The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror

by Stephen Jones

  MICHAEL KELLY

  The Woods

  MICHAEL KELLY WAS BORN in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada. He currently resides near Toronto.

  A rising star of Canadian horror, he is the author of two short story collections, Scratching the Surface, and Undertow and Other Laments; and co-author of a novel, Ouroboros. Apparitions, an anthology he edited and published under his own literary imprint, Undertow Publications, was nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award.

  About the first of two stories he has in this volume, the author reveals: “‘The Woods’ was written for an anthology seeking regional horror and ghost stories. I’d just read Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephant’s’. Now, in no way am I comparing myself to Hemingway but I wanted to write a similarly brief tale, with only two main characters, and where the horror was off-stage. As well, the setting had to be distinctly Canadian. What, I thought, could be more Canadian than the frozen north and allusions to mythical beasts?”

  IT HAD BEEN SNOWING FOR DAYS. Icy needles of teeth tumbled from the ash-flecked sky, clotted the woods. The thick shroud of snow shifted, moved with the weeping wind, pushed against a cabin. A bug-bright snowmobile rested near a leaning woodshed like some alien invader, its engine cooling, ticking, though the two men inside the cabin could not hear this. They could hear nothing of the outside world but the wind and its ceaseless winter lament.

  Inside, logs crackled and smouldered in a fireplace. A black cast-iron pot hung above the small fire, suspended from a metal rod attached to stanchions. A spicy tang permeated the cabin.

  The old man in the old rocking-chair, who had a face like tree bark, blinked crusty eyes, looked up at the younger man (who nonetheless was near retirement himself but was still much younger than the old man in the chair) and gestured to the only other chair in the cabin. “Have a seat, Officer Creed.”

  The younger man grinned weakly. “How many times I have to tell you, Jack, you don’t have to call me that. It’s just the two of us. We go back a long way.”

  The old man blinked again, nodded, stared at the younger man’s uniform; the gold badge on the parka, the gun holstered at his side. “Well, Ned,” croaked the old man, “it looks like you’re out here on business, so it’s only proper.”

  Ned clutched a small, furry, dead animal, fingers digging deep. He sat on the proffered chair, laid the dead thing on the floor, where it resembled a hat. “We go back a long way,” he repeated, wistful.

  They were silent for a time. The old man rocked slowly and the pine floor creaked. Ned stared at his wet boots, glanced out the window at the swirling sheets of grey-white.

  Jack stopped rocking. “Get you some coffee, Ned?”

  “No, thanks. Can’t stay long. Have to get back before the storm comes full on.”

  A sad chuckle came from the old man. “You may be too late.”

  “I fear I am, Jack.”

  Another brief silence ensued. Jack rocked slowly and Ned brushed wet snow from his pants.

  “You still trapping?” Ned asked. “Still getting out?”

  Jack paused, as if carefully considering his words. “Course I am. I’m old, not dead.” Another brief pause, then, “Man’s got to eat.”

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  “I see.”

  “We go back a long way, don’t we, Jack?”

  The old man blinked, nodded.

  “I mean, you’d tell me if you needed anything, wouldn’t you? You’d tell me if anything was wrong?”

  The old man leaned forward. “Checking up on me, Ned?”

  “You might be snowbound awhile, is all. Just doing my job. You’re like a ghost out here.”

  Jack eased back into the rocker. “Pantry is stocked. Plenty of rabbit in the woodshed.”

  Ned grimaced. “You were always a good trapper.”

  “Been here a long, long time, Ned. You do something often enough you get good at it.”

  “True enough.”

  “You learn about things,” Jack said. “By necessity. You learn how the world works. The good. The bad. All of it.”

  “Hmm, yes.”

  “I know things,” Jack said. He was staring hard at Ned. “But . . . tell me, what do you know, Ned?”

  Ned fidgeted, returned Jack’s look. “Not as much as you, Jack. That’s the gospel. I know certain things, that’s all. And other stuff I’m not so certain about. Trying to figure things out, is all.”

  “Oh, you’re a sly one, aren’t you, Ned?”

  Ned turned away, sighed, gazed at the window. “Not so much. No.”

  “What do you see?” Jack asked.

  “I can just make out a few trees. Nothing else. The woods and nothing.”

  “I know these woods like the back of my hand.”

  “I bet you do,” Ned said.

  Gusts of blowing snow swept past the window, a curtain of ice. The cabin door groaned. Each man sat, staring at the other, stealing glances at the window, then the door, expectant, as if waiting for a visitor.

  Ned broke the silence. “Tom Brightman’s got a spot of trouble.”

  Jack’s face creased into a sneer. “You don’t say.”

  “Wendigo,” Ned whispered, as if afraid to say it aloud.

  Jack sniggered. “That old saw again?”

  “I’m afraid so.” Ned scratched his head. “Every year. The same old superstitions. We’ve heard them all, me and you. We go back some ways.”

  “Stop saying that.”

  “It’s true, though. There’s not much between us. Is there, Jack? There are no secrets in these parts.”

  “Yes,” Jack said.

  Ned stretched his legs out, crossed them, uncrossed them. A log in the fireplace popped, split. The room smelled of spice and meat and wet fur. He turned toward the fire.

  Jack followed Ned’s gaze. “Get you something to eat? To tide you over?”

  “No.” Ned squirmed. “You hungry, Jack?”

  “All the time. Seems the older I get, the hungrier I get.” Jack stared off into a far corner. “It’s not something I can explain. Not something you’d understand.”

  Ned gestured to the pot. “Don’t mind me. Help yourself.”

  Jack smirked, swung his gaze around to Ned. “It’s okay, I’ll wait. I’ve some manners still.”

  “You’ve got a nice little set up out here, Jack. All by yourself. No one around for miles. Must get mighty lonely at times, I’d imagine.”

  The old man shrugged. “Not really. A man can find plenty of things to occupy his time. Idle hands and all that.”

  “That’s what worries me, Jack. This place, this solitude, this . . . nothingness. It does things to people.” Ned leaned forward, nodded toward the window. “You ever spot anything out there, in the woods? Anything . . . strange?”

  “Ha.” Jack’s tree-bark face glowed orange from the fire, a winter pumpkin. “Stealthy man-eating beasts, Ned? Slavering cannibals? Wendigo?”

  Ned blinked, watched Jack, said nothing.

  “Tom Brightman is a damn fool,” Jack said. “Every year it’s the same damn thing. Can’t control his dogs so he blames everyone else. Myths. Legends. Old wives’ tales. Easier for some men to cast blame than take responsibility.”

  “What do you know about such things, Jack?”

  “How many, Ned? How many of his sled dogs have gone missing this year?”

  “None.” Ned straightened and leaned forward. Rigid and intent. “It’s the youngest boy. Johnny. Been gone a week now.”

  Jack was quiet. He began to rock slowly. Then, “He’s a damn fool.”

  “May very well be.” Ned scratched his chin. “You positive there’s nothing I can get you, Jack? Nothing you need?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Don’t suppose,” Ned asked, “at this point it’d make a lick of difference if I peeked into the woodshed on my way out? To make sure?”

  “Not a lick, Ned. Not at this point.”

  Ned picked up his hat, stood, let out a
heavy breath. “That’s what I thought.” He pulled the hat over his head, went to the door, opened it a crack and peered into the gathering white nothingness. “I’ll try and swing by later in the week, Jack. Watch yourself.” He shoved through the gap, into the outside, pulled the door shut.

  The old man rose from the rocking chair and scuttled across the worn pine floor. He went to the window, pressed his face against the frost-veined pane and spied the younger man, a blurry black smudge, trudging through the blizzard. The younger man stopped at the woodshed, pulled open the door and slipped inside.

  Jack watched. Waited. It had been snowing forever. Glassy shards struck the ground, formed an icy shell. He thought surely that the world would crack, that something would crack.

  Ned exited the shed, paused, gazed back at the cabin, shambled over to his snowmobile. Soon, the white swallowed him.

  Jack turned, walked to the cupboards, grabbed a chipped bowl and a spoon, and went over to the fireplace and the pot. Stew bubbled and simmered in the pot. His stomach grumbled, empty, always empty. It wasn’t something he could explain. Wasn’t something that he understood. A vast emptiness inside him. Nothingness.

  He ladled stew into the bowl, spooned the hot meal into his mouth. Chewed. Swallowed. His thoughts turned to Tom Brightman, his dogs, his son . . . and his daughters.

  Jack ate. The emptiness abated. Then he didn’t think about anything except the woods.

  The woods and nothing.

  JOE HILL and STEPHEN KING

  Throttle

  JOSEPH HILLSTRÖM KING WAS born in Bangor, Maine, in 1972. He is the second child of authors Stephen and Tabitha King. Under the pseudonym “Joe Hill” he burst upon the literary scene with his acclaimed first collection of short stories, 20th Century Ghosts, and quickly followed it up with the best-selling novels Heart-Shaped Box and Horns.

  As a comic-book writer, IDW has issued the second volume of his series Locke & Key: Head Games in hardcover, and Locke & Key: Keys to the Kingdom, the fourth arc in the series, was recently published by the same imprint. He is currently working on a new novel.

  Hill is a winner of the World Fantasy Award, the Bram Stoker Award, two British Fantasy awards, the Ray Bradbury Fellowship, the William L. Crawford Award for Best New Fantasy Writer and the Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer.

  Stephen King is the world’s most famous and successful horror writer. His first novel, Carrie, appeared in 1974, and since then he has published a phenomenal string of best-sellers, including Salem’s Lot, The Shining, The Stand, Dead Zone, Firestarter, Cujo, Pet Sematary, Christine, It, Misery, The Dark Half, Needful Things, Rose Madder, The Green Mile, Bag of Bones, The Colorado Kid, Lisey’s Story and Duma Key, to name only a few.

  The author’s short fiction and novellas have been collected in Night Shift, Different Seasons, Skeleton Crew, Four Past Midnight, Nightmares and Dreamscapes, Hearts in Atlantis, Everything’s Eventual, The Secretary of Dreams (two volumes), Just After Sunset: Stories and Stephen King Goes to the Movies. Full Dark, No Stars is a new collection of four novellas.

  The winner of numerous awards – including both the Horror Writers Association and World Fantasy Convention Lifetime Achievement Awards, and a Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation – he lives with his wife in Bangor, Maine.

  “Throttle” was written for an anthology celebrating the work of genre giant Richard Matheson. Inspired by Matheson’s 1971 story, “Duel”, which was filmed that same year by a young Steven Spielberg, it marks the first-ever collaboration between father and son.

  “My dad showed me Duel when I was about eight years old,” recalls Hill. “He had it on video disc, the format that preceded DVD – it was exactly like DVD, except the movies came on these enormous record-sized silver platters, with twenty minutes of video on each side. A single movie was usually spread across about six discs and you had to keep getting up to flip ’em over, or to put a new one in.

  “I know we watched Duel at least four times one summer, and that we would talk about it when we went on drives, imagining what we would do if we had The Truck after us. My dad also led me to the novels and stories of Richard Matheson – stories marked by a lack of adornment, Freudian subtexts, and a relentless commitment to cranking up the suspense.

  “Matheson’s novella ‘Duel’ is no exception. When the chance came up to do a story for He Is Legend, an anthology of original stories inspired by and honouring the fiction of Richard Matheson, it seemed natural for the two of us to jump in together. And we had a blast.”

  “Joe called me and explained that someone was doing a book of Richard Matheson tribute stories, and proposed that we do a riff on ‘Duel’,” adds King. “I was thrilled, because it gave me a chance to work with two writers I admire . . . at the same time!”

  THEY RODE WEST FROM THE SLAUGHTER, through the painted desert, and did not stop until they were a hundred miles away. Finally, in the early afternoon, they turned in at a diner with a white stucco exterior and pumps on concrete islands out front. The overlapping thunder of their engines shook the plate glass windows as they rolled by. They drew up together among parked long-haul trucks, on the west side of the building, and there they put down their kickstands and turned off their bikes.

  Race Adamson had led them the whole way, his Harley running sometimes as much as a quarter-mile ahead of anyone else’s. It had been Race’s habit to ride out in front ever since he had returned to them, after two years in the sand. He ran so far in front it often seemed he was daring the rest of them to try and keep up, or maybe had a mind to simply leave them behind. He hadn’t wanted to stop here but Vince had forced him to. As the diner came into sight, Vince had throttled after Race, blown past him, and then shot his hand left in a gesture The Tribe knew well: follow me off the highway. The Tribe let Vince’s hand-gesture call it, as they always did. Another thing for Race to dislike about him, probably. The kid had a pocketful of them.

  Race was one of the first to park, but the last to dismount. He stood astride his bike, slowly stripping off his leather riding gloves, glaring at the others from behind his mirrored sunglasses.

  “You ought to have a talk with your boy,” Lemmy Chapman said to Vince. Lemmy nodded in Race’s direction.

  “Not here,” Vince said. It could wait until they were back in Vegas. He wanted to put the road behind him. He wanted to lie down in the dark for a while, wanted some time to allow the sick knot in his stomach to abate. Maybe most of all, he wanted to shower. He hadn’t got any blood on him, but felt contaminated all the same, and wouldn’t be at ease in his own skin until he had washed the morning’s stink off.

  He took a step in the direction of the diner, but Lemmy caught his arm before he could go any further. “Yes. Here.”

  Vince looked at the hand on his arm – Lemmy didn’t let go, Lemmy of all the men had no fear of him – then glanced toward the kid, who wasn’t really a kid at all any more and hadn’t been for years. Race was opening the hardcase over his back tyre, fishing through his gear for something.

  “What’s to talk about? Clarke’s gone. So’s the money. There’s nothing left to do. Not this morning.”

  “You ought find out if Race feels the same way. You been assuming the two of you are on the same page even though these days he spends forty minutes of every hour pissed off at you. Tell you something else, boss. Race brought some of these guys in, and he got a lot of them fired up, talking about how rich they were all going to get on his deal with Clarke. He might not be the only one who needs to hear what’s next.” He glanced meaningfully at the other men. Vince noticed for the first time that they weren’t drifting on into the diner, but hanging around by their bikes, casting looks towards him and Race both. Waiting for something to come to pass.

  Vince didn’t want to talk. The thought of talk drained him. Lately, conversation with Race was like throwing a medicine ball back and forth, a lot of wearying effort, and he didn’t feel up to it, not wit
h what they were driving away from.

  He went anyway, because Lemmy was almost always right when it came to Tribe preservation. Lemmy had been riding six to Vince’s twelve going back to when they had met in the Mekong Delta and the whole world was dinky dau. They had been on the look-out for tripwires and buried mines then. Nothing much had changed in the almost forty years since.

  Vince left his bike and crossed to Race, who stood between his Harley and a parked truck, an oil hauler. Race had found what he was looking for in the hardcase on the back of his bike, a flask sloshing with what looked like tea and wasn’t. He drank earlier and earlier, something else Vince didn’t like. Race had a pull, wiped his mouth, held it out to Vince. Vince shook his head.

  “Tell me,” Vince said.

  “If we pick up Route 6,” Race said, “we could be down in Show Low in three hours. Assuming that pussy rice-burner of yours can keep up.”

  “What’s in Show Low?”

  “Clarke’s sister.”

  “Why would we want to see her?”

  “For the money. Case you hadn’t noticed, we just got fucked out of sixty grand.”

  “And you think his sister will have it.”

  “Place to start.”

  “Let’s talk about it back in Vegas. Look at our options there.”

  “How about we look at ’em now? You see Clarke hanging up the phone when we walked in? I heard a snatch of what he was saying through the door. I think he tried to get his sister, and when he didn’t, he left a message with someone who knows her. Now why do you think he felt a pressing need to reach out and touch that toerag as soon as he saw all of us in the driveway?”

  To say his goodbyes was Vince’s theory, but he didn’t tell Race that. “She doesn’t have anything to do with this, does she? What’s she do? She make crank too?”

  “No. She’s a whore.”

  “Jesus. What a family.”

  “Look who’s talking,” Race said.

  “What’s that mean?” Vince asked. It wasn’t the line that bothered him, with its implied insult, so much as Race’s mirrored sunglasses, which showed a reflection of Vince himself, sunburnt and a beard full grey, looking puckered, lined, and old.