The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Horror

by Stephen Jones

  “You’re stronger than me, you kept me out,” I said.

  He chuckled.

  “Stronger? Is that all you think it is? Stronger? You still don’t get it, do you?” His face, then, grew terrible. “You don’t even understand now, right now that I’ve cleaned it all away and you can see what I did to you, do you?

  “Do you think I stayed in a jail cell, and went through that trial, all of that, because I couldn’t do anything about it? You poor jig slob. I could have jumped like a shrike any time I wanted to. But the first time I met your Ally I saw you.”

  I cringed. “And you waited . . .? For me, you spent all that time in prison, just to get to me . . .?”

  “At the moment when you couldn’t do anything about it, at the moment you couldn’t shout ‘I’ve been taken over by someone else, I’m Rudy Pairis here inside this Henry Lake Spanning body, help me, help me!’ Why stir up noise when all I had to do was bide my time, wait a bit, wait for Ally, and let Ally go for you.”

  I felt like a drowning turkey, standing idiotically in the rain, head tilted up, mouth open, water pouring in. “You can . . . leave the mind . . . leave the body . . . go out . . . jaunt, jump permanently . . .”

  Spanning sniggered like a schoolyard bully.

  “You stayed in jail three years just to get me?”

  He smirked. Smarter than thou.

  “Three years? You think that’s some big deal to me? You don’t think I could have someone like you running around, do you? Someone who can ‘jaunt’ as I do? The only other shrike I’ve ever encountered. You think I wouldn’t sit in here and wait for you to come to me?”

  “But three years . . .”

  “You’re what, Rudy . . . thirty-one, is it? Yes, I can see that. Thirty-one. You’ve never jumped like a shrike. You’ve just entered, jaunted, gone into the landscapes, and never understood that it’s more than reading minds. You can change domiciles, black boy. You can move out of a house in a bad neighbourhood – such as strapped into the electric chair – and take up residence in a brand, spanking, new housing complex of million-and-a-half-buck condos, like Ally.”

  “But you have to have a place for the other one to go, don’t you?” I said it just flat, no tone, no colour to it at all. I didn’t even think of the place of dark, where you can go . . .

  “Who do you think I am, Rudy? Just who the hell do you think I was when I started, when I learned to shrike, how to jaunt, what I’m telling you now about changing residences? You wouldn’t know my first address. I go a long way back.

  “But I can give you a few of my more famous addresses. Gilles de Rais, France, 1440; Vlad Tepes, Romania, 1462; Elizabeth Bathory, Hungary, 1611; Catherine DeShayes, France, 1680; Jack the Ripper, London, 1888; Henri Désiré Landru, France, 1915; Albert Fish, New York City, 1934; Ed Gein, Plainfield, Wisconsin, 1954; Myra Hindley, Manchester, 1963; Albert DeSalvo, Boston, 1964; Charles Manson, Los Angeles, 1969; John Wayne Gacy, Norwood Park Township, Illinois, 1977.

  “Oh, but how I do go on. And on. And on and on and on, Rudy, my little porch monkey. That’s what I do. I go on. And on and on. Shrike will nest where it chooses. If not in your beloved Allison Roche, then in the cheesy fucked-up black boy, Rudy Pairis. But don’t you think that’s a waste, kiddo? Spending however much time I might have to spend in your socially unacceptable body, when Henry Lake Spanning is such a handsome devil? Why should I have just switched with you when Ally lured you to me, because all it would’ve done is get you screeching and howling that you weren’t Spanning, you were this nigger son who’d had his head stolen . . . and then you might have manipulated some guards or the Warden . . .

  “Well, you see what I mean, don’t you?

  “But now that the mask is securely in place, and now that the electrodes are attached to your head and your left leg, and now that the Warden has his hand on the switch, well, you’d better get ready to do a lot of drooling.”

  And he turned around to jaunt back out of me, and I closed the perimeter. He tried to jaunt, tried to leap back to his own mind, but I had him in a fist. Just that easy. Materialized a fist, and turned him to face me.

  “Fuck you, Jack the Ripper. And fuck you twice, Bluebeard. And on and on and on fuck you Manson and Boston Strangler and any other dipshit warped piece of sick crap you been in your years. You sure got some muddy-shoes credentials there, boy.

  “What I care about all those names, Spanky my brother? You really think I don’t know those names? I’m an educated fellah, Mistuh Rippuh, Mistuh Mad Bomber. You missed a few. Were you also, did you inhabit, hast thou possessed Winnie Ruth Judd and Charlie Starkweather and Mad Dog Coll and Richard Speck and Sirhan Sirhan and Jeffrey Dahmer? You the boogieman responsible for every bad number the human race ever played? You ruin Sodom and Gomorrah, burned the Great Library of Alexandria, orchestrated the Reign of Terror dans Paree, set up the Inquisition, stoned and drowned the Salem witches, slaughtered unarmed women and kids at Wounded Knee, bumped off John Kennedy?

  “I don’t think so.

  “I don’t even think you got so close as to share a pint with Jack the Ripper. And even if you did, even if you were all those maniacs, you were small potatoes, Spanky. The least of us human beings outdoes you, three times a day. How many lynch ropes you pulled tight, M’sieur Landru?

  “What colossal egotism you got, makes you blind, makes you think you’re the only one, even when you find out there’s someone else, you can’t get past it. What makes you think I didn’t know what you can do? What makes you think I didn’t let you do it, and sit here waiting for you like you sat there waiting for me, till this moment when you can’t do shit about it?

  “You so goddam stuck on yourself, Spankyhead, you never give it the barest that someone else is a faster draw than you.

  “Know what your trouble is, Captain? You’re old, you’re real old, maybe hundreds of years who gives a damn old. That don’t count for shit, old man. You’re old, but you never got smart. You’re just mediocre at what you do.

  “You moved from address to address. You didn’t have to be Son of Sam or Cain slayin’ Abel, or whoever the fuck you been . . . you could’ve been Moses or Galileo or George Washington Carver or Harriet Tubman or Sojourner Truth or Mark Twain or Joe Louis. You could’ve been Alexander Hamilton and helped found the Manumission Society in New York. You could’ve discovered radium, carved Mount Rushmore, carried a baby out of a burning building. But you got old real fast, and you never got any smarter. You didn’t need to, did you, Spanky? You had it all to yourself, all this ‘shrike’ shit, just jaunt here and jaunt there, and bite off someone’s hand or face like the old, tired, boring, repetitious, no-imagination stupid shit that you are.

  “Yeah, you got me good when I came here to see your landscape. You got Ally wired up good. And she suckered me in, probably not even knowing she was doing it . . . you must’ve looked in her head and found just the right technique to get her to make me come within reach. Good, m’man; you were excellent. But I had a year to torture myself. A year to sit here and think about it. About how many people I’d killed, and how sick it made me, and little by little I found my way through it.

  “Because . . . and here’s the big difference ’tween us, dummy:

  “I unravelled what was going on . . . it took time, but I learned. Understand, asshole? I learn! You don’t.

  “There’s an old Japanese saying – I got lots of these, Henry m’man – I read a whole lot – and what it says is, ‘Do not fall into the error of the artisan who boasts of twenty years experience in his craft while in fact he has had only one year of experience – twenty times’.” Then I grinned back at him.

  “Fuck you, sucker,” I said, just as the Warden threw the switch and I jaunted out of there and into the landscape and mind of Henry Lake Spanning.

  I sat there getting oriented for a second; it was the first time I’d done more than a jaunt . . . this was . . . shrike; but then Ally beside me gave a little sob for her old pal, Rudy Pairis, who was
baking like a Maine lobster, smoke coming out from under the black cloth that covered my, his, face; and I heard the vestigial scream of what had been Henry Lake Spanning and thousands of other monsters, all of them burning, out there on the far horizon of my new landscape; and I put my arm around her, and drew her close, and put my face into her shoulder and hugged her to me; and I heard the scream go on and on for the longest time, I think it was a long time, and finally it was just wind . . . and then gone . . . and I came up from Ally’s shoulder, and I could barely speak.

  “Shhh, honey, it’s okay,” I murmured. “He’s gone where he can make right for his mistakes. No pain. Quiet, a real quiet place; and all alone forever. And cool there. And dark.”

  I was ready to stop failing at everything, and blaming everything. Having fessed up to love, having decided it was time to grow up and be an adult – not just a very quick study who learned fast, extremely fast, a lot faster than anybody could imagine an orphan like me could learn, than anybody could imagine – I hugged her with the intention that Henry Lake Spanning would love Allison Roche more powerfully, more responsibly, than anyone had ever loved anyone in the history of the world. I was ready to stop failing at everything.

  And it would be just a whole lot easier as a white boy with great big blue eyes.

  Because – get on this now – all my wasted years didn’t have as much to do with blackness or racism or being overqualified or being unlucky or being high-verbal or even the curse of my “gift” of jaunting, as they did with one single truth I learned waiting in there, inside my own landscape, waiting for Spanning to come and gloat:

  I have always been one of those miserable guys who couldn’t get out of his own way.

  Which meant I could, at last, stop feeling sorry for that poor nigger, Rudy Pairis. Except, maybe, in a moment of human weakness.

  This story, for Bob Bloch, because I promised.

  1994

  The Temptation of Dr Stein

  Paul J. McAuley

  AS A TRIBUTE TO RAMSEY’S inestimable contribution to the series, for the 1994 edition I asked Luis Rey to add a little joke into his atmospheric cover painting.

  At a launch party (those were the days!) for the book at the annual British Fantasy Convention, the publisher recreated the cover as, literally, the icing on the cake.

  The sixth edition of The Best New Horror won the International Horror Guild Award and was the first of two volumes to appear under the Raven Books imprint in the UK. This was a new genre list that I launched and edited for Robinson for a couple of years, until I was reluctantly forced to come to the conclusion that it was not worth all the hard work.

  For my first volume as solo editor, the Introduction grew to thirty-one pages and the Necrology was now up to eighteen. In my editorial I warned against the law of diminishing returns as the genre was swamped with “ . . . sequels, inferior copies, share-cropped worlds, media novelizations and role-playing tie-ins, most of them written and published with little or no thought given to their intrinsic value of lasting worth.”

  It was advice that the authors and publishers of many so-called “paranormal romances” would do well to heed today . . .

  The twenty-two contributions included the welcome return of Ellison and Lamsley, along with such “regulars” as Charles L. Grant, Joel Lane, Ramsey Campbell, Nicholas Royle, Michael Marshall Smith and Kim Newman (with a marvellous contemporary re-imagining of the Zorro mythology that was nominated for a World Fantasy Award).

  Esther M. Friesner contributed the only verse we have run in the series so far, but this sixth compilation was also touched with personal sadness.

  Also in this edition were stories by two old friends – Karl Edward Wagner’s hallucinatory “In the Middle of a Snow Dream” and Robert Bloch’s Bram Stoker Award-winning “The Scent of Vinegar”. Both authors had died within a month of each other the previous year, and the book was dedicated to their memory.

  Paul J. McAuley is another old friend and also one of the UK’s most respected science fiction writers. His British Fantasy Award-winning “The Temptation of Dr Stein” may have been set in the same alternate history as his novel Pasquale’s Angel, but it involved a certain mad scientist memorably portrayed by eccentric English actor Ernest Thesiger in James Whale’s classic movie Bride of Frankenstein.

  In fact, Paul returned to the character with “The True History of Doctor Pretorius”, which I selected for the following year’s Best New Horror, and “Dr Pretorius and the Lost Temple”, which appeared in Volume Fourteen.

  DR STEIN PRIDED HIMSELF on being a rational man. When, in the months following his arrival in Venice, it became his habit to spend his free time wandering the city, he could not admit that it was because he believed that his daughter might still live, and that he might see her amongst the cosmopolitan throng. For he harboured the small, secret hope that when Landsknechts had pillaged the houses of the Jews of Lodz, perhaps his daughter had not been carried off to be despoiled and murdered, but had instead been forced to become a servant of some Prussian family. It was no more impossible that she had been brought here, for the Council of Ten had hired many Landsknechts to defend the city and the terraferma hinterlands of its empire.

  Dr Stein’s wife would no longer talk to him about it. Indeed, they hardly talked about anything these days. She had pleaded that the memory of their daughter should be laid to rest in a week of mourning, just as if they had interred her body. They were living in rooms rented from a cousin of Dr Stein’s wife, a banker called Abraham Soncino, and Dr Stein was convinced that she had been put up to this by the women of Soncino’s family. Who knew what the women talked about when locked in the bathhouse overnight, while they were being purified of their menses? No good, Dr Stein was certain. Even Soncino, a genial, uxorious man, had urged that Dr Stein mourn his daughter. Soncino had said that his family would bring the requisite food to begin the mourning; after a week all the community would commiserate with Dr Stein and his wife before the main Sabbath service, and with God’s help this terrible wound would be healed. It had taken all of Dr Stein’s powers to refuse this generous offer courteously. Soncino was a good man, but this was none of his business.

  As winter came on, driven out by his wife’s silent recriminations, or so he told himself, Dr Stein walked the crowded streets almost every afternoon. Sometimes he was accompanied by an English captain of the Night Guard, Henry Gorrall, to whom Dr Stein had become an unofficial assistant, helping identify the cause of death of one or another of the bodies found floating in the backwaters of the city.

  There had been more murders than usual that summer, and several well-bred young women had disappeared. Dr Stein had been urged to help Gorrall by the Elders of the Beth Din; already there were rumours that the Jews were murdering Christian virgins and using their blood to animate a Golem. It was good that a Jew – moreover, a Jew who worked at the city hospital, and taught new surgical techniques at the school of medicine – was involved in attempting to solve this mystery.

  Besides, Dr Stein enjoyed Gorrall’s company. He was sympathetic to Gorrall’s belief that everything, no matter how unlikely, had at base a rational explanation. Gorrall was a humanist, and did not mind being seen in the company of a man who must wear a yellow star on his coat. On their walks through the city, they often talked on the new philosophies of nature compounded in the University of Florence’s Great Engineer, Leonardo da Vinci, quite oblivious to the brawling bustle all around them.

  Ships from twenty nations crowded the quay in the long shadow of the Campanile, and their sailors washed through the streets. Hawkers cried their wares from flotillas of small boats that rocked on the wakes of barges or galleys. Gondoliers shouted vivid curses as skiffs crossing from one side of the Grand Canal to the other got in the way of their long, swift craft. Sometimes a screw-driven Florentine ship made its way up the Grand Canal, its Hero’s engine laying a trail of black smoke, and everyone stopped to watch this marvel. Bankers in fur coats and tall felt hats
conducted the business of the world in the piazza before San Giacometto, amid the rattle of the new clockwork abacuses and the subdued murmur of transactions.

  Gorrall, a bluff muscular man with a bristling black beard and a habit of spitting sideways and often, because of the plug of tobacco he habitually chewed, seemed to know most of the bankers by name, and the most of the merchants, too – the silk and cloth-of-gold mercers and sellers of fustian and velvet along the Mercerie, the druggists, goldsmiths and silversmiths, the makers of white wax, the ironmongers, coopers and perfumers who had stalls and shops in the crowded little streets off the Rialto. He knew the names of many of the yellow-scarved prostitutes, too, although Dr Stein wasn’t surprised at this, since he had first met Gorrall when the captain had come to the hospital for mercury treatment of his syphilis. Gorrall even knew, or pretended to know, the names of the cats that stalked between the feet of the crowds or lazed on cold stone in the brittle winter sunshine, the true rulers of Venice.

  It was outside the cabinet of one of the perfumers of the Mercerie that Dr Stein for a moment thought he saw his daughter. A grey-haired man was standing in the doorway of the shop, shouting at a younger man who was backing away and protesting that there was no blame that could be fixed to his name.

  “You are his friend!”

  “Sir, I did not know what it was he wrote, and I do not know and I do not care why your daughter cries so!”

  The young man had his hand on his long knife, and Gorrall pushed through the gathering crowd and told both men to calm down. The wronged father dashed inside and came out again, dragging a girl of about fourteen, with the same long black hair, the same white, high forehead, as Dr Stein’s daughter.

  “Hannah,” Dr Stein said helplessly, but then she turned, and it was not her. Not his daughter. The girl was crying, and clasped a sheet of paper to her bosom – wronged by a suitor, Dr Stein supposed, and Gorrall said that it was precisely that. The young man had run off to sea, something so common these days that the Council of Ten had decreed that convicted criminals might be used on the galleys of the navy because of the shortage of free oarsmen. Soon the whole city might be scattered between Corfu and Crete, or even further, now that Florence had destroyed the fleet of Cortés, and opened the American shore.