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

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  ‘I see you need a drink,’ she said.

  ‘That’s nice,’ Ray said. ‘I appreciate your support.’ He sat at his table and swallowed whiskey without taking his eyes from her.

  Sally took a step towards him, then stopped moving and tucked the pages under one arm. ‘I assume you got into Leo’s apartment.’

  ‘Yes,’ Ray said. ‘That we did. It took a little heavy-duty persuasion, but the super finally opened the door to Leo’s disgusting pigpen. The results were unsatisfying. They lacked a certain resolution. The pigpen was empty. In the sense of its tenant being nowhere in sight. Looked at another way, the place wasn’t empty at all, since garbage was piled up everywhere you looked. We waited around until we were about to pass out from the stench, and then we gave up.’

  ‘Do you think he killed himself? Is that what you were worried about?’

  Ray leaned back in his chair and gazed at a spot on the wall five or six feet to her right, pretending to consider her words. He appeared to be mildly amused. ‘I would say ... I would say that your question is too narrowly framed. Our anxieties are free-floating and essentially undefined. They are of an inclusive nature.’

  ‘That’s not—’

  He interrupted her, still contemplating the spot on the wall. ‘I will say this, however. If I had to live in that filthy dump, thoughts of suicide would never be far from my mind. Seeing his apartment puts Leo in an entirely different light. I had no understanding, none whatsoever. Of the way he lived.’

  She looked at him in silence for a suspended moment. ‘Have you had any new thoughts about us?’

  ‘Now?’ Ray took another swallow of whiskey. After a few seconds, he shifted his gaze to Sally. ‘Do you know how ridiculous that question is? That doesn’t mean you can’t spend the night here, by the way.’

  ‘Here’s another ridiculous question,’ she said. ‘How would you describe the way you’re feeling at this moment? Or, if you are uncertain about your feelings, what are you thinking?’

  ‘Oh, I’m completely clear about my emotional condition,’ Ray said. ‘It’s as though a huge explosion just went off a yard or so away from me. Chunks of metal and parts of bodies are flying all over the place. People have begun to scream, and the screaming is going to continue for a long time. I’m still on my feet, but as yet I don’t know if I have been injured. I almost have to be injured, but I’m afraid to look. That’s how I feel.’

  Sally quivered.

  Ray tilted the last of the whiskey into his mouth and thumped the glass on the table. ‘And what I’m thinking is this. Betrayal is the ugliest, most repulsive thing I can imagine. I hate being betrayed.’

  Sally wavered backward. ‘We have nothing more to say to each other. Stay there, don’t walk me to the door.’ She spun around and left the kitchen.

  ‘For God’s sake, Sally,’ Ray said. ‘I wasn’t talking about you.’ He stood up and poured more whiskey into his glass. From the living room came the rustle of papers being stuffed into a briefcase. ‘Sally?’ The next sound he heard was the closing of the door.

  Peter Straub lives in New York City. He is the author of Ghost Story, Shadowland, The Talisman (with Stephen King),Koko, Mystery, The Throat, The Hellfire Club, Mr X and other acclaimed novels. He has won two World Fantasy Awards, the British Fantasy Award, two Bram Stoker Awards and the International Horror Guild Award. In 1998, he was named Grand Master at the World Horror Convention. His second collection of shorter fiction, Magic Terror, was recently published by Random House. ‘“The Geezers” is the product of a lengthy period,’ says the author, ‘extending from roughly October 1998 to February 2000, during which I reported four days a week to the gymnasium at Columbia University in the bracing company of my friend and neighbour, Hap Beasely, a native of Nashville and former paratrooper, former policeman, fellow jazz connoisseur and clotheshorse, also a wondrous raconteur and bon vivant. Beasely and I did stretching exercises, walked around the track, worked out on the torture machines, swam laps in the pool, sweated in the sauna, then daily repaired for lunch - the same lunch, every day - to a little second-floor student restaurant called The Heights, located four blocks south of the Columbia campus on Broadway, where we soon became familiar with everyone on the staff. My efforts at coasting through the exercise-units amused and outraged Hap in about equal measure. (His father had been a coach at Fisk University, and he could have been a great coach, had it not meant taking so much time away from being a bon vivant.) When the time came to contribute another story to the ongoing series of anthologies from the Adams Round Table, a group of mystery writers including Lawrence Block, Susan Isaacs and Mary Higgins Clark that meets once a month for dinner and conversation, I decided to place my contribution in the familiar world of the Columbia gym. The character called “Gus Treyham” is drawn in part upon my friend Hap. My purpose in this story was a kind of radical indirection - I wanted to leave the essential point unstated.’

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  * * * *

  Honeysuckle

  WILLIAM R. TROTTER

  The green-eyed coed had written a slick little story about teenage angst in a small southern city in the late 1980s, tagged with a politically correct ending that put yuppie greed in its place. Halfway through the story she had included (quite calculatingly, I suspected) a startling sex scene. True, there have been sex scenes in about half of the stories I’d read for this workshop, but there were turns of phrase and allusions in this girl’s treatment that hinted of interesting personal proclivities.

  Now she was staring at me expectantly, waiting for me to make a pass at her, in the guise of literary criticism, or for me to tell her how gifted she was; I suspected that in the yeasty crucible of the mind crouching behind that Cosmopolitan-cover face, the two were intertwined. I knew what my lines would have to be if I wanted to score with her, and for an instant my 49-year-old ego was tempted. She’d probably been told, by more than one English instructor who wanted to get into her pants, that she was very talented, and if tonight was the night she got to Fuck a Famous Writer, some degree of confirmation would be hers, some small professional magic transferred by the act.

  Suddenly feeling mulish and weary, the only thing I wanted to do was slap her perfectly made-up cheeks with the cold mackerel of reality. Somewhere along the way, whether from reading too many articles in Writer’s Digest or from the encouragement of too many horny professors, this young woman had become convinced that she would be able to earn an actual living by writing proper little stories like the one that lay on the table between us. She could churn out stories like this by the dozen, I was sure, and as long as she stayed in graduate school, she would thrive. Out in the great marketplace, however, this kind of MFA-realism was a debased currency.

  ‘It’s a good story,’ I began.

  Her face fell, then snapped back into the same lacquered smile. Good teeth, sweet breath, a satiny tongue - I was probably going to miss her by the time midnight rolled around.

  ‘But...’ she encouraged, grittily determined to show that she could Take Criticism.

  ‘But nothing. It’s a good story. Polished, effective, self-assured. Technically speaking, it’s one of the best I’ve read during this workshop.’

  ‘But I sense you’re still holding something back,’ she prompted, leaning forward.

  ‘Well, this is a purely subjective reaction, you understand, but it’s just like a thousand other stories that writing students are grinding out all over the country. God knows I’ve read enough of them. You’ve been told to “only write about what you know”, and the problem is that you and all the others who write like this have taken that advice literally...and I’m afraid you all “know” the same stuff.’

  Say this for her: she didn’t give up easily. Changing the subject, she leaned back and threw out a question as big as a fishing net. ‘So, then, what advice would you give to somebody who wants to write as much as I do?’

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

&
nbsp; ‘Don’t. Not to the exclusion of having a real life and a real job. Learn computers, get a licence to sell real estate, or find somebody rich to marry. Just don’t leave this university thinking you’re going to earn a living writing short stories. It will not happen.’

  ‘I think I have what it takes,’ she fired back.

  ‘Maybe you do. What you don’t have is any real conception of what the odds are against you, how big a part blind stupid luck is going to play, and how vast the competition is when it comes to the kind of stories you write. At least learn a tolerable trade, my dear, because the market for short stories is microscopic and the kind of magazines that print them usually pay in free copies. You might consider broadening your range to include romance novels, advertising copy, travel writing, or some such thing that will enable you to pay the bills while you practise your craft.’

  That tore it; she wouldn’t go to bed with me now on a Vegas-sized bet. She gathered up her manuscript, thanked me for my time, and sashayed out of the conference room with enough of a swing in her fine tennis-playing ass to let me know I had just talked myself out of something memorable.

  Still, I was more relieved than regretful when she snapped the door shut behind her. Her story had been the last one in the pile and this had been the last conference of the week-long workshop I had contracted to give at my old Alma Mater. I’d presented my obligatory lecture the previous afternoon and coped - graciously, I think - with a book-signing in the student union and a two-hour cocktail party afterwards, where I had listened to a lot of senile drivel from antique professors who swore they remembered having me in their classes, along with a surfeit of trendy educational babble from middle-aged academics of my own bewildered and increasingly irrelevant generation. God save me from ex-radicals with tenure; they are equal to the worst of Stalin’s commissars.

  Now the afternoon stretched before me like a blank page. I repacked my briefcase, downed the last inch of tepid coffee in the Styrofoam cup I’d been nursing for an hour, and left, for the last time, the office the college had loaned me for the duration of my four-day sojourn. My plane didn’t leave until tomorrow morning, and I had turned down all offers for dinner and drinks. As I left the building and stepped into the bright spring sunlight. I had some vague notion of buying a bottle of bourbon and spending a monastic but tranquil night in my hotel room, surfing the premium channels for a decent movie or just enjoying the luxury of reading something I wanted to read.

  It was one-thirty in the afternoon, most of the kids were in class, so the campus was pretty much deserted. As I started to walk to the parking lot where my rented Taurus waited in a VIP slot, I was suddenly cold-cocked, nearly overwhelmed in fact, by a sneak-attack wave of nostalgia. Although Davidson College had doubled in size since I had graduated in 1965, gone coed, loosened the hammerlock of Calvinism that had made the school conservative even by the standards of the Bible Belt, the campus itself had not lost the remarkable beauty of its nineteenth century landscaping.

  Even during my moments of deepest discontent with its stiflingly reactionary curriculum and hypocritical ‘traditions’, I had always loved the look of the place: beautifully groomed lawns, roomy sidewalks, groves of towering elms and seasonally magnificent magnolias which created a palette of Turneresque light-effects at twilight; and the stately, if slightly pompous, façades of its Greek Revival architecture. Few places in America, in the mid-1960s, could have looked and felt so protected from the turmoil that had begun to rack the nation elsewhere.

  And this was one of those picture-perfect late-spring afternoons that seemed to distil every enduring beauty of the North Carolina Piedmont into a kind of sensual banquet potent enough to slow the very tides of Time: mellow and generous sunlight, warm enough for shirtsleeves yet still hinting of the evening cool to come. Every random sound - a dog barking, the rustle of a squirrel leaping from one tree to another, the lazy but purposeful footsteps of students heading for the library, a distant whoop of sheer youthful exuberance from one of the dormitories - was made vivid and full of significance by the specialness of the springtime air I breathed. The intensity of the moment was unexpected, and it opened a vault of long-suppressed memories.

  For about five minutes, I just stood there, rooted, in the centre of the quadrangle, breathing slowly and letting the mood take possession of me. Enlightenment quickly came: I knew that I was going to spend the rest of the afternoon in its grip. I had tricked myself, it seemed; subconsciously, I had arranged things, including, probably, my unnecessarily rude remarks to the girl, so that just such a fallow period of time would be available to me. I accepted the possibility I had tried to put in the back of my mind: I would, after all, make the pilgrimage I had sworn to myself I would not make.

  Once behind the wheel, I went on autopilot; the little town that surrounded the campus had not grown all that much. Beyond its limits, I ignored the signs pointing west to the big new highway that led to Charlotte and turned in the opposite direction, on to an old New Deal-era two-lane country road that meandered through the cornfields and woods to the east.

  * * * *

  The memory of the first time I had travelled this road came surging back so vividly that, for an instant, my youthful self seemed to merge with my middle-aged persona, so that I could see and hear and smell with senses that had net become brittle, selective, guarded.

  It was on a May afternoon in my Junior year. I had just taken my final exam in a required course I detested, and I was still bristling from forty-eight hours of Dexedrine and coffee-fuelled cramming. Too wired to sleep or even relax, I climbed into my ratty old ‘58 Chevy and started driving aimlessly. The big highway to Charlotte was still six or seven years in the future, and so when I found myself at the first significant intersection, I turned towards the country, for no more compelling reason than the fact that I had not ever driven in this particular direction before.

  The instant I did so, I experienced a remarkable sense of having done exactly the right thing, as though I had subconsciously caught a scent or felt the tug of an importuning current. There was little traffic - two or three cars passed going the opposite way, but otherwise the road was all mine. Cornfields stretched out in both directions, tenderly green, bordered by stands of trees close to the road, so that I passed through alternating bands of sunlight and shade, which created a soothing rhythm. Exactly where I was going or how long I would be driving, I did not know, nor did I particularly care. The wind streaming over my bare arms smoothed out those exam-time tensions.

  After perhaps twenty minutes, I saw a sign announcing the imminent appearance of a place called ‘Haynesville, Unincorporated; pop. 500.’ The name was not unknown, though I had never actually been there; just a dot on the road map, one of those tiny Piedmont farm towns one drives through on one’s way to a larger dot on the map. Don’t blink as you pass through or you’ll miss it. A couple of gas stations, a feed-and-hardware store, a cinder-block post office, some tree-shaded houses set back from the road. A single four-way intersection with a yellow blinking light defined the centre of town. I scrupulously maintained the speed limit and made sure to come to a complete stop at the intersection - this place looked like the very archetype of a rural speed trap.

  Which way to go? I was about to continue in the same direction when I saw, half-obscured by weeds, a small hand-painted sign: an arrow pointing left towards something called ‘The Gardens’. The sign could not have been placed there to get the attention of travellers or tourists - of whom there were precious few on this half-forgotten old highway; rather it seemed to be a reminder to local people who presumably already knew what The Gardens were.

  Responding once more to that subconscious magnetic tug, I made a slow left turn and decided to check out The Gardens. For the first two or three miles, I saw nothing but more farmlands, pine groves, hedges, and gently sloping fields flowing with a late-afternoon patina of dusty gold.

  Then, quite suddenly, the car seemed to enter a cloud of aromas so dense, so
overwhelmingly rich, that my first inhalation made me as dizzy as the first toke I’d ever taken of really good pot. At first, the dominant scent was that of honeysuckle. That’s what hooked me, I guess. Growing up in Charlotte in the 1950s, I had experienced a secure, comfortable childhood, long before the city became a sprawling, traffic-choked Atlanta-clone. Every family I knew had a house with a big backyard, and the lazy summers were blissfully endless. Aside from the generic hormonal changes and confusions, even my adolescence had been a savoury, romantic time. And if there was one sensory input guaranteed to land me in a dewy-eyed trance of nostalgia, it was the sweet, seductive smell of ripe honeysuckle blossoms - in that aroma was distilled the essence of a thousand summery afternoons and lingering twilights.

  At that moment, I felt as though I had suddenly driven into a river of honeysuckle, so thick and narcotic was the scent, and without realising it, I slowed the car to a crawl, leaned my head into the slipstream, and drank it in gratefully. Several intoxicated moments went by before I grew accustomed to the honeysuckle smell and began to register the complex symphony of other scents it had initially masked.