The Best New Horror 6

by Stephen Jones

  Gropp turned on the map light in the dome of the Firebird, and studied the map of Nebraska. He murmured, “I haven’t got a rat’s-fang of any idea where the hell we are! There isn’t even a freeway like this indicated here. You took some helluva wrong turn ’way back there, pal!” Dome light out.

  “I’m sorry, Loo-Harold . . .”

  A large reflective advisement marker, green and white, came up on their right. It said:

  FOOD GAS LODGING 10 MILES.

  The next sign said: EXIT 7 MILES.

  The next sign said: OBEDIENCE 3 MILES.

  Gropp turned the map light on again. He studied the venue. “Obedience? What the hell kind of ‘Obedience’? There’s nothing like that anywhere. What is this, an old map? Where did you get this map?”

  “Gas station.”

  “Where?”

  “I dunno. Back a long ways. That place we stopped with the root beer stand next to it.”

  Gropp shook his head, bit his lip, murmured nothing in particular. “Obedience,” he said. “Yeah, huh?”

  They began to see the town off to their right before they hit the exit turnoff. Gropp swallowed hard and made a sound that caused Mickey to look over at him. Gropp’s eyes were large, and Mickey could see the whites.

  “What’sa matter, Loo . . . Harold?”

  “You see that town out there?” His voice was trembling.

  Mickey looked to his right. Yeah, he saw it. Horrible.

  Many years ago, when Gropp was briefly a college student, he had taken a warm-body course in Art Appreciation. One oh one, it was; something basic and easy to ace, a snap, all you had to do was show up. Everything you wanted to know about Art from aboriginal cave drawings to Diego Rivera. One of the paintings that had been flashed on the big screen for the class, a sleepy 8:00 AM class, had been The Nymph Echo by Max Ernst. A green and smoldering painting of an ancient ruin overgrown with writhing plants that seemed to have eyes and purpose and a malevolently jolly life of their own, as they swarmed and slithered and overran the stone vaults and altars of the twisted, disturbingly resonant sepulcher. Like a sebaceous cyst, something corrupt lay beneath the emerald fronds and hungry black soil.

  Mickey looked to his right at the town. Yeah, he saw it. Horrible.

  “Keep driving!” Gropp yelled, as his partner-in-flight started to slow for the exit ramp.

  Mickey heard, but his reflexes were slow. They continued to drift to the right, toward the rising egress lane. Gropp reached across and jerked the wheel hard to the left. “I said: keep driving!”

  The Firebird slewed, but Mickey got it back under control in a moment, and in another moment they were abaft the ramp, then past it, and speeding away from the nightmarish site beyond and slightly below the superhighway. Gropp stared mesmerized as they swept past. He could see buildings that leaned at obscene angles, the green fog that rolled through the haunted streets, the shadowy forms of misshapen things that skulked at every dark opening.

  “That was a real scary-lookin’ place, Looten . . . Harold. I don’t think I’d of wanted to go down there even for the Grape-Nuts. But maybe if we’d’ve gone real fast . . .”

  Gropp twisted in the seat toward Mickey as much as his muscle-fat body would permit. “Listen to me. There is this tradition, in horror movies, in mysteries, in tv shows, that people are always going into haunted houses, into graveyards, into battle zones, like assholes, like stone idiots! You know what I’m talking about here? Do you?”

  Mickey said, “Uh . . .”

  “All right, let me give you an example. Remember we went to see that movie Alien? Remember how scared you were?”

  Mickey bobbled his head rapidly, his eyes widened in frightened memory.

  “Okay. So now, you remember that part where the guy who was a mechanic, the guy with the baseball cap, he goes off looking for a cat or somedamnthing? Remember? He left everyone else, and he wandered off by himself. And he went into that big cargo hold with the water dripping on him, and all those chains hanging down, and shadows everywhere . . . do you recall that?”

  Mickey’s eyes were chalky potholes. He remembered, oh yes; he remembered clutching Gropp’s jacket sleeve till Gropp had been compelled to slap his hand away.

  “And you remember what happened in the movie? In the theater? You remember everybody yelling, ‘Don’t go in there, you asshole! The thing’s in there, you moron! Don’t go in there!’ But, remember, he did, and the thing came up behind him all those teeth, and it bit his stupid head off! Remember that?”

  Mickey hunched over the wheel, driving fast.

  “Well, that’s the way people are. They ain’t sensible! They go into places like that, you can see are death places; and they get chewed up or the blood sucked outta their necks or used for kindling . . . but I’m no moron, I’m a sensible guy and I got the brains my mama gave me, and I don’t go near places like that. So drive like a sonofabitch, and get us outta here, and we’ll get your damned Grape-Nuts in Idaho or somewhere . . . if we ever get off this road . . .”

  Mickey murmured, “I’m sorry, Lieuten’nt. I took a wrong turn or somethin’.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Just keep driv – ” The car was slowing.

  It was a frozen moment. Gropp exultant, no fool he, to avoid the cliché, to stay out of that haunted house, that ominous dark closet, that damned place. Let idiot others venture off the freeway, into the town that contained the basement entrance to Hell, or whatever. Not he, not Gropp!

  He’d outsmarted the obvious.

  In that frozen moment.

  As the car slowed. Slowed, in the poisonous green mist.

  And on their right, the obscenely frightening town of Obedience, that they had left in their dust five minutes before, was coming up again on the superhighway.

  “Did you take another turnoff?”

  “Uh . . . no, I . . . uh, I been just driving fast . . .”

  The sign read: NEXT RIGHT 50 YDS OBEDIENCE.

  The car was slowing. Gropp craned his neckless neck to get a proper perspective on the fuel gauge. He was a pragmatic kind of a guy, no nonsense, and very practical; but they were out of gas.

  The Firebird slowed and slowed and finally rolled to a stop.

  In the rearview mirror Gropp saw the green fog rolling up thicker onto the roadway; and emerging over the berm, in a jostling, slavering horde, clacking and drooling, dropping decayed body parts and leaving glistening trails of worm ooze as they dragged their deformed pulpy bodies across the blacktop, their snake-slit eyes gleaming green and yellow in the mist, the residents of Obedience clawed and slithered and crimped toward the car.

  It was common sense any Better Business Bureau would have applauded: if the tourist trade won’t come to your town, take your town to the tourists. Particularly if the freeway has forced commerce to pass you by. Particularly if your town needs fresh blood to prosper. Particularly if you have the civic need to share.

  Green fog shrouded the Pontiac, and the peculiar sounds that came from within. Don’t go into that dark room is a sensible attitude. Particularly in a sensible city.

  TERRY LAMSLEY

  Blade and Bone

  IT’S BEEN A good year for Terry Lamsley: His novella “Under the Crust” (from his first, self-published collection of the same name) won the 1994 World Fantasy Award and was chosen by editor Karl Edward Wagner for The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII, while another story from the same collection, “Two Returns”, appeared in last year’s volume of The Best New Horror.

  He has recently sold stories to Ghosts & Scholars and the anthology Dark Terrors, and a new collection of broadly supernatural tales, provisionally called The Outer Darkness, is due from The Ash-Tree Press in 1996. He is also currently working on a novel.

  “Wormhill is an almost unpopulated village,” explains the author, “obviously haunted in summer, and spooky as hell on a misty day in winter.

  “Most of the details in the story, including the quote from J. Turner at the head, are authentic. ‘Blade
and Bone’ was inspired by an actual visit to Wormhill about ten years ago. It started raining hard and I took shelter in a hut in overgrown gardens behind some deserted cottages that was exactly like the one in the story, right down to the old copies of Radio Times from 1952. All the tools were there as described, except the ones made from the relic. I believe the hut must have been closed up for thirty years or more. God knows why . . .”

  Wormhill

  Within this manor were held the courts for the jurisdiction of the forest laws, within its boundaries were the lairs of those wolves so destructive to the forest animals; but which were the most ferocious, the wolves or the forest laws, is a matter of opinion. Animals sacred to the Norman Monarchs were the hart, hind, boar and wolf. To destroy one of them William I punished with loss of eyesight, Henry II with loss of limb, Rufus had made it a capital offence, while Richard I devised a torture too barbarous for description.

  Old Halls, Manors, and Families of Derbyshire

  J. Turner, 1892

  WITH A FEELING OF RELEASE, like a slave casting off his chains, Ogden Minter flung his useless mountain bike against a low dry-stone wall and shrugged his head and arms out of his gaudy, child-size pink and purple back-pack. Though there was little weight in this burden the thin, tight straps had cut notches into the sides of his neck. A pool of sweat had formed under the bag between his shoulder blades, seeped down his spine, amassed in a trench round the line of his belt, and drained away into his shorts. He felt flooded.

  He gave the punctured back tyre of his hired machine a jaundiced glare. He remembered putting a repair kit into the pocket of his linen jacket before breakfast that morning and, an hour later, deciding a jacket would not be necessary that day after all.

  Ogden began to wonder where he was. The countryside around looked particularly lush and succulent. To his left, a line of cottage-like dwellings stretched away at a right angle to the road. A few hundred yards further on he could see a couple of larger buildings, typical, in their austerity of design and structure, of hundreds he had seen in the Peak District during the last week.

  He pulled the bunch of documents his wife had insisted he take with him out of his back-pack, and extracted a tattered yellow-covered O.S. map of the Peak District. Opening it on the ground at his feet, he crouched down to run his finger along the route he had so far covered. It appeared that the long, steep hill up which he had recently pushed his crippled bike had brought him to the edge of an area marked “Wormhill”. His wife, he recalled, had suggested that the village may be of interest. He could not recall why exactly, but he thought she had mentioned the Domesday Book.

  Carefully, he established his exact position from the map and peered into the landscape towards a quantity of trees (in itself an unusual sight in that particular area of the High Peak) among which the heart of the village supposedly lay concealed. He sorted through the folders of notes his wife had prepared in the months before their holiday until he came to a batch headed “Buxton + Environs” from which he extracted some hand written sheets collected together under the title “Wormhill (etc.)”

  He did this with no great enthusiasm, but with the air of a man doing his duty towards his spouse. Poppy, sadly, was unable to benefit from the painstaking work she had put into compiling the information he had before him. Their tour together had come to an end two days previously when his wife lost control of her bike while descending a steep path down the side of Lathkill Dale. She and her vehicle had tipped twenty feet into an old quarry, and she had broken an ankle in her subsequent collision with the ground.

  Instead of ending their holiday early, as Ogden had suggested, Mrs Minter had preferred to spend the final part of the week at the “Jem Arms”, a hotel in Tideswell. There, presumably, she now sat, as he had left her, sunning herself on the patio, with her wounded leg propped on a bench in front of her. Meanwhile, Ogden visited the places of interest she had planned they should share together. It was, she had informed him, his mission to view, by proxy, on her behalf, the churches, historic buildings, and prehistoric sites that she herself had been so keen to inspect.

  It should be understood that Ogden did not find his wife’s antiquarian obsessions nearly as fascinating as perhaps he led her to believe. His enthusiasm for the cultures of the past, never more than superficial, had declined noticeably. The ever-mobile pageant of history had marched on, leaving him stranded, but he had no regrets about its passing. He had lost interest in many things in recent years, including Poppy and her several hobbies, and felt none the worse for it.

  Nevertheless, he had his orders and, to keep the domestic peace, he would obey them. He rifled through the sheets in his hand to determine which local sites he was obliged to find and visit, remembering as he did so that Poppy would require photographic evidence of his pilgrimage, and that he would need to put a film in the camera.

  At the top of the first page he read:

  Wyrma’s Hill (Old Eng.) – Wruenele (Domesday Book.) – ‘A doubtful tradition says the place was once called Wolfhill, from the many predatory wolves that here had their lair.’

  Principal families & individs: Foljambes, John Le Wolfhunte, and Bagshaws (from 17th Cnt).

  Church: of St Margaret of Antioch: built in 1273 – little remains except part of tower, as it was rebuilt in 1864.

  St Margaret: canonised form of Aphrodite Marina? – daughter of heathen priest, but brought up Christian by nurse against father’s wishes. St M. spurned advances of rich suitor and devoted herself to Christian virginity. Was subject to terrible tortures to make her change her mind. “Her bones were laid bare and the blood poured forth from her body as from a pure stream.” Even so, still had the strength to beat the devil who, in the form of a huge dragon [“Aha, I thought there might be one of those involved somewhere,” Ogden mused, relishing Poppy’s taste for the macabre] swallowed her up, whereupon she caused his body to burst and ventured forth unharmed, except for injuries resulting from her previous torture. After this St M. was drowned, beheaded and burned. The most consistent attributes of St M. are a dragon and a cross.

  As he skimmed through his wife’s notes Ogden was vaguely aware of a lowering of the temperature of the sunlight on his back and a corresponding decrease in the intensity of the light. He held the papers closer to his face, the better to read Poppy’s tiny writing, and immediately three or four large crimson spots appeared on the top sheet with soft, damp puttering sounds.

  “Good grief,” he said aloud: “it’s raining blood!”

  He wiped his fingers across the glistening wet places in an exploratory gesture that turned the spots to red smears and, fumbling confusedly, knocked all the notes out of his grasp onto the grass at his feet. As they fell, a stiff crimson card slid out from among them. He realised that raindrops had turned the thin paper sheet he had been studying transparent where they struck, revealing beneath parts of the blood red card that his wife had thoughtfully included for him to rest on whilst taking notes.

  Then it began to rain very hard. Ogden looked upwards. A line of gritstone-grey cloud had sneaked up behind him. It hung above him like a steep, dark cliff, cutting away almost half of the blue summer sky. There was going to be a downpour. And Poppy’s notes were getting very wet. The ink on some of them had already begun to run. He scooped them up hastily and looked about for shelter. The cottages he had noticed earlier were close. He might be able to tuck himself into a doorway.

  He picked up his bicycle and ran.

  He realised the cottages were uninhabited as soon as he reached them. Windows were boarded up, weeds possessed the gardens, and a chimney had toppled down through a roof. The front doors were flush with the walls and offered no protection. He found his way round to the back of the buildings and came upon a stone outhouse with a door that looked forceable. Then he noticed someone had taken a great deal of trouble to fasten it. It had been sealed shut with a number of large screws. But this had been done a long time ago. The screw-heads were rusty, and the crude planks o
f wood that formed the door were clearly rotten.

  The rain was now a torrent; a monsoon.

  Ogden kicked the door at what he judged to be its weakest point and had the satisfaction of seeing the whole thing tear free of the batons that held it in place and swing round into the room beyond. He leapt in after it.

  And received a powerful impression, as he entered, that, simultaneously, something made its exit. Something slender, sharp, and oddly jointed, that burst free in a great hurry. Nothing had passed him through the door, he was sure of that: even so, the little room he found himself in had an air of having been recently, instantly vacated. He was as sure of this as he would have been if he had glimpsed a pair of heels vanishing in front of him, but, in fact, he had detected no actual movement other than that of a swirl of ochre wood-dust in the air around his feet caused by the sudden implosion of the door. He had experienced a vaguely unpleasant sensation, but one that left him more confused than alarmed, since it was over almost before it registered on his consciousness.

  A window in the roof gave ample light for him to see that all the evidence indicated he was the first person to enter the place for a long time, however. The walls on three sides were covered with a wide variety of tools for wood and garden work, held in place by hooks, and positioned with scrupulous neatness. Many of their metal parts were edged with a scale of rust, suggesting they had once been infected with damp, though the air was now sharp and dry. All were cowled with ancient spider webs, but it was obvious that they had been kept in prime condition by the craftsman who had employed them, right up to the time of their disuse. They were not so much stored as displayed, and Ogden smiled to think of the obvious pride of their owner.