The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 20

by Stephen Jones (ed. )

  But not now.

  Now it’s a little before 6:20. The heart of Happy Hour.

  At this time, the regular regulars usually sit at the tables between the booths and the bar, conversation low and intense. Like a hospital waiting room.

  There’s only two tables filled tonight.

  The table tucked in behind the bar close to the back wall has one man sitting at it. One man and a pack of playing cards. He’s turning the cards over one by one, placing some on one pile and some on another. Every once in a while, he starts another pile by placing a card away from the others and then leaves it alone, putting cards on the other piles. For anyone watching, any casual observer, there wouldn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason for the way he’s turning those cards. But what do casual observers know about another man’s chosen path in life?

  This man is dressed in black – shirt, jacket and pants; the shirt buttoned right up to the neck but with no necktie – and he slouches back in his chair, a glass and a pitcher of beer on the table amidst the piles of playing cards. His eyes are hooded, bushy-browed, his face is thin – some might say “gaunt” or “drawn” – and he sports a small, neatly-clipped goatee beard which covers the tip of his chin and not a lot else.

  This man is Artie Williams, sometimes known as “Bills” and others as “Dealer”. He is something of a communicator, his head filled with numbers and probability percentages and ratios. There are those who say he has a direct line to the world beyond the rain-slicked streets of Manhattan and far away from the leafy thoroughfares of Central Park: the world where the spirits roam. But where this reputation has sprung from nobody knows. Artie Williams keeps himself very much to himself. Like tonight, Happy Hour, turning cards over on the table, drifting with the music, making piles and occasionally smiling to himself. And occasionally frowning.

  The table midway between the stairs and the bar has three men sitting at it. One is Edgar Nornhoevan; another is Jim Leafman and the last of the three is McCoy Brewer.

  They’re talking about the condition of the subways right now. A little while ago, they were discussing the flow of traffic down Fifth. In a while, they may be talking about what kind of winter they’re going to have this year. It’s the middle of September now and the weather is a big consideration in New York, particularly after the excesses of the previous winter.

  These men are what you might call real friends.

  They can talk deep-down personal stuff – like Jim’s wife Clarice cheating on him or Edgar’s prostate problems or McCoy being laid off from his job with the Savings and Loan company – or they can talk controversial stuff like religion or life after death or abortion rights, but that isn’t always necessary. Like tonight. And the truth is that only real friends can discuss trivialities with the level of intent and interest that Jim, Edgar and McCoy are displaying right now.

  But that conversation about the subways will be interrupted in just a minute. And it won’t drift into the weather. At least not tonight.

  For tonight, the City will be sending to The Land at the End of the Working Day one of its casualties for healing.

  It does that sometimes.

  The sound of shoes echoes through the bar, shoes coming down the stairs. One guy at the bar stops tapping his hand for just a couple of seconds, the wink of an eye, and takes in this sudden intrusion. Then he goes back to tapping. An elderly man further down the bar mutters something to himself and then smiles into the mirror, gives a kind of half-chuckle and then reaches for his drink, running a finger down the iced-up side. The man he sees looks right back at him and returns the smile, runs a finger down his own glass.

  Over in one of the booths, a woman in a red dress that’s so red it looks like she just spilt berry juice all over it – looks like it should be dripping that redness onto Jack Fedogan’s polished floor – she looks up for a second, drinking in the sight of the descending feet, then looks back at the glass she’s twirling around the coaster on the table in front of her, the glass next to the pack of Marlboro Lights and matchbook, next to the ashtray with a collection of butts sitting in it that she is determined not to count. The feet don’t mean anything to her. There’s nobody knows she’s here tonight. Nobody who even cares where she is, tonight or any night.

  The truth is the feet don’t mean anything to any of the irregular regulars.

  But they mean something to Jim and McCoy and Edgar, and they stare at the line where the ceiling meets the diagonal stairs and watch as the owner of the feet comes fully into view.

  As the feet get closer to the floor, walking strangely stiltedly on the stairs like one or both of them is favouring a broken shin-bone or a twisted ankle, these feet grow into legs and the legs grow into a waist and the waist turns into a full body and that, at last, leads into a head. The feet reach the floor and stop. The body sways slightly, like it has already had enough Happy Houring without looking for more, but the face on the head does not appear to be Happy Houred. Not at all.

  The eyes are wide, wide but somehow not taking in what they’re seeing, and the hair is mussed up and in bad need of a comb not to mention a razor and clippers. The sports coat hangs off of one shoulder, its sleeve obscuring the hand at the end of the arm it contains. The necktie is undone and hangs askew, the thin end flopped out over his sports coat lapel. The pants hang baggy around his crotch, no creases in them at all, the ends sitting crumpled up on mud-caked shoes whose laces are trailing untied on the floor.

  “Hey,” says Edgar Nornhoevan in a voice little louder than a whisper, “isn’t that—”

  “Front-Page McGuffin,” says Jim Leafman, keeping his own voice low, nodding slowly.

  McCoy Brewer keeps the nod going. “Sonofabitch, so it is,” he says.

  It won’t surprise anyone to learn that Front-Page McGuffin’s first name isn’t really Front-Page, so it hardly seems like worth mentioning. But it kind of leads into other things that are important, so I will.

  Front-Page McGuffin’s first name is Archibald and the only other Archibald he ever heard of – he has never actually known any at all – is Cary Grant. And, as Front-Page is wont to remark at regular intervals – such as when someone introduces him to someone he doesn’t already know (though there has never seemed to be many that ever fit that particular bill) as Archibald McGuffin, just for a joke kind of – he renamed himself. The fact that there are so few Archibalds says it all as far as Front-Page is concerned. And so he changed his name.

  But, like it happens so often, the truth is slightly different. Front-Page didn’t actually rename himself. It was done for him.

  When A. D. McGuffin joined the New York Times back in the 1940s, he was sixteen – “too young to fight but old enough to cuss and make coffee,” is how he usually tells it. The guys in the Times newsroom called him Adie, making something almost tuneful out of the acronym of his initials, sometimes putting their hands on their hips in an effeminate manner and shouting across the hubbub clatter of ringing telephones and pounding typewriter keys, “Hey, Adie, howsabouta coffee over here?” And they’d laugh. They’d laugh every time, like it was a new joke that nobody had ever heard before.

  Hank Vendermeer, the guy who employed Front-Page, didn’t make a big thing out of Front-Page’s reluctance to divulge his first name. At that time, Hank had got a boy out in the Pacific, a problem making the payments on his house, a meeting with the Editor in about ten minutes (for which he was decidedly unprepared) and a peptic ulcer that made him wince every time he burped up wind. The fact was, Hank Vendermeer couldn’t care diddly about names.

  “What’s the ‘A’ for?” Hank Vendermeer asked at the time, suddenly thumping his chest with a hand shaped like a fleshy meathook into which a tiny pencil had been incongruously placed.

  “Just ‘A’,” Front-Page responded.

  “Okay.” Hank wrote it down. “And the ‘D’?”

  “Just ‘D’,” said Front-Page.

  Hank Vendermeer shrugged and wrote the ‘D’ alongside the ‘A’ on
the sheet on the desk in front of him, then made a few ticks here and there. And that was that. “Okay,” he said. “You start tomorrow.”

  Front-Page had a job.

  The ‘D’ in Front-Page’s initials actually stood for Donald. But this seemed even worse to Front-Page than Archibald. Hell, the only Donald he’d ever heard of was a grumpy cartoon duck. No Thank You, Ma’am.

  A. D. McGuffin worked hard and he learned fast and, pretty soon, he was making less coffee . . . though he was cussing more. At first, his daily routine pretty much consisted of schlepping copy around the various offices, doing a little typing, answering a few telephones, generally pinch-hitting around the floor. Then he got the chance to write up a piece on LaGuardia’s speech in Atlantic City, when the Mayor of New York agreed to head up the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, imploring Americans the country over not to overeat and not to waste. A. D. wrote a nice piece and made it onto page four. His first solo flight in print. “One day,” he told Sonny Vocello, “I’m gonna be on the front page.”

  “Sure,” said Sonny, nodding his head. Hell, it was just a filler piece.

  “Well, I am,” said A. D.

  “Sure,” said Sonny Vocello. “We gonna have to call you Front-Page McGuffin.” And he laughed, calling it out to anyone near enough to respond.

  A. D. smiled and went along with the gag. But it made him even more determined to succeed.

  A. D. didn’t officially earn this sobriquet until December 1954 when he reported on the censure of the senator from Wisconsin for what the Senate called “four years of abuse of his colleagues”. A week later, albeit in smaller print and in a keylined box in the bottom right corner, A. D. got his second front page story when Papa Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature for his sparingly written story of an old fisherman who just refused to give up.

  From then on, Front-Page McGuffin got a lot of lead stories and he just stuck with the name.

  He retired from the Times in 1991 at the not-so-tender age of sixty-five. He was happy to be leaving it all behind, even though he still yearned for those years when newspaper reporting meant something more. But, he still had his wife, Betty, and he intended to write a book, a kind of memoir of the post-war years when everyone had a mental eye on the nuclear clock, watching its hands tick around to Armageddon.

  He had his friends, too.

  And his favourite watering hole, a two-flight walk-down that had just opened up a couple of years earlier on the corner of 23rd and Fifth, where he had met people who seemed real and where folks off the street just didn’t seem to come. He made some new friends there, too, at a time of life when a guy couldn’t really expect to make new friends but just to sit around and lose the ones he already had.

  That last part was true enough for Front-Page McGuffin.

  Cancers took a half-dozen of them in only half as many years, cut them down in their prime, wasting them to skin and bones and puckering up their mouths into thin-lipped sad little smiles. Bobby DuBarr, who could make a pool cue ball near on sit up and bark like a dog; Jimmy Frommer, who taught Front-Page all there was to know about subjunctive clauses; even Lester “Dawdle” O’Rourke, Front-Page’s friend of friends, who was always late for everything, even the punchline of a joke . . . all of them went that way, eaten up from the inside like wormy apples, their skins yellow-white like old parchment and their ankles blown up over the sides of their house shoes because of all the steroids they were taking.

  Heart attacks took another couple – Jack Blonstein, who had a singing voice that the angels would love, and Nick Diamanetti, who knew every joke that had ever existed (or so it seemed) – Front-Page watching them slip away in quiet hospital rooms with a barrage of blipping machines and suspended drips fixed onto scrawny arms.

  A traffic accident took one of his best friends, a car crash up in Vermont where Bill Berison and his wife, Jenny had gone to see the fall colours on the trees. It had been something Bill had always planned to do.

  Then, on New Year’s Eve of 1994, in a lonely hospital ward in the South Bronx, Betty McGuffin gave in to the cancer that roiled inside her, slipping regretfully away from Front-Page into the waiting bedsheets, holding Front-Page’s hand so tight he thought it would shatter and biting her lip to try to hold on another few minutes. To stay with him.

  Thus, as millions of people celebrated the sudden movement of a clock-hand to midnight, the world ended for Front-Page McGuffin.

  It didn’t end with the cataclysmic explosion that Front-Page and his friends at the Times had been predicting in the 1950s and 60s, but with a sudden rush of silence that accentuated all of the minutiae of sound and colour that surrounded him.

  He didn’t remember getting home that night. Didn’t remember getting into the suddenly wide and empty and lonely bed: it had been wide and empty for all of the nights that Betty had been in hospital but then Front-Page had been praying and hoping she’d come back. Now that he knew she would never be coming back, the bed was the loneliest place in the world.

  The next night, he had been gone down to The Land at the End of the Working Day the way he’d gone down there to Jack Fedogan’s bar most nights round about 6:30, for just a couple of drinks before going home to Betty and supper. Edgar Nornhoevan had been in that night, just like he was most nights, and Jim Leafman, too. Even McCoy Brewer came in, at around 10:00, armed with a passle of jokes that would have made even Nick Diamanetti smile.

  Nobody mentioned Betty even once, but everyone bought Front-Page a drink and everyone gave his shoulder a squeeze. Once or twice, Edgar and Jim and McCoy saw Jack wiping his face with a towel, making out like the heat was getting to him, even though it was the first day of January and cold enough to freeze the spit as you swallowed it. Edgar, Jim and McCoy figured Jack Fedogan was thinking back about his own Phyllis and recognizing Front-Page’s grief and his loss.

  At a little after midnight, Front-Page made his farewells and stumbled up the stairs and out into the night. They never saw him again.

  Not until tonight.

  Three years later.

  The three men at the table sit and stare.

  Jack Fedogan stands and stares, the seemingly ever-present glass that he polishes held limply in one hand and the towel in the other.

  Over behind them, Edgar, Jim and McCoy hear the sound of chair legs being pushed roughly across the floor. When they turn around they see Bills Williams standing up at his table and staring across at the new customer.

  It’s a night for staring, though none of the other patrons – the irregular Regulars – are paying any attention to Front-Page McGuffin.

  “Hello,” says Front-Page, like he’s been here every night for months, but stammering the word and making it come out in a kind of croak.

  Jack Fedogan leans on the bar and shakes his head. “Front-Page,” he says, “Where you been hiding yourself?”

  Front-Page McGuffin looks around like he’s seeing the place for the first time, frowning and blinking his eyes. As they watch, Edgar, McCoy and Jim notice one of the eyelids seems to hang down longer, like it’s got stuck on the way back. Front-Page lifts his left arm and starts swinging it towards his face, the fingers moving slow and robotic like the pick-up-a-prize machines out on Coney Island. Eventually, the hand gently connects with Front-Page’s neck and then crawls – there’s no other word for it – crawls its way up onto his chin and then around the cheek up to the eye socket where one of the fingers extends and pushes the lid up. Front-Page rubs at it, blinks a couple more times, and then drops the arm by his side.

  “Not . . . well,” says Front-Page, leaving a big space between the words. “How you guys?”

  Edgar gets to his feet and moves to take Front-Page’s hand, having to lift it up from the man’s side first, and pumps it furiously but carefully. “Good to see you,” he says, “been a long time.”

  “Long time,” Front-Page echoes.

  He looks to the other two men at the table and then walks across stilted
ly, listing to the left at first until he whacks himself on the hip. This seems to cure the trouble and he makes it all the way to the table without further mishap. His co-ordination seems to have improved a little but it’s still shaky, like he’s not in control of his movements. Front-Page takes hold of Jim Leafman’s hand, shakes it and says, “Jim.” Jim nods, returns the shake.

  “How about that?” Edgar is saying to Jack Fedogan.

  “Something’s wrong,” says Jack, keeping his voice low.

  Over at the table, McCoy Brewer is reaching his hand across to Front-Page but Front-Page backs away, looking at it in a kind of blank-faced horror . . . a quiet desperation.

  McCoy looks across at Jim and then over at Edgar and Jack. “What did I say?” he asks, but Front-Page is already making his way around the table. When he reaches McCoy, he leans forward and takes hold of McCoy’s hand in both of his own and shakes it emphatically. “Bad luck,” says Front-Page, shaking his head slowly and uncertainly, looking like maybe he’s already had a few Happy Hours of his own before hitting the Working Day.

  McCoy pulls his hand back from Front-Page, who seems momentarily unable to detach himself, and flexes the fingers and then rubs it in his other hand. “Jeez,” says McCoy, “must be cold out there.”

  Jim moves across and puts an arm around Front-Page’s shoulder. “You okay?” He pulls a chair across from a nearby table. “You want to sit down?”

  Front-Page moves his head slowly and jerkily to face Jim Leafman. His eyes are all white for a second and then the pupils slide slowly down. “Not well,” he says.

  Jim helps him to the chair and Front-Page drops onto the seat.