Dark Terrors 5 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology]

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  ‘Who’s here?’ Coral asked them.

  ‘Just some guys,’ said Judy. ‘The kind that never give up.’

  ‘Jeannie’s in the kitchen,’ said Michelle. ‘She drank too much eggnog.’

  ‘Put her in the guest bedroom. She can sleep it off.’

  ‘The junior girls are there.’

  ‘What are they doing?’

  ‘Talking about boys and horses.’

  ‘Are there any boys?’

  ‘Only that trainer, with the story about his leg. He has one boot off.’

  ‘Pervert,’ said Ed and headed for the back of the house.

  Lesley crossed the dining room. There were candy canes and sugared peanuts on the carpet, cookie crumbs folded in napkins by every chair. As she gathered them up colourful holiday sweaters and turquoise watchbands flashed beyond the arches. The faces of the men who had stayed were no longer blurred but easy to see now, weathered and tan or pale but interesting, professionals and jocks from the city or the country, each with a story to tell. Easy laughter lilted from every direction. It would take a few more minutes for them all to say their goodbyes. She grabbed as much trash as she could and took it to the kitchen.

  * * * *

  As she emptied her arms, a low moaning came from the floor by the butcher block table.

  ‘Jeannie, what are you doing down there?’

  ‘Sitting.’

  Michele and Judy came in with a crumpled paper tablecloth. They stepped around Jeannie and found the trash can.

  ‘How are we going to get her on her feet?’

  ‘Tell her Hap Hanson’s in the other room.’

  ‘He’s too old.’

  ‘He’s not, is he?’ said Lesley.

  ‘Too old?’

  ‘No, in the other room.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Who is?’ Lesley asked.

  They both turned from the sink and looked at her. Michelle winked at Judy. ‘There might be a couple of single guys out there.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Chris, from the barn. And Jason the baby doctor, and that guy from Westlake Village, the lawyer—’

  ‘His wife’s the lawyer,’ said Lesley.

  ‘Which one is he?’ asked Judy.

  ‘Curly hair, five-eight or nine...’

  ‘That’s him. He’s definitely married.’

  ‘To his first wife!’

  ‘I know. I was just wondering.’

  ‘If he fools around?’

  ‘No. He’s nice, though. Funny. Is he a friend of Coral’s?’

  ‘She didn’t invite him.’

  ‘His wife, then,’ said Michelle. ‘She rides.’

  ‘Not yet,’ Lesley told them. ‘She wants to take lessons.’

  ‘I heard she works for a TV station.’

  ‘She’s a vet,’ said Judy.

  ‘They just moved here,’ Michelle said. ‘From Phoenix.’

  ‘Texas,’ said Judy.

  ‘He told me San Diego...’Jeannie mumbled from the floor.

  ‘Maybe he crashed the party.’

  ‘Why would he do that?’

  ‘Looking for his present wife!’

  ‘Remember, he’s off-limits.’

  ‘I know,’ said Lesley, ‘okay?’

  * * * *

  She made coffee and helped her friends walk Jeannie to a sofa in the living room, then left them and joined Coral and her husband. The front door was open just enough to show the blonde girl at the edge of the porch, kissing someone goodnight in the shadows. It was not the same boy she had been with earlier. Lesley lingered in the foyer as the last guests put on their coats. Michelle made her promise to meet for lunch next week, then went outside to find her daughter.

  ‘You finally stopped shivering,’ said Coral.

  ‘I feel better now.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Glad you could make it,’ said Ed.

  Lesley met his eyes without flinching. ‘Thanks for inviting me. You don’t know.’

  ‘Any time,’ said Coral and held her. ‘I mean it,’ she whispered. ‘See you Saturday?’

  ‘I’d love to.’

  She went back to the living room. Judy would take Jeannie home and bring her back to pick up her car in the morning. Then Lesley remembered her purse. It was on the rack, behind a long black leather coat.

  ‘Whose is this?’

  ‘Mine,’ said Ed.

  ‘It was my present to him,’ Coral said. ‘Because he’s my sweetie.’

  ‘Oh.’ Lesley hooked her arm through the strap of the purse.

  ‘You drive carefully, now,’ Ed told her.

  Lesley started out, then came back and hugged him, too.

  ‘I will,’ she said.

  She closed the door. Now the moon shone down like a huge streetlamp, illuminating the fence and the tops of the trees beyond the front yard. There were no more cars or shadows in the driveway. She started down the steps.

  Behind her, the boards squeaked and a man’s voice said, ‘Need a ride?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘I have a car.’

  ‘Where? I’ll drive you.’

  She noticed a black Chrysler still parked by the curb at the end of the driveway and walked faster, digging for her keys. She shook her purse but nothing jingled. When she stopped to open it he bumped into her and the purse fell to the ground.

  ‘Let me get that, little lady.’

  ‘I can do it.’

  She knelt before a pair of snakeskin boots. They belonged to the one with the camel’s hair coat and bolo tie.

  ‘Wonder what happened to those keys?’ he said with a grin.

  ‘How did you know...?’

  ‘I got it, honey,’ said another voice.

  ‘Over here,’ she called as the sandy-haired man came down from the porch. ‘Where were you, Michael?’

  ‘Looking for you.’ To the tall man he said, ‘We’re okay here, pardner.’

  When the other man left she said, ‘You have wonderful timing.’

  ‘You, too.’

  ‘I feel so stupid. Now I can’t find my keys.’ She kept sifting through the gravel with her fingers. ‘I left my purse for a while. You don’t suppose that man...?’

  ‘Let’s just see here once.’

  He put his hand in his pocket and clinked his own keys. Then he leaned down and raked the gravel, and suddenly her keyring glinted there in the moonlight.

  ‘Oh, God, thanks!’

  ‘Where are you parked?’

  ‘All the way at the end.’

  ‘I’ll walk you.’ He helped her up. ‘Do you have a long way to go?’

  ‘A few miles. Once I get to the freeway I’m okay.’

  ‘Left at the first street, then follow it till you see the on-ramp.’

  ‘Got it.’ When he patted his pockets she reached into her purse. ‘How about a menthol?’

  ‘Just like my wife.’

  ‘I thought she didn’t smoke.’

  ‘She used to.’

  ‘I hope she’s all right. Did she call?’

  In the flare of the lighter his hair was red and his smile ironic. He cupped his hands over the flame, enclosing her fingers.

  ‘She wouldn’t know the number here.’

  ‘Does she have a cell phone?’

  ‘No. She doesn’t want people bugging her when she’s away from the clinic.’

  Lesley lit her own cigarette and blew out a cloud of smoke, white as frost from the chill in the air. ‘I thought she was a lawyer.’

  ‘The office, I mean.’

  They came to the end of the driveway. Ahead the trees were so tall that the rest of the canyon was black.

  ‘Do you mind if I follow you?’ she said.

  ‘Sounds like a plan.’

  ‘In case I get lost again.’ She fingered her keys, took a deep breath, held it and finally let it out. ‘Look, would you like to have coffee or something? It’s so cold. I was thinking about stopping, before
I get on the freeway.’

  ‘There’s a Denny’s by the underpass.’

  ‘Is that the only place open?’

  ‘Something wrong with Denny’s?’

  ‘I just meant. . .’

  A car drove out of the canyon and he turned to her, the headlights blazing in his eyes. ‘Not good enough for you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing’s ever good enough, is it?’

  She tried to step back but he had hold of her wrist, the one that was almost healed.

  ‘You’re hurting me!’

  ‘Sometimes I wonder why I married you in the first place,’ he said, his breath steaming until his face was only a blur again. ‘Well, listen up, bitch. Tonight you’re going to do exactly what I tell you and like it! Got that? I might even take you to the State Park afterwards. There’s never anybody around...’

  Then, jerking her so violently that her feet left the ground and her toes scraped the dirt and the rocks, he dragged her the rest of the way down into the cul-de-sac.

  Dennis Etchison lives in Los Angeles. He is a winner of both the World Fantasy Award and the British Fantasy Award.The Death Artistfrom DreamHaven Books is his fourth collection of stories illustrated by J.K. Potter. ‘The late Robert Bloch had a deliciously mordant sense of humour,’ the author recalls. ‘Always the wicked jokester, his mischief found expression in public and private conversations as well as in his writing. I once heard him introduce his lovely spouse Elly, to whom he had been happily married for many years, as “my present wife”, a remark she somehow did not find amusing. When I followed his example and tried to introduce “my first wife” (first and only, I should add) on a couple of occasions, for some reason mine did not like that one any better. So, since I do not share Bloch’s love of risk in matters of domestic harmony, I decided that it might be safer to write about a character given to such remarks. What if an unfamiliar man showed up at a social gathering and spoke glowingly of a wife who was not there? Would his married status cause the single women in the room to let down their guard? Would it actually make him more appealing? To carry the idea further, what if the man used this as a technique of seduction - or worse? He might even be, say, a psychopath who no longer differentiates between the one he is married to (or was, if she is even still alive!) and the one he is with. Sounds like a story to me...’

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  * * * *

  Alicia

  MELANIE TEM

  Puberty hit Alicia early and hard. After two other daughters who’d been more or less impossible in their early teens, we’d been hoping for a late-bloomer, but when she had noticeable if asymmetrical breast buds by the time she was ten and got her period well before her eleventh birthday, we knew we were in for trouble.

  ‘She’s growing up so fast,’ became my husband’s refrain. At first he’d sound more plaintive or ironic than seriously alarmed; alarm came later.

  This annoyed me, because I didn’t want my daughter to be afraid of her adolescence, even if her parents were. I needn’t have worried. ‘She’s growing up at exactly the pace she’s supposed to,’ I’d say a little testily, meaning to be reassuring to both Alicia and her father. But as time went on I wasn’t so sure.

  Soon the older girls started pointing out, with equal parts envy and annoyance and with sly glances in our direction, that their little sister had a more respectable cleavage than they did. She started getting hips, couldn’t buy pants to fit her in the girls’ department any more.

  The spring she turned twelve, she grew a good six inches between Christmas and the end of school; you could practically see her legs elongating with every lope across the soccer field. For a little while it was obvious from the sidelines that she suddenly wasn’t familiar with her body or her emotions: elbows flew all over the place; when the action was at the other end of the field her attention visibly spumed away like little curls of steam; once she kicked the ball into the opponents’ goal and burst into tears so hysterical she had to be pulled from the game. But it didn’t take her long to get herself together, and before that season was over Alicia was the best forward on the team, because of a truly formidable concentration she learned to bring to bear.

  Suddenly ninety per cent of the phone calls were for Alicia, from giddy, snotty girls and boys with squeaky voices; a few boys who sounded alarmingly older didn’t call more than a few times, so I restrained myself to a raised eyebrow. Her big sisters reported that she would say things - statements, never questions - obviously intended to draw them into discussions of sex and love. Her tender age made them decidedly uncomfortable with this; they were just old enough for a dawning perception that parental worries and rules might not be completely arbitrary, but still sufficiently close to Alicia’s age to think maybe they ought to ally themselves with her against us. I must admit I took a certain ignoble amusement in their discomfiture, remembering how difficult they’d been.

  A sense began to gather of something impending - not doom, exactly, but something threatening. My husband and I both became vigilant. We analysed Alicia’s every state of mind, her every action. We wondered what she was thinking, even when she seemed to be telling us. We talked about Alicia so much and so fruitlessly that I, beginning to resent her ubiquitousness, would try to change the subject, but my husband was even more obsessed with her than I was and he’d bring it right back to her. It became hard to think of anything else.

  Whereas the older girls had been moody - bursting into tears if a waiter brought them regular instead of cherry Coke; having to be sent from the dinner table to get a giggling fit under some semblance of control - Alicia remained relatively even-tempered. The most noticeable change was in her relationship with her father. She’d always been Daddy’s girl. Now she’d talk to him in a tone she’d never use with me, just this side of disrespectful, or she’d give him a rather skilful cold shoulder at his slightest unresponsiveness, actual or imagined, to her slightest desire, whether or not he could possibly have known what it was. At the same time, she was more overtly affectionate with him than usual, often snuggling against him on the couch or grabbing his hand as they walked across a parking lot, and she was openly flirtatious, sauntering past him just out of the shower wrapped only in a towel, soliciting his opinion about whether she could still decently wear last year’s bathing suit.

  My husband, a sensible man, tried to remember what he knew from raising the older girls, to give her feedback and set limits for her without taking things personally. I tried to stay out of it, to let them work out their relationship themselves and trust that he had his own ways of dealing with it. After a confrontation with her, overt or subtle, he’d often retreat to his garden, which for some time had been a source of solace and inspiration for him and, now that he was skilled enough to try things like topiary and cultivating more exotic plants, functioned as distraction, too.

  But often I couldn’t stand it and would step in to protect him from her. This was, after all, the man I loved, and this nubile young woman was treating him shabbily. Besides that, I was aware of a kind of primal jealousy, the intensity of which shocked me; this was my man, and she couldn’t have him.

  One day it came to me what she was doing. She was practising on him, trying out various ways of behaving with men, testing her power. This was all perfectly normal behaviour for an adolescent girl with a trustworthy father, and the older girls had done some of it, too, but something about Alicia’s concentrated version was chilling.

  Our house was positively awash in female hormones. I’d started the hot flashes and emotional lability of menopause. Our oldest daughter, living with her new husband in the basement apartment, was pregnant. And Alicia, beautiful and poised and not even officially a teenager yet, exuded a sexuality that took us all aback, at first even her. Palpable as an electromagnetic field, it charged the air, gave her a sort of aura. It changed her voice, her skin tone, the way she sat in a chair and walked across a room and lounged in a doorway. Something new had come into this daughter
, and it excited and worried me deeply.

  Long accustomed to being the only male in a house full of women, pampered and revered and out of a particular sort of gender-based fondness sometimes not quite taken seriously, my husband was nonetheless finding this almost too much for him, and he’d threaten to run away for the next few years He was joking, but not entirely.