The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

by Stephen Jones (ed. )

  “Jesus . . .” he said.

  “Not Jesus. Neither Heaven nor Hell. Not God. Not Buddha, not Allah, not Yahweh. Nothing. That’s what waits on the other side of that headstone. No pie in the sky by and by when you die. No Nirvana. No Valhalla. No Tetragrammaton. No Zeus or Jove or any of their buddies. Nothing. Maybe that’s why we’re coming back – there’s nothing out there, beyond. Zero. Not even an echo. So kiss me again. I’ve been cold and I’ve been still, and I need to make love to you. Making love; that sounds like we’re manufacturing something, doesn’t it? Feel my hand. There’s living blood in there. Feel my heart; it’s pumping again. I’ve felt bad things moving around inside of me. That happens when you’re well and truly dead. Now I’m back. And I want to feel other things moving around inside of me. You.”

  Tomorrow, Doug would get fired as a no-show after only one day on the job. Craignotti would replace him with some guy named Dormand R. Stowe, rumored to be a loving husband and a caring father.

  One of the most famous foreign pistols used during the Civil War was the Le Mat Revolver, a cap and ball weapon developed by a French-born New Orleans doctor, unique in that it had two barrels – a cylinder which held nine .40 caliber rounds fired through the upper barrel, and revolved around the lower, .63 caliber barrel, which held a charge of 18 or 20-gauge buckshot. With a flick of the thumb, the shooter could realign the hammer to fall on the lower barrel, which was essentially a small shotgun, extremely deadly at close range, with a kick like an enraged mule. General J. E. B. Stuart had carried one. So had General P. G. T. Beauregard. As an antique firearm, such guns in good condition were highly prized. Conroy Gudgell cherished his; it was one of the stars of his modest home arsenal, which he always referred to as his “collection”. His big mistake was showing his wife how to care for it. How to clean it. How to load it. How to fire it, you know, “just in case”. No one was more surprised than Conroy when his loving wife, a respected first-grade teacher in Triple Pines, blew him straight down to Hell with his own collectible antique.

  Ellen Gudgell became a widow at sixty-one years of age. She also became a Wiccan. She was naked, or “sky-clad”, when she burned the braided horsehair whip in her fireplace after murdering Conroy. Firing the Le Mat had broken her right wrist; she’d had to make up a story about that. With her left hand she had poured herself a nice brandy, before working herself up into enough lather to phone the police, in tears, while most of Conroy’s head and brains were cooling in various corners of his basement workshop. A terrible accident, oh my lord, it’s horrible, please come. She kept all the stuff about Earth Mother religious revelations to herself.

  She treated Constable Dickey (Triple Pines’ head honcho of law enforcement) as she would one of her elementary school charges. Firm but fair. Matronly, but with just the right salting of manufactured hysteria. Conroy had been working with his gun collection in the basement when she heard a loud boom, she told the officer. She panicked and broke her wrist trying to move what was left of him, and now she did not know what to do, and she needed help.

  And the local cops had quite neatly taken care of all the rest. Ellen never had to mention the beatings she had suffered under the now-incinerated whip, or that the last fifteen years of their sex life had consisted mostly of rape. When not teaching school, she used her free time – that is, her time free of Conroy’s oppression – to study up on alternate philosophies, and when she found one that made sense to her, it wasn’t long before she decided to assert her new self.

  After that, the possibilities seemed endless. She felt as though she had shed a chrysalis and evolved to a form which made her happier with herself.

  Therefore, no one was more surprised than Ellen when her husband Conroy thumped up the stairs, sundered head and all, to come a-calling more than a year after she thought she had definitively killed the rotten sonofabitch. His face looked exactly as it had when Coggins, the undertaker, had puttied and waxed it back into a semblance of human, dark sub-dermal lines inscribing puzzle pieces in rough assembly. The parts did not move in correct concert when Conroy spoke to her, however. His face was disjointed and broken, his eyes, oddly fixed.

  “Time for some loving,” is what Conroy said to her first.

  Ellen ran for the gun cabinet, downstairs.

  “Already thought of that,” said Conroy, holding up the Le Mat.

  He did not shoot her in the head.

  Despite the fact that Lee Beecher’s death had been inadvertent, one of those Act of God things, Constable Lon Dickey had always felt responsible. Lee had been a hometown boy, Dickey had liked him, and made him his deputy; ergo, Lee had been acting as a representative of the law on Dickey’s behalf, moving a dead deer out of the middle of the road during a storm. Some local asshole had piled into the animal and left it for dead, which constituted Triple Pines’ only known form of hit and run. If you’d had to guess the rest of the story, Dickey thought, you’d say and another speeding nitwit had hit Lee. Nope. Struck by lightning, for christ’s sake. Hit by a thunderbolt out of the ozone and killed deader than snakeshit on the spot, fried from the inside out, cooked and discarded out near the lumber yard which employed about a quarter of Triple Pines’ blue-collar workforce.

  Lee had been buried in his uniform. A go-getter, that kid. Good footballer. Instead of leaving Triple Pines in his rearward dust, as so many youngsters ached to do, Lee had stuck close to home, and enthusiastically sought his badge. It was worth it to him to be called an “officer”, like Dickey. Death in Triple Pines was nearly always accidental, or predictable – no mystery. This was not the place where murderers or psychos lived. In this neck of the woods, the worst an officer might have to face would be the usual rowdiness – teenagers, or drunks, or drunk teenagers – and the edict to act all authoritative if there was a fire or flood or something naturally disastrous.

  Beecher’s replacement was a guy named James Trainor, shit-hot out of the academy in Seattle and fulminating to enforce. Too stormtrooper for Triple Pines; too ready to pull his sidearm for a traffic stop. Dickey still had not warmed up to him, smelling the moral pollution of citified paranoia.

  Feeling like a lazy lion surveying his domain, Dickey had sauntered the two blocks back to the station from the Ready-Set Dinette, following feeling his usual cheeseburger late-lunch. (The food at Callahan’s, a block further, was awful – the burgers as palatable as pucks sliced off a Duraflame log.) Time to trade some banter with RaeAnn, who ran the police station’s desk, phones and radios. RaeAnn was a stocky chunk of bottle-blonde business with multiple chins and an underbite, whose choice of corrective eyewear did not de-emphasise her Jimmy Durante nose. In no way was RaeAnn a temptation, and Dickey preferred that. Strictly business. RaeAnn was fast, efficient, and did not bring her problems to work. Right now she was leaning back at her station with her mouth wide open, which seemed strange. She resembled a gross caricature of one of those mail-order blowjob dolls.

  Before he could ask what the hell, Dickey saw the bullet hole in the center of her forehead. Oh.

  “Sorry I’m a little bit late, Chief,” said Lee Beecher. He had grave dirt all over his moldy uniform, and his face was the same flash-fried nightmare that had caused Coggins to recommend a closed-casket service. Beecher had always called Dickey “Chief”.

  Deputy Trainor was sprawled behind Dickey’s desk, his cap over his eyes, his tongue sticking out, and a circlet of five .357 caliber holes in his chest. Bloodsmear on the bulletin board illustrated how gracelessly he had fallen, hit so hard one of his boots had flown off. The late Lee Beecher had been reloading his revolver when Dickey walked in.

  “I had to shoot RaeAnn, she was making too much bother,” said Beecher. His voice was off, dry and croaky, buzzing like a reed.

  Dickey tried to contain his slow awe by muttering the names of assorted deities. His hand wanted to feel the comfort of his own gun.

  “How come you replaced me, Chief?” said the late Lee Beecher. “Man, I didn’t quit or nothing. You repl
aced me with some city boy. That wasn’t our deal. I thought you liked me.”

  “I—” Dickey stammered. “Lee, I . . .” He just could not force out words. This was too wrong.

  “You just put me in the dirt.” The late Lee Beecher shook his charred skull with something akin to sadness. He snapped home the cylinder on his pistol, bringing the hammer back to full cock in the same smooth move. “Now I’m gonna have to return the favor. Sorry, Chief.”

  Constable Dickey was still trying to form a whole sentence when the late Lee Beecher gave him all six rounds. Up at RaeAnn’s desk, the radio crackled and the switchboard lit up with an influx of weird emergency calls, but there was no one to pay any attention, or care.

  Doug’s current home barely fit the definition. It had no more character than a British row flat or a post-war saltbox. It was one of the basic, ticky-tacky clapboard units thrown up by the Triple Pines aluminum plant back when they sponsored company housing, and abandoned to fall apart on its own across slow years once the plant folded. It had a roof and indoor plumbing, which was all Doug had ever required of a residence, because addresses were disposable. It had storm shutters and a rudimentary version of heat, against rain and winter, but remained drafty. Its interior walls were bare and still the same vague green Doug had always associated with academia. The bedroom was sort of blue, in the same mood.

  He regretted his cheap sheets, his second-hand bed, his milk-crate nightstand. He had strewn some candles around to soften the light, and fired up a portable, radiant oil heater. The heat and the light diffused the stark seediness of the room, just enough. They softened the harsh edges of reality.

  There had been no seduction, no ritual libations, no teasing or flirting. Michelle had taken him the way the Allies took Normandy, and it was all he could muster to keep from gasping. His pelvis felt hammered and his legs seemed numb and far away. She was alive, with the warm, randy needs of the living, and she had plundered him with a greed that cleansed them both of any lingering recriminations.

  No grave rot, no mummy dust. Was it still necrophilia when the dead person moved and talked back to you?

  “I have another blanket,” he said. His left leg was draped over her as their sweat cooled. He watched candle-shadows dance on the ceiling, making monster shapes.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Really.”

  They bathed. Small bathtub, lime-encrusted shower head. It permitted Doug to refamiliarise himself with the geometry of her body, from a perspective different than that of the bedroom. He felt he could never see or touch enough of her; it was a fascination for him.

  There was nothing to eat in the kitchen, and simply clicking on the TV seemed faintly ridiculous. They slept, wrapped up in each other. The circumstance was still too fragile to detour into lengthy, dissipate conversations about need, so they slept, and in sleeping, found a fundamental innocence that was already beyond logic – a feeling thing. It seemed right and correct.

  Doug awoke, his feet and fingertips frigid, in the predawn. He added his second blanket and snuggled back into Michelle. She slept with a nearly beatific expression, her breath – real, living – coming in slow tidal measures.

  The next afternoon Doug sortied to the market to stock up on some basics and find some decent food that could be prepared in his minimal kitchen. In the market, he encountered Joe Hopkins, from the digging crew. Doug tried unsuccessfully to duck him. He wanted to do nothing to break the spell he was under.

  But Joe wanted to talk, and cornered him. He was holding a fifth of bourbon like he intended to make serious use of it, in due course.

  “There was apparently a lot of activity in the cemetery last night,” he said, working his toothpick from one corner of his mouth to the other. Both ends were wet and frayed. “I mean, after we left. We went back this morning, things were moved around. Some graves were disrupted. Some were partially refilled. It was a mess, like a storm had tossed everything. We had to spend two hours just to get back around to where we left off.”

  “You mean, like vandalism?” said Doug.

  “Not exactly.” Joe had another habit, that of continually smoothing his upper lip with his thumb and forefinger, as though to keep his moustache in line when he wasn’t looking. To Doug, it signaled nervousness, agitation, and Joe was too brawny to be agitated about much for very long. “I tried to figure it, you know – what alla sudden makes the place not creepy, but threatening in a way it wasn’t, yesterday. It’s the feeling you’d have if you put on your clothes and alla sudden thought that, hey, somebody else has been wearing my clothes, right?”

  Doug thought of what Michelle had said, about the dead hearing every footfall of the living above them.

  “What I’m saying is, I don’t blame you for quitting. After today, I’m thinking the same thing. Every instinct I have tells me to just jump on my bike and ride the fuck out of here as fast as I can go. And, something else? Jacky says he ran into a guy last night, a guy he went to high school with. They were on the football team together. Jacky says the guy died four years ago in a Jeep accident. But the he saw him, last night, right outside the bar after you left. Not a ghost. He wasn’t that drunk. Then, this morning, Craignotti says something equally weird: That he saw a guy at the diner, you know the Ready-Set? Guy was a dead ringer for Aldus Champion, you know the mayor who died in 2003 and got replaced by that asshole selectman, whatsisname—?”

  “Brad Ballinger,” said Doug.

  “Yeah. I been here long enough to remember that. But here’s the thing: Craignotti checked, and today Ballinger was nowhere to be found, and he ain’t on vacation or nothing. And Ballinger is in bed with Coggins, the undertaker, somehow. Notice how that whole Marlboro Reservoir thing went into a coma when Champion was mayor? For a minute I thought Ballinger had, you know, had him whacked or something. But now Champion’s back in town – a guy Craignotti swears isn’t a lookalike, but the guy. So now I think there was some heavy-duty money changing hands under a lot of tables, and the reservoir is a go, except nobody is supposed to talk about it, and now we’re out there, digging up the whole history of Triple Pines as a result.”

  “What does this all come to?” Doug really wanted to get back to Michelle. She might evaporate or something if left alone too long.

  “I don’t know, that’s the fucked up thing.” Joe tried to shove his busy hands into his vest pockets, then gave up. “I’m not smart enough to figure it out, whatever it is . . . so I give it to you, see if any lightbulbs come on. I’ll tell you one thing. This afternoon I felt scared, and I ain’t felt that way since I was paddy humping.”

  “We’re both outsiders, here,” said Doug.

  “Everybody on the dig posse in an outsider, man. Check that out.”

  “Not Jacky.”

  “Jacky don’t pose any threat because he don’t know any better. And even him, he’s having fucking hallucinations about his old school buddies. Listen: I ain’t got a phone at my place, but I got a mobile. Do me a favor – I mean, I know we don’t know each other that well – but if you figure something out, give me a holler?”

  “No problem.” They traded phone numbers and Joe hurried to pay for his evening’s sedation. As he went, he said, “Watch your ass, cowboy.”

  “You, too.”

  Doug and Michelle cooked collaboratively. They made love. They watched a movie together both had seen separately. They made more love. They watched the evening sky for several hours until chilly rain began to sheet down from above, then they repaired inside and continued to make love. The Peyton Place antics of the rest of the Triple Pines community, light years away from their safe, centered union, could not have mattered less.

  The trick, as near as Billy Morrison could wrassle it, was to find somebody and pitch them into your hole as soon as you woke up. Came back. Revived. Whatever.

  So he finished fucking Vanessa Billings. “Bill-ing” her, as his cohort Vance Thompson would crack, heh. Billy had stopped “billing” high school chicks three years ago, wh
en he died. Now he was billing a Billings, wotta riot.

  Billy, Vance, and Donna Christiansen had perished inside of Billy’s Boss 302 rebuild, to the tune of Black Sabbath’s “Mob Rules” on CD. The car was about half grey primer and fender-fill, on its way back to glory. The CD was a compilation of metal moldies. No one ever figured out how the car had crashed, up near a trailer suburbia known as Rimrock, and no one in authority gave much of a turd, since Billy and his fellow losers hailed from “that side” of town, rubbing shoulders an open-fire garbage dump, an auto wrecking yard, and (although Constable Dickey did not know it) a clandestine crack lab. The last sensation Billy experienced as a living human was the car sitting down hard on its left front as the wheel flew completely off. The speed was ticketable and the road, wet as usual, slick as mayonnaise. The car flipped and tumbled down an embankment. Billy dimly recalled seeing Donna snap in half and fly through the windshield before the steering column punched into his chest. The full tank ruptured and spewed a meandering piss-line of gasoline all the way down the hill. Vance’s cigarette had probably touched it off, and the whole trash-compacted mess had burned for an hour before new rain finally doused it and a lumber yard worker spotted the smoke.

  Their plan for the evening had been to destroy a bottle of vodka in the woods, then Billy and Vance would do Donna from both ends. Donna dug that sort of thing when she was sufficiently wasted. When they awoke several years later in their unearthed boxes, they renewed their pleasure as soon as they could scare up some more liquor. They wandered into a roadside outlet known as the 1-Stop Brew Shoppe and Vance broke bottles over the head of the proprietor until the guy stopping breathing. Then Donna lit out for the Yard, a quadrangle of trees and picnic benches near most of the churches in town. The Yard was Triple Pines’ preferred salon for dropouts fond of cannabis, and Donna felt certain she could locate an old beau or two lingering among the waistoids there. Besides, she could bend in interesting new ways, now.