The Best New Horror 6

by Stephen Jones

  Allie threw me a surprised glance at that, and the doc shook his head. “No,” he said. “She don’t. Doesn’t.”

  “Bill, Miss Everett ain’t married,” Allie said, “and I never heard tell she had a baby.”

  I was beginning to wonder if I was going crazy. This was all so weird. “She said she did,” I insisted.

  Doc Everett nodded. “She thinks she does,” he said. “Laura . . . Laura’s not right.”

  “First I’ve heard of it,” Allie said.

  “Well, it’s true,” Doc said. “Not for five years. Not since the baby died.”

  “So there was a baby?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “There was?” Allie was pretty startled by that. She’d been keeping up on the gossip around Dawsonville since she was thirteen, but I guess she’d never heard this one.

  “Stillborn,” Doc said. “Never had a chance. Probably just as well. But Laura couldn’t take it.”

  I glanced at Allie, but if she thought Doc was saying anything about her, she didn’t pay any mind to it.

  “We’d managed to keep it all quiet – she never went out much, and she carried small, and I performed the delivery right here at home, so no one ever knew,” Doc explained. “When he was born dead, I figured it was a blessing, and I buried him in the back yard and thought that was an end to it.”

  “It wasn’t?”

  He shook his head. “Laura dug him up,” he said.

  Allie’s mouth came open at that, and the gun drooped a bit further.

  “She brought the body back in the house and treated it like a live baby, and I didn’t know how to make her stop,” Doc went on. “I tried to talk sense to her, but she wouldn’t listen, and if I tried to take it away she’d throw a screaming fit until I gave it back.”

  “Couldn’t . . . didn’t anyone else know?” I asked. “Couldn’t you take her to a psychiatrist or something?”

  “Didn’t dare,” he said. “If it came out that there’d been a baby and I’d kept it quiet, and who the father was . . .”

  “Who was the father?”

  He looked startled, as if he thought we’d figured that out already. “I was,” he said.

  Maybe I had figured it out, because I wan’t really surprised, but Allie was.

  “Your sister?” she said.

  “Two lonely people alone in the house together,” Doc said. “Yes, my sister.”

  “What’s this got to do with our baby?” I demanded.

  “Well, hell, son, dead bodies don’t keep,” he said. “When the baby got too far gone, Laura said it was sick and told me to make it better – I was a doctor, couldn’t I fix it up? Nagged at me day and night, and ’bout then Mrs Kelliher’s little Josie died – crib death, what they’re calling SIDS now. So I got an idea and I talked to Henry Tuchman and switched ours for Josie Kelliher. Been doing it ever since.” He shrugged. “After all, one dead baby’s a lot like another.”

  “So . . . but then why isn’t there another one in our girl’s coffin?”

  The doc grimaced. “Last one was too far gone,” he said. “It’s buried out back. Told Laura it was sleeping, managed to keep her away for three days – don’t know what I’d have done if you poor folks hadn’t come along.”

  “You killed my baby,” Allie said, and the gun came up again. “You killed her so you could give her to your sister.”

  “No, Mrs Sellers,” he said, “I swear I didn’t. I’d never do that. I took an oath, and I meant it.”

  The gun wavered some.

  “Come on,” I said, getting out of the truck. “We’re getting our daughter back. I feel sorry for your sister, Doc, but that’s our baby’s body, and we’re taking it.”

  “Right,” Allie said, opening her own door.

  Together, we marched up the porch steps, right past Doc Everett, and on into the house – front door wasn’t locked, not in Dawsonville.

  The doc ran after us, shouting, “No, wait! Wait! I didn’t tell you . . . you can’t . . . let me explain!”

  I reckoned we’d heard enough; we didn’t stop, marched right into the house. I pointed to the big sliding door. “In there,” I said.

  Allie tried to open it, but it wouldn’t move.

  “It’s locked,” she said.

  I turned to Doc Everett. “Open it,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “Listen, you can’t just barge in here. I’ll give you back your baby, I’ll give Laura a doll or something, but don’t . . .”

  “Open it, or we’ll shoot the fucking lock off!” I shouted.

  He hesitated, and Allie took the revolver two-handed and pointed it, but then the door opened by itself, and there was Miss Everett, asking, “What’s all the noise? You’re disturbing the baby!”

  She had a bundle in her arms, wrapped up in a white-and-pink baby blanket. It wasn’t moving, didn’t make a sound.

  Allie started to grab for it, then realised she still had the gun in her hand, and got confused.

  “Miss Everett,” I said, “could we see him? Just for a moment?” I held out my arms.

  She looked at me strangely, then smiled, and gave me the bundle.

  It was cold and dead, like a bundle of laundry, but I took a look under a flap of blanket.

  It was our baby, all right.

  “There,” Doc said, “you’ve got what you want. Take it out for some air.”

  I nodded. I thought that was the end of it.

  Then I looked in through the sliding door, into the old drawing room, and saw them, lined up on shelves, on the mantelpiece, on the couch, dried-out little things, skin stretched tight over bone, a dozen or more, all mummified.

  “Oh, my God,” I said.

  Allie screamed.

  And Doc Everett, standing in the front door, seemed to slump down into himself.

  “Laura always wanted a big family,” he said.

  HARLAN ELLISON

  Sensible City

  IN A CAREER THAT has spanned more than forty years, Harlan Ellison has won more awards than any other living fantasist. He is the author or editor of more than sixty books and has written over 1,700 short stories, essays, articles and newspaper columns, plus two dozen teleplays and a dozen screenplays. The Washington Post has described him as “one of the great living American short story writers.”

  Over the next five years, White Wolf is publishing his extensive backlist plus a new collection, while Borderlands Press will continue its programme of reissuing limited edition hardcovers of the author’s work. Dark Horse has recently launched Harlan Ellison’s Dream Corridor, featuring quality comic-book adaptations of stories, introduced by Ellison himself. He is also currently the Conceptual Consultant for the television series Babylon 5 and has recently been renewed for a third season as a featured Commentator on the Sci-Fi Channel’s weekly Sci-Fi Buzz tv news magazine.

  His novella “Mefisto in Onyx” (published in a previous volume of The Best New Horror) was a finalist for the Hugo, Edgar Allan Poe, Nebula and World Fantasy awards, won the 1994 Locus Award, and was presented with a belated Bram Stoker Award by the Horror Writers Association after an oversight was discovered in the rules. It is in pre-production as a theatrical feature.

  His next three books, to be published in 1995 and early 1996, are Rough Beasts, The City on the Edge of Forever, and Slippage. Visually, he recently handed in the completed script of an adaptation of his dark fantasy, “the Face of Helene Bournouw,” to be filmed by either Ridley or Tony Scott . . . who were, at last bulletin, fighting with brotherly affection for the privilege of directing Ellison’s “disturbing” screenplay.

  The author finished the following story on a cruise ship with his wife Susan. “I ain’t a cruise kind of guy,” says Ellison. “One day, and I was nuts. So I wrote.”

  DURING THE THIRD WEEK OF the trial, sworn under oath, one of the Internal Affairs guys the DA’s office had planted undercover in Gropp’s facility attempted to describe how terrifying Gropp’s smile was. The IA guy stammered
some; and there seemed to be a singular absence of color in his face; but he tried valiantly, not being a poet or one given to colorful speech. And after some prodding by the Prosecutor, he said:

  “You ever, y’know, when you brush your teeth . . . how when you’re done, and you’ve spit out the toothpaste and the water, and you pull back your lips to look at your teeth, to see if they’re whiter, and like that . . . you know how you tighten up your jaws real good, and make that kind of death-grin smile that pulls your lips back, with your teeth lined up clenched in the front of your mouth . . . you know what I mean . . . well . . .”

  Sequestered that night in a downtown hotel, each of the twelve jurors stared into a medicine cabinet mirror and skinned back a pair of lips, and tightened neck muscles till the cords stood out, and clenched teeth, and stared at a face grotesquely contorted. Twelve men and women then superimposed over the mirror reflection the face of the Defendant they’d been staring at for three weeks, and approximated the smile they had not seen on Gropp’s face all that time.

  And in that moment of phantom face over reflection face, Gropp was convicted.

  Police Lieutenant W.R. Gropp. Rhymed with crop. The meatman who ruled a civic smudge called the Internment Facility when it was listed on the City Council’s budget every year. Internment Facility: dripping wet, cold iron, urine smell mixed with sour liquor sweated through dirty skin, men and women crying in the night. A stockade, a prison camp, stalag, ghetto, torture chamber, charnel house, abattoir, duchy, fiefdom, Army co-op mess hall ruled by a neckless thug.

  The last of the thirty-seven inmate alumni who had been subpoenaed to testify recollected, “Gropp’s favorite thing was to take some fool outta his cell, get him nekkid to the skin, then do this rolling thing t’him.”

  When pressed, the former tenant of Gropp’s hostelry – not a felon, merely a steamfitter who had had a bit too much to drink and picked up for himself a ten-day Internment Facility residency for D&D – explained that this “rolling thing” entailed “Gropp wrappin’ his big, hairy sausage arm aroun’ the guy’s neck, see, and then he’d roll him across the bars, real hard and fast. Bangin’ the guy’s head like a roulette ball around the wheel. Clank clank, like that. Usual, it’d knock the guy flat out cold, his head clankin’ across the bars and spaces between, wham wham wham like that. See his eyes go up outta sight, all white; but Gropp, he’d hang on with that sausage aroun’ the guy’s neck, whammin’ and bangin’ him and takin’ some goddam kinda pleasure mentionin’ how much bigger this criminal bastard was than he was. Yeah, fer sure. That was Gropp’s fav’rite part, that he always pulled out some poor nekkid sonofabitch was twice his size.

  “That’s how four of these guys he’s accused of doin’, that’s how they croaked. With Gropp’s sausage ’round the neck. I kept my mouth shut; I’m lucky to get outta there in one piece.”

  Frightening testimony, last of thirty-seven. But as superfluous as feathers on an eggplant. From the moment of superimposition of phantom face over reflection face, Police Lieutenant W.R. Gropp was on greased rails to spend his declining years for Brutality While Under Color of Service – a serious offense – in a maxi-galleria stuffed chockablock with felons whose spiritual brethren he had maimed, crushed, debased, blinded, butchered, and killed.

  Similarly destined was Gropp’s gigantic Magog, Deputy Sergeant Michael “Mickey” Rizzo, all three hundred and forty pounds of him; brainless malevolence stacked six feet four inches high in his steel-toed, highly polished service boots. Mickey had only been indicted on seventy counts, as opposed to Gropp’s eighty-four ironclad atrocities. But if he managed to avoid Sentence of Lethal Injection for having crushed men’s heads underfoot, he would certainly go to the maxi-galleria mall of felonious behavior for the rest of his simian life.

  Mickey had, after all, pulled a guy up against the inside of the bars and kept bouncing him till he ripped the left arm loose from its socket, ripped it off, and later dropped it on the mess hall steam table just before dinner assembly.

  Squat, bulletheaded troll, Lieutenant W.R. Gropp, and the mindless killing machine, Mickey Rizzo. On greased rails.

  So they jumped bail together, during the second hour of jury deliberation.

  Why wait? Gropp could see which way it was going, even counting on Blue Loyalty. The city was putting the abyss between the Dept., and him and Mickey. So, why wait? Gropp was a sensible guy, very pragmatic, no bullshit. So they jumped bail together, having made arrangements weeks before, as any sensible felon keen to flee would have done.

  Gropp knew a chop shop that owed him a favor. There was a throaty and hemi-speedy, immaculately registered, four year old Firebird just sitting in a bay on the fifth floor of a seemingly abandoned garment factory, two blocks from the courthouse.

  And just to lock the barn door after the horse, or in this case the Pontiac, had been stolen, Gropp had Mickey toss the chop shop guy down the elevator shaft of the factory. It was the sensible thing to do. After all, the guy’s neck was broken.

  By the time the jury came in, later that night, Lieut. W.R. Gropp was out of the state and somewhere near Boise. Two days later, having taken circuitous routes, the Firebird was on the other side of both the Snake River and the Rockies, between Rock Springs and Laramie. Three days after that, having driven in large circles, having laid over in Cheyenne for dinner and a movie, Gropp and Mickey were in Nebraska.

  Wheat ran to the sun, blue storms bellowed up from horizons, and heat trembled on the edge of each leaf. Crows stirred inside fields, lifted above shattered surfaces of grain and flapped into sky. That’s what it looked like: the words came from a poem.

  They were smack in the middle of the plains state, above Grand Island, below Norfolk, somewhere out in the middle of nowhere, just tooling along, leaving no trail, deciding to go that way to Canada, or the other way to Mexico. Gropp had heard there were business opportunities in Mazatlan.

  It was a week after the jury had been denied the pleasure of seeing Gropp’s face as they said, “Stick the needle in the brutal sonofabitch. Fill the barrel with a very good brand of weed-killer, stick the needle in the brutal sonofabitch’s chest, and slam home the plunger. Guilty, your honor, guilty on charges one through eighty-four. Give ’im the weed-killer and let’s watch the fat scumbag do his dance!” A week of swift and leisurely driving here and there, doubling back and skimming along easily.

  And somehow, earlier this evening, Mickey had missed a turnoff, and now they were on a stretch of superhighway that didn’t seem to have any important exits. There were little towns now and then, the lights twinkling off in the mid-distance, but if they were within miles of a major metropolis, the map didn’t give them clues as to where they might be.

  “You took a wrong turn.”

  “Yeah, huh?”

  “Yeah, exactly huh. Keep your eyes on the road.”

  “I’m sorry, Looten’nt.”

  “No. Not Lieutenant. I told you.”

  “Oh, yeah, right. Sorry, Mr Gropp.”

  “Not Gropp. Jensen. Mister Jensen. You’re also Jensen, my kid brother. Your name is Daniel.”

  “I got it, I remember: Harold and Daniel Jensen is us. You know what I’d like?”

  “No, what would you like?”

  “A box’a Grape-Nuts. I could have ’em here in the car, and when I got a mite peckish I could just dip my hand in an’ have a mouthful. I’d like that.”

  “Keep your eyes on the road.”

  “So whaddya think?”

  “About what?”

  “About maybe I swing off next time and we go into one’a these little towns and maybe a 7-Eleven’ll be open, and I can get a box’a Grape-Nuts? We’ll need some gas after a while, too. See the little arrow there?”

  “I see it. We’ve still got half a tank. Keep driving.”

  Mickey pouted. Gropp paid no attention. There were drawbacks to forced traveling companionship. But there were many cul-de-sacs and landfills between this stretch of dark turnpike and New B
runswick, Canada or Mazatlan, state of Sinaloa.

  “What is this, the Southwest?” Gropp asked, looking out the side window into utter darkness. “The Midwest? What?”

  Mickey looked around, too. “I dunno. Pretty out here, though. Real quiet and pretty.”

  “It’s pitch dark.”

  “Yeah, huh?”

  “Just drive, for godsake. Pretty. Jeezus!”

  They rode in silence for another twenty-seven miles, then Mickey said, “I gotta go take a piss.”

  Gropp exhaled mightily. Where were the cul-de-sacs, where were the landfills? “Okay. Next town of any size, we can take the exit and see if there’s decent accommodations. You can get a box of Grape-Nuts, and use the toilet; I can have a cup of coffee and study the map in better light. Does that sound like a good idea, to you . . . Daniel?”

  “Yes, Harold. See, I remembered.”

  “The world is a fine place.”

  They drove for another sixteen miles, and came nowhere in sight of a thruway exit sign. But the green glow had begun to creep up from the horizon.

  “What the hell is that?” Gropp asked, running down his power window. “Is that some kind of a forest fire, or something? What’s that look like to you?”

  “Like green in the sky.”

  “Have you ever thought how lucky you are that your mother abandoned you, Mickey?” Gropp said wearily. “Because if she hadn’t, and if they hadn’t brought you to the county jail for temporary housing till they could put you in a foster home, and I hadn’t taken an interest in you, and hadn’t arranged for you to live with the Rizzos, and hadn’t let you work around the lockup, and hadn’t made you my deputy, do you have any idea where you’d be today?” He paused for a moment, waiting for an answer, realized the entire thing was rhetorical – not to mention pointless – and said, “Yes, it’s green in the sky, pal, but it’s also something odd. Have you ever seen ‘green in the sky’ before? Anywhere? Any time?”

  “No, I guess I haven’t.” Gropp sighed, and closed his eyes.

  They drove in silence another nineteen miles, and the green miasma in the air enveloped them. It hung above and around them like sea-fog, chill and with tiny droplets of moisture that Mickey fanned away with the windshield wipers. It made the landscape on either side of the superhighway faintly visible, cutting the impenetrable darkness, but it also induced a wavering, ghostly quality to the terrain.