The Best New Horror 6

by Stephen Jones

  “It was a beautiful evening; I know because I was sitting on the wall outside this very building, looking down the path towards the church, and thinking what a grand end we were having to the day. Then I saw Nev running out the churchyard gate very fast. Just like you were when I saw you today. You reminded me of him, with your plastic mac swirling round you. You looked the image of Nev, blustering towards me in his old gabardine.”

  Ogden sat up straight in his chair with a jerk, as though he had been woken from sleep by a shout. His surroundings no longer looked comforting. He didn’t want to hear any more of the story, or stay where he was, but felt too weak to get out of his chair.

  The man’s voice droned inevitably on.

  “I shouted to Nev, asking what was the matter; but he didn’t stop. I watched him go up the street to his house . . .”

  “Where did he live?” Ogden interrupted urgently.

  The man pointed. “Up there. One of a row of cottages. You’ll have passed them on your left, if you came in from Tideswell. His family had lived there for generations, though I don’t suppose he was aware of it. They got the land cheap two hundred years ago. No one wanted it because of the uses it had been put to, and the things that were supposed to be buried there. But, as I say, Nev knew nothing about that.”

  He shook his head and looked down at his knees. “That was the last I saw of Nev. His wife said they heard something rattling the latch on the back door in the early hours of the next morning. Nev went down to investigate. He was found two days later. Six miles away. In the middle of a field. He’d been cut to pieces; taken apart. The corpse looked like someone who’d fallen into a harvester, they said. As did his wife’s body, when they found her. She went missing within a week.”

  The man put his fingertips together, pressed them against his lips, and peered at Ogden, who snatched up his cup and drained it. He managed to get to his feet. He realised he had not paid for what he had eaten and shouted for his bill.

  “Going,” the man observed, rather than asked, and continued, “Those cottages were a bad place to live from then on. Bad things happened to anyone who lived there. One by one, the inhabitants moved out, and nobody else fancied taking them over. And there were . . . incidents in the village: some quite nasty. I don’t know whose idea it was, but one day the local men went to the cottages and boarded them up, after smashing the insides to make them uninhabitable. They took particular care to shut up a stone shed in old Nev’s back garden, for some reason.

  “Since then, we’ve had no trouble,” the man said. “Not for forty years, we haven’t,” he added, wistfully.

  Ogden could think of nothing to say. He put his hand over his eyes, and shook his head.

  The woman returned and Ogden paid her. She looked around the room.

  “Are you on your own?” she said. “I thought I heard talking. I thought I had another customer!”

  Ogden glanced round and realised the storyteller had gone. “There was a man sitting there,” he said, gesturing towards an empty table. “I thought perhaps he was your husband.”

  “What did he look like?”

  Ogden gave a brief description.

  “Oh,” the woman laughed for some reason, “you’ve been talking to him have you?”

  “Hum. Local chap, is he?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Lived here a long time, I expect?” Ogden said, folding his mac into a tight roll and hurriedly stuffing it into his back-pack. “Seems to know a lot about the village.”

  “Good heavens, yes,” the woman confirmed. “He’s been around here for . . . well – ages.”

  And she laughed again.

  * * *

  Ogden stumbled out of the building and back onto the road. His bike was leaning against a metal rail alongside the path to the church. He hauled the machine upright, and ran with it back the way he had come. When he got to the top of the hill that led out of the village, he slid onto the saddle and free-wheeled down away, hardly aware of his flat tyre. He dropped like a stone out of Wormhill for half a mile, to a bridge across the dried up stream that cut through Monk’s Dale, then he hurtled onto the hill that ramped up to the back edge of Tideswell.

  He began to find his progress rather slow. The ascent to his destination was, he remembered, long and steep. And the condition of his bike made pedalling remarkably difficult. The sun was blazing down again out of a cloudless sky and he felt the heat like an added burden on his back. In spite of his best efforts, the machine almost came to a standstill on a sharp incline, after climbing a couple of hundred yards. Although he had come a long way in a short time, something nagged at his mind, telling him he had not put enough space between himself and Wormhill. He had a sensation that something was reaching out to him from that village; something that was gaining on him.

  He jumped off the bike, looked behind him down the empty road, then started to run, pushing the machine along by his side.

  Ogden was a healthy man, the fittest sixty-three-year-old he knew, who had run marathons in recent years, but, even so, his energy soon began to flag. He wasn’t able to choose his pace to preserve his strength, and felt himself burning up inside. He caught his right ankle against a spinning pedal and fell sideways on top of his machine. That hurt. He decided to ditch the bike, to hide it, and to get someone to come and collect it later. There was a gate in the wall at the side of the road close by. He humped the bike over, clambered after it, and moved it into a position out of sight from the road.

  Again, he looked back, this time across Monk’s Dale to where he imagined Wormhill lay.

  And saw, at the far side of the field he was in, some creature loping towards him. It was a dirty, off-white colour, and moved with a peculiar, disjointed gait. Ogden tried to think it was a dog, but part of his mind insisted on seeing whatever it was as a thin, almost human shape, running on all fours. Though awkward in motion, it was making good progress.

  Sunlight flashed on some bright objects it held in its jaws.

  Ogden blundered backwards and somehow got himself over the gate and onto the road again. He ran the mile or more up the hill to Tideswell remarkably quickly.

  Poppy Minton, out sunning herself again since the rain had stopped, was wearing her reading glasses when Ogden burst through the gate at the rear of the Jem Arms and slammed it shut behind him. She closed her book, rested it on her knee, and squinted at her husband. She knew it was him from his shape and the colour of his shirt, but she could not see his expression. Nevertheless, she was immediately aware that something was not quite right with her spouse, if only because he was moving with uncharacteristic speed. He fairly pelted across the lawn towards her.

  “Oggy,” she said, “I didn’t expect you back for hours. Was your expedition a success? Did you bring back anything interesting?”

  But, to Poppy’s surprise, Ogden didn’t stop to chat. As he ran across the patio into the hotel, he astonished her by saying, “We’re going. At once. No time to pack. We’ll have our stuff sent on. I’ll settle the bill. Get the car round to the front.”

  How rude, thought Poppy.

  Very occasionally, Ogden had a liquid lunch. Drink made a beast of him. Poppy decided she would ignore him. She would continue her book.

  Moments later, her reading was interrupted by the sound of the gate opening again. Another guest returning! She hoped it was someone who would stop to talk. She hated to admit it, but it had been a long and lonely day.

  Ogden had his wallet open and a wad of notes in his hand, and had almost reached the reception desk, when he heard a noise, like the squeal of brakes, that quickly modulated to a more human tone, then became, just recognisably, the voice of his wife. Her sharp, thin scream was suddenly cut short, leaving a silence that seemed much louder.

  For a moment Ogden found himself wondering why the hell she had not done as he had told her, and followed him through the hotel to fetch their car. Then he remembered she had a broken ankle, and could not move from where she sat witho
ut assistance.

  He ran back out onto the patio and saw at once what had been done to her. He did not have long to dwell on this horror, however.

  Within seconds, his legs were cut from under him.

  NORMAN PARTRIDGE

  Harvest

  NORMAN PARTRIDGE’S FIRST novel, Slippin’ into Darkness, was called “nitro-laced, in-your-face fiction for the ’90s” by Locus and “easily the most auspicious genre début of the year” by Stephen King. His collection of short stories, Mr Fox and Other Feral Tales, won the Bram Stoker Award and was a World Fantasy Award nominee, and recent short story appearances include Dark Voices 6, Peter Straub’s Ghosts, Love in Vein and Weird Business.

  Partridge has worked in libraries and steel mills. He collects prizefights and B-movies on videocassette and makes his home in Lafayette, California, where he is currently working on his next novel, a suspense tale with surfboards and cacti.

  About the following story, he says, “ ‘Harvest’ is loosely based on a cancer cluster which occurred in the California farming community of McFarland. At the time I wrote the story, pesticides were suspected as the cause. Later, indicators pointed toward pollution of the water table by toxic waste products. Either way, the result was frightening . . .”

  Arboles de la ladera porque no han reverdecido

  Por eso calandrias cantan o las apachurra el nido . . .

  – Las Amarillas (Traditional Folk Song)

  RAPHAEL BACA SPLIT the skin, weeping as he uncovered the skull beneath. He slipped his fingers under a fleshy flap and tugged. The skin peeled off in one piece and he dropped it to the floor, a limp, bloody husk.

  He threw the skull into a corner and kicked the skin after it. How many times would it happen? How many seasons would pass before he peeled an orange and found only fruit?

  Through the winter, through the spring, he had prayed that things would be different this year. And just this morning his hopes had swelled when he discovered the first orange of the new season, for the fruit had not screamed when he chopped it from the dead branch with his machete.

  But in the end it had all been the same as the year before.

  Raphael sat at the kitchen table and sharpened his machete. He listened to the wind, heard the woman wailing above it as she wandered the empty streets of C-Town. Raphael prayed that he would look up from his work, through the kitchen window, and see the bruja leading the children’s ghosts through the deserted streets and away. But Raphael did not bother to look up, because the kitchen window was dirty.

  It didn’t matter. He had never seen the woman – not even once.

  He had only heard her cries.

  And then, suddenly, he could not hear her at all.

  The music of the flies was much too loud.

  They came, fat and black, squeezing through chinks in the window, buzzing around the bloody fruitskull, ignoring the other skulls that had been picked clean during the previous season.

  A stray fly danced over Raphael’s bloodstained fingers. He listened to its music and did not move. The fly was hungry, and he would not disturb it. He would not raise his hand against even the most disgusting of God’s creatures.

  He stared at the dirty window and imagined the woman out there, somewhere, weeping for an audience of ghosts.

  The afternoon waned. The flies had gone, their bellies full. Raphael left the shanty. He checked the mailbox at the end of the road, hoping for a reply from the government, but there was nothing waiting for him. There hadn’t been any mail in more than a year. He started along the border of the grove, avoiding the bruja’s domain.

  Not far from the mailboxes, a car was parked on the shoulder of the dirt road. Dead trees blanketed it with feeble fingers of shade, printing strange cracks on the white hood and hard-top. Raphael looked inside. He saw keys hanging from the ignition and a wallet tucked haphazardly beneath the front seat. He glanced into the grove but saw no one there.

  He hurried away. The wind was rising, and he could almost hear the evil woman weeping again.

  This was not the first abandoned car that Raphael had discovered. He imagined the bruja falling upon the driver, an innocent who took a wrong turn off the highway. An innocent who had no protection. These days, people didn’t believe in creatures like the one that haunted C-Town. They had no faith to protect them.

  Raphael wished that he could do something to protect the people who came here, but he could do nothing. Gripping his machete, he walked to the west side of the grove, almost to the highway. The sunlight was still strong there. He skirted the dead trees and was happy at their nakedness, pleased by the spindly shadows that were much too feeble to frighten him.

  He sat down and thought about the bewitched fruit. The bruja’s bugs had killed the trees when the farmers stopped spraying. Raphael imagined that the insects made her witchcraft possible, even though the trees were long dead. He wished he could find a spray that would kill the cursed bugs, and he decided that tonight he would write another letter to the government and ask if they knew of such a spray.

  The sun drifted slowly from the sky. Raphael’s shadow stretched before him, as long and grey as a rich man’s gravestone.

  None of Raphael’s children had gravestones. Not Ramona, not Alicia, not Pablo or Paulo. Before his wife left him, Raphael had promised her that he would buy stones as soon as he had enough money to fix the old car. They had to do that first, he said, because they needed the car to visit the cemetery. It was too far away, otherwise.

  But it never worked out. His wife left him, and he never had any money. He didn’t have the car anymore, either, and the only time he visited the camposanto was when nobody came for the cars that he found near the grove.

  When that happened, he would drive to the camposanto and park nearby. Then he would visit his children. He always found their graves, even though they had no headstones.

  Except when the long shadows fell.

  And when the shadows turned to darkness and the gravestones disappeared, he walked back to C-Town.

  Alone. Crying.

  Shadows fell across the grove, thickening, stretching toward him. Raphael moved on and found a rabbit trapped in one of his snares. He took it back to the shanty, where he built a fire beneath a dead oak tree.

  Sometimes he worried about eating the rabbits. If the lawyers were right, the animals could be sick with the same disease that killed the children.

  The idea frightened him. He looked at the rabbit, suddenly afraid of it. But he was hungry, and he knew that the lawyers were wrong. He had eaten many rabbits in the last two years and he was not sick.

  Still, he was afraid, because he knew that C-Town was bewitched. He hung the rabbit and skinned it, his hands unsteady, his face dripping sweat. And then he laughed and laughed, because it was only a dead rabbit, after all, and there was only good meat in the places where he had imagined that he might find sticky fruit.

  That night Raphael lay still and listened to the bruja’s weeping.

  He had heard of her as a boy in Mexico. The story had come from the lips of his grandmother. “You must be a very good little nino, Raphael,” she had said. “If you are not, La Llorona will come for you.”

  “Who is she, grandma?”

  “She is a very bad bruja. Long ago, someone stole her babies. Now she steals children who are bad, because she knows that their parents will not miss them.”

  Raphael wasn’t the only one who knew the story. As the children of C-Town fell ill and the doctors failed to help them, more and more people remembered the tale. Raphael’s neighbors had not spoken La Llorona’s name in years, except in jest. But death made things different, especially the deaths of so many. The priest at the little chapel near the highway tried to stop the talk. He said that it was all superstitious nonsense. But the priest only came to the chapel once a week, and soon it seemed that the stories were more than just rumors.

  Epifanio Garcia said that he saw La Llorona in the grove one evening, spying on his shanty. Epif
anio and his wife had two babies, and he was determined to protect them. He chased La Llorona through the grove, but he could not catch her. He said that every tree which the bruja touched was instantly blighted, its fruit suddenly heavy with huge black bugs.

  Rosita Valdez said that she was walking to Mass when she came upon La Llorona drinking from an irrigation ditch. Rosita was so frightened by the evil one’s muddy leer that she ran home without stopping, and that was something, because Rosita was barely five feet tall and weighed nearly two hundred pounds.

  Epifanio’s babies fell ill and died. Rosita’s daughter died, too.

  Not everyone who lost children saw the weeping woman. Raphael never saw her. But everyone heard her, even over the children’s cries. Each night her wails haunted the camp, sawing through the dead trees along with the summer wind. The poor little ones feared La Llorona so much that they could not sleep at night for the terror of her. They shivered and wept and begged for God’s mercy. But God did not help them. He did not heal the sickness that stole their appetites but somehow left them as fat and bloated and bald as giant babies. And He did nothing to stop La Llorona.

  The lawyers said that the sickness came from the water but Raphael did not believe them. He knew that La Llorona was making the children sick so that they could not escape when she came for them.

  She came for Raphael’s children over the space of a month. Poor little Paulo was the last to go. His final days were spent in agony. He cried and cried, promising his father that he was a good little boy and that La Llorona would not take him. Raphael wiped his son’s tears and said that he would stay with Paulo always.

  Paulo was the youngest. Raphael sent him to school whenever the family was going to be at one colonias for a long time. When Paulo fell ill, Raphael brought him books to read, and Paulo taught his father how to read them, too. They slept together, holding each other close in the tiny bed.