The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

by Stephen Jones (ed. )

  None of it seems the least bit real, not the ridiculous things that she’s saying, or all the people dressed in white, or the television crews. This scene is not even as substantial as a nightmare. It’s very hot in the warehouse, and I feel dizzy and sick and wonder if I can reach an exit before I vomit.

  I close my eyes and I’m sitting in a bar in Brooklyn, watching them wade into the sea, and I’m thinking, Some son of a bitch is standing right there taping this and no one’s trying to stop them, no one’s lifting a goddamn finger.

  I blink, and I’m sitting in an office in Manhattan, and the people who write my checks are asking me questions I can’t answer.

  “Good god, you were fucking the woman, for Christ’s sake, and you’re sitting there telling me you had no idea whatsoever that she was planning this?”

  “Come on. You had to have known something.”

  “They all worshipped some sort of prehistoric fish god, that’s what I heard. No one’s going to buy that you didn’t see this coming—”

  “People have a right to know. You still believe that, don’t you?”

  Answers are scarce in the mass suicide of a California cult, but investigators are finding clues to the deaths by logging onto the Internet and Web sites run by the cult’s members. What they’re finding is a dark and confusing side of the Internet, a place where bizarre ideas and beliefs are exchanged and gain currency. Police said they have gathered a considerable amount of information on the background of the group, known as the Open Door of Night, but that it may be many weeks before the true nature of the group is finally understood. (CNN.com)

  And my clumsy hands move uncertainly across her bare shoulders, my fingertips brushing the chaos of scar tissue there, and she smiles for me.

  On my knees in an alley, my head spinning, and the night air stinks of puke and saltwater.

  “Okay, so I first heard about this from a woman I interviewed who knew the family,” the man in the Radiohead T-shirt says. We’re sitting on the patio of a bar in Pacific Grove, and the sun is hot and glimmers white off the bay. His name isn’t important, and neither is the name of the bar. He’s a student from LA, writing a book about the Open Door of Night, and he got my e-mail address from someone in New York. He has bad teeth and smiles too much.

  “This happened back in 76, the year before Jacova’s mother died. Her father, he’d take them down to the beach at Moss Landing two or three times every summer. He got a lot of his writing done out there. Anyway, apparently the kid was a great swimmer, like a duck to water, but her mother never let her to go very far out at that beach because there are these bad rip currents. Lots of people drown out there, surfers and shit.”

  He pauses and takes a couple of swallow of beer, then wipes the sweat from his forehead.

  “One day, her mother’s not watching and Jacova swims too far out and gets pulled down. By the time the lifeguards get her back to shore, she’s stopped breathing. The kid’s turning blue, but they keep up the mouth-to-mouth and CPR and she finally comes around. They get Jacova to the hospital up in Watsonville and the doctors say she’s fine, but they keep her for a few days anyhow, just for observation.”

  “She drowned,” I say, staring at my own beer. I haven’t taken a single sip. Beads of condensation cling to the bottle and sparkle like diamonds.

  “Technically, yeah. She wasn’t breathing. Her heart had stopped. But that’s not the fucked-up part. While she’s in Watsonville, she keeps telling her mother some crazy story about mermaids and sea monsters and demons, about these things trying to drag her down to the bottom of the sea and drown her and how it wasn’t an undertow at all. She’s terrified, convinced that they’re still after her, these monsters. Her mother wants to call in a shrink, but her father says no, fuck that, the kid’s just had a bad shock, she’ll be fine. Then, the second night she’s in the hospital, these two nurses turn up dead. A janitor found them in a closet just down the hall from Jacova’s room. And here’s the thing you’re not gonna believe, but I’ve seen the death certificates and the autopsy reports and I swear to you this is the God’s honest truth.”

  Whatever’s coming next, I don’t want to hear it. I know that I don’t need to hear it. I turn my head and watch a sailboat out on the bay, bobbing about like a toy.

  “They’d drowned, both of them. Their lungs were full of saltwater. Five miles from the goddamn ocean, but these two women drowned right there in a broom closet.”

  “And you’re going to put this in your book?” I ask him, not taking my eyes of the bay and the little boat.

  “Hell yeah,” he replies. “I am. It fucking happened, man, just like I said, and I can prove it.”

  I close my eyes, shutting out the dazzling, bright day, and wish I’d never agreed to meet with him.

  I close my eyes.

  “Down there,” Jacova whispers, “you will know nothing but peace, in her mansions, in the endless night of her coils.”

  We would be warm below the storm

  In our little hideaway beneath the waves

  I close my eyes. Oh, God, I’ve closed my eyes.

  She wraps her strong, suntanned arms tightly around me and takes me down, down, down, like the lifeless body of a child caught in an undertow. And I’d go with her, like a flash I’d go, if this were anything more than a dream, anything more than an infidel’s sour regret, anything more than eleven thousand words cast like a handful of sand across the face of the ocean. I would go with her, because, like a stone that has become an incarnation of mystery, she has drawn a circle around me.

  DAVID MORRELL

  They

  DAVID MORRELL IS THE AUTHOR of First Blood, the award-winning novel in which Rambo was created. He holds a Ph.D in American literature from the Pennsylvania State University and was a professor in the English department at the University of Iowa until he gave up his tenure to devote himself to a full-time writing career.

  “The mild-mannered professor with the bloody-minded visions,” as one reviewer called him, Morrell has written numerous best-selling thrillers that include The Brotherhood of the Rose (the basis for a highly rated NBC-TV mini-series), The Fifth Profession and Extreme Denial (set in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lives).

  His short stories have appeared in many of the major horror and fantasy anthologies and periodicals, including the Whispers, Shadows, Night Visions and Masters of Darkness series, as well as The Twilight Zone Magazine, The Dodd Mead Gallery of Horror, Psycho Paths, Prime Evil, Dark at Heart, MetaHorror, Revelations, 999: New Stories of Horror and Suspense and Redshift.

  Two of his novellas received Bram Stoker Awards from the Horror Writers Association, while his non-supernatural horror novel The Totem, which reinvents the werewolf myth, was included in Horror: 100 Best Books. His Stoker Award-winning novel Creepers has been called “genre defining” because of its unusual combination of thriller and horror elements. Scavenger is his latest book.

  “A lot of my fiction deals with struggling to keep one’s identity,” observes Morrell, “about the fear of walking down the wrong corridor and entering the wrong room, only to discover a dangerously different version of reality. Often, these themes are dramatised against large landscapes.

  “Years ago, reading a history book about the settlement of the American West, I learned that in spring, as the ground thawed, snakes sometimes fell from the sod roofs of farmhouses, landing inside, startling the inhabitants. That image stayed with me, insisting to be used in a story. The original text didn’t specify what kind of snakes, but I knew they needed to be rattlesnakes, and I knew they’d appear at the beginning of the story, the prelude to something worse that the story’s pioneer family would encounter. But what would that further horror be?

  “As the decades passed, the answer kept eluding me until a recent December when a snow storm hit the New Mexico valley where I live. Normally, I see mountains in every direction. But on that blizzard-swept evening, visibility was reduced to almost nothing. With a fireplace crackling nex
t to me, I peered out my living-room window. As dusk made the snowfall seem thicker, I suddenly saw quick movement outside, a fleeting shadow, then another and another. At once, the movement was gone.

  “Perhaps I’d only imagined it. Even so, the experience unnerved me, and at that instant, a complex chain of association inspired me to imagine the further horror that my pioneer family – and especially a brave little girl – would face.”

  PAPA WAS CLEVER. In the spring, when the sod roof thawed and the snakes fell through, he hooked blankets to the ceiling and caught them. Usually, they were bull snakes, but sometimes, they were rattlers. They sounded like somebody shaking a package of seeds. Papa said they were still sleepy from hibernating, which was why he wasn’t worried about going near them. He made a sack out of each blanket and carried their squirming weight to the far edge of the pasture, where he dumped them into our creek. The snowmelt from the mountains made the water high and swift and took them away. Just to be safe, papa warned us never to go downstream past where he dumped them. Mama wanted to kill them, but papa said they were too sleepy to mean us harm and we shouldn’t kill what we didn’t need to.

  The snakes dropped from the ceiling because papa dug the back of the cabin into a slope. He piled the dirt over the sod on the roof beams. It kept us cool in the summer and warm in the winter, and shielded us from the wind that shrieked through the valley during bad weather. In time, grass grew up there, but while the dirt was soft, snakes burrowed into it. We always heard them moving before they fell, so we had warning, and it wasn’t many, and it was only for a few weeks in the spring.

  Papa was so clever, he made the best soap in the valley. Everybody knew how to make the soft kind. Pour water over wood ashes to dissolve the potash in them. Strain the water through a layer of straw to get rid of dirt. Add the potash water to boiling animal fat. Let the two of them cool and use the scummy stuff at the top. That was the soap. But we had an outcrop of salt on our property, and papa experimented by adding salt to the boiling water and fat. When the mixture cooled, it got hard. Papa also put sand in his soap, and everybody thought that was his secret, but they could never get their soap hard because his real secret was the salt, and he made us promise not to tell.

  We had ten chickens, a horse, a cow, a sheep, a dog, and a cat. The dog was a collie. It and the cat showed up a day apart. We never knew where they came from. We planted lettuce, peas, carrots, beans, potatoes, tomatoes, corn, and squash. We had to build a solid fence around the garden to keep rabbits away. But birds kept trying to eat the seed, so papa traded his hard soap for sheets and tented them over the ground. The birds got discouraged. The rabbits that kept trying, papa shot them. He said they needed to be killed to save the garden and besides they made a good stew.

  We were never hungry. Papa dug a root cellar under the cabin. It kept the carrots, potatoes, and squash through the winter. Mama made preserves of the peas and beans, using wax to seal the lids the way papa showed her. We even had an old apple tree that was there when we came, and mama made the best pies, and we stored the apples, too. All of us worked. Papa showed us what to do.

  Hot summer nights, while he and mama taught us how to read from the Bible, we sometimes heard them howling in the hills. Yip, yip, yip, yip. Baying at the moon. God’s dogs, papa said. That’s what the Indians call them. Why? Judith asked. Because they’re practically invisible, papa said. Only God can see them.

  What do they look like? Daniel asked. Silly, I said. If only God can see them, how can anybody know what they look like? Well, a couple of times people have seen them, papa said. They’re brown. They’ve got pointy ears and black tips on their tails.

  How big are they? Judith asked, snuggling in his arms. A little bigger than Chester, papa said. Chester was our dog. They weigh about thirty pounds, papa said. They look a little like a dog, but you can tell them from a dog because they run with their tails down while a dog runs with its tail up.

  Sure sounds like somebody got a good look at one, I said. Papa nodded. I saw one a long time ago, he said. Before I met your mother. I was alone at a campfire. It came out of the darkness and stared from the edge of the light. It must have smelled the rabbit I was cooking. After a while, it turned away. Just before it disappeared into the darkness, it looked over its shoulder, as if it blamed me for something.

  Were you scared? Daniel asked. Time for you to go to sleep, mama said. She gave papa a look. No, papa said, I wasn’t scared.

  The harvest moon was full. They howled in the hills for several hours.

  The next year, the rains held off. The other farmers lost their wells and had to move on. But the drainage from the snow in the mountains kept water in our creek, enough for the garden. The aspens on the slopes had it hard, though. They got so dry, lightning sparked fires. At night, parts of the hills shimmered. Smoke drifted into the valley. Judith had trouble breathing.

  At last, we had a storm. God’s mercy, mama said, watching the rain chase the smoke and put out the flames in the hills. The morning after the first hard freeze, Daniel ran into the cabin. His face was white. Papa, come quick, he said.

  Our sheep lay in the middle of the pasture. Its neck was torn. Its stomach was chewed. Blood and chunks of wool lay everywhere. The other animals shivered, keeping a distance.

  I saw the veins in papa’s neck pulse as he stared toward the hills. At night, we’ll fence the cow and the horse next to the cabin, he said. There’s meat on the carcass. Ruth, he told me, get the axe and the knife. Daniel and I need to butcher the sheep. Get the shears, he told mama. We’ll take the wool that’s left.

  The morning after that, papa made us stay inside while he went outside to check the rest of the animals. He was gone quite awhile. Mama kept walking to the only window we had. I heard papa digging. When he came back, his face looked tight. The chickens, he said. They’re all killed. He turned toward mama. Heads and feathers. Nothing else left. Not enough meat for you even to make soup from. I buried it all. What about eggs? mama asked. No, he said.

  That night, papa loaded his rifle, put on his coat, and went out to the shed beside where the horse and cow were fenced. Yip, yip, yip, yip. I stared at the ceiling and listened to them howl. But they were far away, their echo shifting from one part of the valley to another. When papa came inside the next morning, the breeze was cold. Snow dusted the ground. His eyes looked strained, but he sounded relieved. Seems they moved on, he said, putting his rifle on a shelf. We’ll trade soap for more chickens, mama told him, and gave him a cup of coffee.

  By noon, it was colder. Clouds capped the mountains. Looks like an early winter, papa said. Thank God, mama said. As dry as it’s been, the mountains need moisture. The creek needs snowmelt, she said. At supper, we heard wood snapping outside, the horse whinnying. Papa dropped his fork and grabbed his rifle, which he hadn’t unloaded. Mama handed him a lantern. From the window, we watched his light jerk this way and that as papa rushed toward the corral next to the shed.

  He kept running. He passed the fence. The light from the lantern got smaller until I couldn’t see it in the darkness. I listened to the wind. I flinched when I heard a shot. Then all I heard was the wind again. Snow was in the air. Mama whispered something as she stared through the window toward the night. I think she said, Please God. We waited. Ruth, get Daniel his coat and a lantern, mama told me. He needs to go out and see if papa wants help.

  But Daniel didn’t need to. Look, Judith said, standing on tiptoes, pointing. Through the window, we saw a speck of light. It got bigger, moving with the wind and papa’s arm. Cold filled the room as he came in. Judith coughed. Papa locked the door and set down the lantern. Something scared the horse so bad it broke through the fence and tried to run off, he said. Tried? Daniel asked. Papa looked toward the window. Whatever scared the horse took it down. Didn’t get much to eat, though. When I shot, they ran into the dark.

  They? I asked. No need to alarm the children, mama told him. But everybody has to know so you can all be careful, papa said.
We’re already careful, mama said. Need to be even more, papa said. They, papa? I asked. I think I saw five, he said. Judith coughed. Five of what? Daniel asked. God’s dogs? Did they run with their tails down? Papa nodded again. But now they’re the Devil’s dogs, he said. I think I hit one. I found a trail of blood, but maybe it was the horse’s blood dripping from their mouths.

  Nobody moved. Judith, get the axe and the knife, papa told me. Daniel and I need to butcher the horse before they come back. Butcher? Judith said. We’re going to eat horse meat? Daniel asked. It’s meat, papa said. When winter comes this early, we need all the food we can find.

  With the dark around us, mama and I shivered and held lanterns that swung in the wind while papa and Daniel cut up the horse. Papa told us to keep staring toward the night, to watch in case they came back. He kept his rifle protected in a blanket beside him. Only Judith didn’t work. She shivered too much to hold a lantern in the blowing snow.

  Look at the paw prints in the snow, Daniel said. I know, papa said. Not natural. I took my gaze away from the darkness and frowned at the prints. I’d never seen anything like them. They were like huge blobs of melted wax, none of them the same size, all big and grotesque and misshapen. Ruth, keep watching the night, papa warned me.

  We put big chunks of horsemeat in burlap bags and carried them to the storage pit papa had dug next to the cabin. That’s where the meat from the sheep was. Papa set planks over the hole and put rocks on them. The cold will freeze the meat all winter, he said. At least, we won’t starve. But what about the cow? mama asked. We’ll put her in the shed at night, papa said.