The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

by Stephen Jones (ed. )

  Billy had sought and duly targeted Vanessa Billings, one of those booster/cheerleader bitches who would never have anything to do with his like. She had graduated in ’02 and was still – still! – living in her parents’ house. It was a kick to see her jaw gape in astonishment at the sight of him. Omigod, you like died! It was even more of a kick to hold her by the throat and fuck her until she croaked, the stuck-up little cuntling. Getting Vanessa out of her parents’ house caused a bit of ruckus, so Billy killed them, too.

  Ultimately, the trio racked up so many new corpses to fill their vacant graves they needed to steal a pickup truck to ferry them all back to Hollymount. Their victims would all be back soon enough, and the fun could begin again.

  None of them had a precise cognition of what they needed to do. It was more along the lines of an ingrained need – like a craving – to take the heat of the living to avoid reverting to the coldness of death. That, and the idea of refreshing their grave plots with new bodies. Billy had always had more cunning than intelligence, but the imperatives were not that daunting. Stupid dogs learned tricks in less time.

  Best of all, after he finished billing Billings, Billy found he still had a boner. Death was apparently better than Viagra; he had an all-night hard-on. And since the night was still a toddler, he began to hunt for other chicks he could bill.

  The sun came up. The sun went down. Billy thought of that rhyme about how the worms play pinochle on your snout. Fucking worms. How about the worms eat your asshole inside-out. For starters. Billy had been one super-sized organ smorgasbord, and had suffered every delicious bite. Now a whole fuckload of Triple Pines’ good, upstanding citizens were going to pay, pay, pay.

  As day and night blended and passed, Triple Pines continued to mutate.

  Over at the Ready-Set Dinette, a pink neon sign continued to blink the word EAT, just as it had before things changed in Triple Pines.

  Deputy Lee Beecher (the late) and RaeAnn (also the late) came in for lunch as usual. The next day, Constable Dickey (recently deceased) and the new deputy, James Trainor (ditto), joined them.

  Vanessa Billings became Billy Morrison’s main squeeze, and what with Vance and Donna’s hangers-on, they had enough to form a new kind of gang. In the next few days, they would start breaking windows and setting fires.

  Over at Callahan’s, Craignotti continued to find fresh meat for the digging crew as the original members dropped out. Miguel Ayala had lasted three days before he claimed to have snagged a better job. Big Boyd Cooper stuck – he was a rationalist at heart, not predisposed to superstitious fears or anything else in the path of Getting the Job Done. Jacky Tynan had apparently taken sick.

  Joe had packed his saddlebags and gunned his panhead straight out of town, without calling Doug, or anyone.

  In the Gudgell household, every day, a pattern commenced. In the morning, Conroy Gudgell would horsewhip his treacherous wife’s naked ass, and in the evening, Ellen Gudgell would murder her husband, again and again, over and over. The blood drenching the inside of their house was not ectoplasm. It continued to accrete, layer upon layer, as one day passed into another.

  In the middle of the night, Doug felt askew on the inside, and made the mistake of taking his own temperature with a thermometer.

  Eighty-seven point-five degrees.

  “Yeah, you’ll run a little cold,” said Michelle, from behind him. “I’m sorry about that. It’s sort of a downside. Or maybe you caught something. Do you feel sick?”

  “No, I—” Doug faltered. “I just feel shagged. Weak.”

  “You’re not a weak man.”

  “Stop it.” He turned, confrontational. He did not want to do anything to alienate her. But. “This is serious. What if I start losing core heat? Four or five degrees is all it takes, then I’m as dead as a Healthy Choice entrée. What the hell is happening, Michelle? What haven’t you told me?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. Her eyes brightened with tears. “I’m not sure. I didn’t come back with a goddamned manual. I’m afraid that if I go ahead and do the next thing, the thing I feel I’m supposed to do . . . that I’ll lose you.”

  Panic cinched his heart. “What’s the next thing?!”

  “I was avoiding it. I was afraid to bring it up. Maybe I was enjoying this too much, what we have right now, in this isolated bubble of time.”

  He held her. She wanted to reject simple comfort, but succumbed. “Just . . . tell me. Say it, whatever it is. Then it’s out in the world and we can deal with it.”

  “It’s about Rochelle.”

  Doug nodded, having prepared for this one. “You miss her. I know. But we can’t do anything about it. There’d be no way to explain it.”

  “I want her back.” Michelle’s head was down, the tears coursing freely now.

  “I know, baby, I know . . . I miss her, too. I wanted you guys to move in with me. Both of you. From here we could move anywhere, so long as it’s out of this deathtrap of a town. Neither of us likes it here very much. I figured, in the course of time—”

  She slumped on the bed, hands worrying each other atop her bare legs. “It was my dream, through all those hours, days, that things had happened differently, and we had hooked up, and we all got to escape. It would be great if you were just a means to an end; you know – just another male guy-person, to manipulate. Great if I didn’t care about you; great if I didn’t actually love you.”

  “I had to explain your death to Rochelle. There’s no going back from that one. Look at it this way: she’s with your mother, and she seemed like a nice lady.”

  When her gaze came up to meet his, her eyes were livid. “You don’t know anything,” she said, the words constricted and bitter. “Sweet, kindly old Grandma Farrier? She’s a fucking sadist who has probably shot pornos with Rochelle by now.”

  “What?!” Doug’s jaw unhinged.

  “She is one sick piece of shit, and her mission was always to get Rochelle away from me, into her clutches. I ran away from home as soon as I could. And when I had Rochelle, I swore that bitch would never get her claws on my daughter. And you just . . . handed her over.”

  “Now, wait a minute, Michelle . . .”

  She overrode him. “No – it’s not your fault. She always presented one face to the world. Her fake face. Her human masque. Inside the family with the doors closed, it was different. You saw the masque. You dealt with the masque. So did Rochelle. Until Grandma could actually strap the collar on, she had to play it sneaky. Her real face is from a monster who needed to be inside a grave decades ago. I should know – she broke me in with a heated glass dildo when I was nine.”

  “Holy shit. Michelle, why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  “Which ‘before?’ Before now? Or before I died? Doug, I died not knowing you were as good as you are. I thought I could never make love to anybody, ever again. I concentrated on moving from place to place to keep Rochelle off the radar.”

  Doug toweled his hands, which were awash in nervous perspiration, yet irritatingly cold. Almost insensate. He needed to assauge her terror, to fix the problem, however improbable; like Boyd Cooper, to Get the Job Done. “Okay. Fine. I’ll just go get her back. We’ll figure something out.”

  “I can’t ask you to do that.”

  “Better yet, how about we both go get her? Seeing you ought to make Grandma’s brain hit the floor.”

  “That’s the problem, Doug. It’s been the problem all along. I can’t leave here. None of us can. If we do . . . if any of us goes outside of Triple Pines . . .”

  “You don’t mean ‘us’ as in you-and-me. You’re talking about us as in the former occupants of Hollymount Cemetery, right?”

  She nodded, more tears spilling. “I need you to fuck me. And I need you to love me. And I was hoping that you could love me enough so that I didn’t have to force you to take my place in that hole in the ground, like all the rest of the goddamned losers and dim bulbs and fly-over people in Triple Pines. I want you to go to San Francisco
, and get my daughter back. But if you stay here – if you go away and come back here – eventually I’ll use you up anyway. I’ve been taking your heat, Doug, a degree at a time. And eventually you would die, and then resurrect, and then you would be stuck here too. An outsider, stuck here. And no matter what anyone’s good intentions are, it would also happen to Rochelle. I can’t kill my little girl. And I can’t hurt you any more. It’s killing me, but – what a joke – I can’t die.” She looked up, her face a raw, aching map of despair. “You see?”

  Michelle had not been a local, either. But she had died here, and become a permanent resident in the Triple Pines boneyard. The population of the town was slowly shifting balance. The dead of Triple Pines were pushing out the living, seeking that stasis of small town stability where once again, everyone would be the same. What happened in Triple Pines had to stay in Triple Pines, and the Marlboro Reservoir was no boon to the community. It was going to service coastal cities; Doug knew this in his gut, now. In all ways, for all concerned, Triple Pines was the perfect place for this kind of thing to transpire, because the outside world would never notice, or never care.

  With one grating exception. Which suggested one frightening solution.

  Time to get out. Time to bail, now.

  “Don’t you see?” she said. “If you don’t get out now, you’ll never get out. Get out, Doug. Kiss me one last time and get out. Try to think of me fondly.”

  His heart smashed to pieces and burned to ashes, he kissed her. Her tears lingered on his lips, the utterly real taste of her. Without a word further, he made sure he had his wallet, got in his car, and drove. He could be in San Francisco in six hours, flat-out.

  He could retrieve Rochelle, kidnap her if that was what was required. He could bring her back here to die, and be reunited with her mother. Then he could die, too. But at least he would be with them, in the end. Or he could put it behind him, and just keep on driving.

  The further he got from Triple Pines, the warmer he felt.

  DON TUMASONIS

  Thrown

  FRESH FROM AN EVENING of overindulgence on the island of Anafi some years ago, Don Tumasonis awoke with a story in his head, and immediately wrote it down.

  Encouraged by fellow orgy survivors, to whom he shyly showed the fragment, he realised that honour, power, riches, fame, and the love of women were within his grasp. He acquired a Muse, as is recommended, having already been provided with that sine non qua of writers, a long-suffering wife. Two International Horror Guild awards, a film option and a Hawthornden Fellowship soon followed. He still awaits power and riches, but admits that three out of five is not too bad.

  His longish tale “The Swing” was recently published in the Ash-Tree Press anthology At Ease With the Dead, edited by Barbara and Christopher Roden. Other projects are in the works.

  “Once, I dreamed of becoming an anthropologist,” Tumasonis recalls. “I had, after all, got stinking drunk on cheap plonk with Sir Edmund Leach, so I thought myself eminently qualified. Fired with explorers’ tales, I fixated on northern Nepal. Months of struggle with Tibetan put paid to that fantasy and, suddenly more realistic, I settled for Crete.

  “Field work in the glorious mountains of Sfakia produced little of academic value. Penitent, I vowed to cross the Great Island by foot, east to west. As may now be suspected, even that last project was somehow thwarted short of completion. Not all was lost – the narrative of ‘Thrown’ draws largely on events that occurred during several legs of that journey.”

  IT WAS STRANGE COUNTRY, cast into tumult by disaster.

  Signs of this were everywhere, from the seaside city in the south where they first stayed, to the northern village from whence they would start their walk. Across the neck of the island, debris was visible all over, through the dusty windows of their ageing Mercedes bus, running late. The delay was a result of the massive flood of several days past, with traffic still detoured around the washed-out main highway bridge, to the old road a bit further inland.

  When Martin and Marline had first come to Crete two days after the deluge, quasi-urban Ierapetra was drying out from the rampageous torrent that had wrecked its streets and invaded buildings. The branch Agricultural Bank’s records and documents were spread out on sidewalks and streets, stones and bricks neatly pinning papers in place, the sun wrinkling and baking fibres. Nearby, a flower-filled Roman sarcophagus doubling as a sidewalk planter lent white Parian cachet to an adjacent telephone booth.

  Floods came often enough on this island of canyons and gorges, but this one had been a monster, by every local estimation. It was the usual chain of events. Heavy autumn rains washed broken trees and branches down a ravine, compacting with clay and gravel at a pinched slot, forming a natural dam. Before anyone even knew, or had time to react, millions of tons of water had built up, until the sudden giving way, and catastrophic release.

  A couple had been taken out to sea, drowned in their Volkswagen beetle. Excepting these, and one old woman at an isolated farm, there was no other loss of human life, amazing as that seemed in the aftermath.

  But the water, gaining speed, spewing like a jet from the mouth of the deep cleft above the cultivated plain, took all else living with as it ripped through the countryside, crashing to the sea in a few calamitous minutes.

  Some short hours after having checked into their room – the cheapest they could find, with a bare concrete floor, the two followed the lead of everyone else: they promenaded, taking in the chaos and damage, trying to assimilate the monstrous extent of the wreckage about them.

  Crowds of foreigners from the large tourist complex near the shore mingled with the local Greeks, walking east out of town. Hundreds, clumped together in their scores, their pairs, were heading along the beach, where the detritus of the flooding was spread. All were silent and stunned, even two days after, and talked, if at all, in hushed voices, in the descending light of the sun.

  Past the hotels, a new river channel had torn through the shore road, destroying it, and people waded across, past a parked bulldozer there for the clean-up. On the other side, all over the long broad beach, lay hundreds of animal corpses, wild and domestic. Lizards rotted promiscuously with goats. Pathetic lambs, wool matted and muddy, strewn broken amid snapped tree limbs. Snakes, and above all, chickens, were everywhere, half-buried in the sand. Let this their memorial be.

  Back at their rundown hotel room, the couple made love. Rattled by what they had seen, they drank to excess, and things ran wilder than usual between them, married ten years.

  Marline sat at an angle leaning forward, hands on Martin’s ankles, facing his feet, as he lay on his back, in the reverse cowgirl, pornographic industrial standard pose, provider of unobstructed views. They had started prone, two layers, both face up, with her on top. Disembodied hands stroked her, leaving her too open and exposed, as if naked in public with some unspeakable object inside. She slid upright and forward, into the unpremeditated position, a natural extension of the first, really, looking upward as she rocked.

  A single red light bulb, forming the sole illumination, bare, dangled on its brown plastic wire from the ceiling, casting a garish glow throughout the room. The double shutters were closed, and the chamber, already damp from their showering, became even more so, heating up.

  The entire tawdriness of the situation inspired Marline to a totally uncharacteristic frenzy. Replying in the dialogue of the flesh, Martin grew enormous, larger than ever inside her, and imagined himself in the cheapest of houses of prostitution, some bold and promiscuous whore working him for all his money’s worth. The red light added to the fantastic aspect, that of being in a Fellini film, or a Turkish camp of ill-fame, where poor young widows, respectable and married the one day, the next, with no one to protect them, are thrown headlong into the wildest of debaucheries, with no escape.

  Marline’s face was invisible as Martin clenched her smoothly sculpted, heaving buttocks. Perfectly rounded, they were starting to fleck with pigment from the hours i
n the Cretan sun, complementing the rest of her freckled body, now writhing like a snake, as she and he both gasped for breath. He held those nether spheres tightly from behind, as it seemed otherwise she would rocket off him in her now fierce motion.

  Her short red hair was like a helmet, and under the crimson bulb, dark. At the moment of ecstasy, she turned for the first time to face him, from over her shoulder. Her sharp jaw was distended – like a John dory, the thought came to him from nowhere – and her eyes were wild. She was not looking at him. She saw beyond, to something else. He could not recognise her again; this was the face of an entirely different person: had he met this one in the street, he would not know her.

  The more he looked at her frenzied eyes, the more strange she appeared, until he conceived her a demon, the devil itself, no woman, no wife he knew. At their mutual orgasm, a chill of irrational fright ran through him, but he closed his eyes, taking in air in huge gulping heaves, uncaring.

  Flush fading, consciousness revived, Martin saw Marline collapsed forward across his legs. He was still inside her, the sticky wetness draining down from his crotch and then his buttocks, turning cold on the sheet beneath him. She rolled off, and resting on her side, eyes closed, a smile across her mouth, murmured something about going out again, a night-cap. Then she yawned.

  “Napoleon slept here, did you know? Ierapetra’s ‘holy rock’ in Greek,” he said.

  Marline was already putting on her clothes.

  Dropped off past the lines of delayed traffic still waiting to cross the old narrow bridge, they had gone more or less straight up from the sea, from the small settlement clinging to steep slope above coastal highway.