The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

by Stephen Jones (ed. )

She waited. Shadows lengthened.

  “We’re closing,” he said, standing by the door without looking at her.

  Shamefaced, Sith ducked away from him, through the door.

  Outside Soriya, the motoboy played dice with his fellows. He stood up. “They say I am very lucky to have Pol Pot’s daughter as a client.”

  There was no discretion in Cambodia, either. Everyone will know now, Sith realised.

  At home, the piles of printed paper still waited for her. Sith ate the old, cold food. It tasted flat, all its savour sucked away. The phones began to ring. She fell asleep with the receiver propped against her ear.

  The next day, Sith went back to Soriya with a box of the printed papers.

  She dropped the box onto the blue plastic counter of Hello Phones.

  “Because I am Pol Pot’s daughter,” she told Dara, holding out a sheaf of pictures toward him. “All the unmourned victims of my father are printing their pictures on my printer. Here. Look. These are the pictures of people who lost so many loved ones there is no one to remember them.”

  She found her cheeks were shaking and that she could not hold the sheaf of paper. It tumbled from her hands, but she stood back, arms folded.

  Dara, quiet and solemn, knelt and picked up the papers. He looked at some of the faces. Sith pushed a softly crumpled green card at him. Her family ID card.

  He read it. Carefully, with the greatest respect, he put the photographs on the countertop along with the ID card.

  “Go home, Sith,” he said, but not unkindly.

  “I said,” she had begun to speak with vehemence but could not continue. “I told you. My home is where you are.”

  “I believe you,” he said, looking at his feet.

  “Then . . .” Sith had no words.

  “It can never be, Sith,” he said. He gathered up the sheaf of photocopying paper. “What will you do with these?”

  Something made her say, “What will you do with them?”

  His face was crossed with puzzlement.

  “It’s your country too. What will you do with them? Oh, I know, you’re such a poor boy from a poor family, who could expect anything from you? Well, you have your whole family and many people have no one. And you can buy new shirts and some people only have one.”

  Dara held out both hands and laughed. “Sith?” You, Sith are accusing me of being selfish?

  “You own them too.” Sith pointed to the papers, to the faces. “You think the dead don’t try to talk to you, too?”

  Their eyes latched. She told him what he could do. “I think you should make an exhibition. I think Hello Phones should sponsor it. You tell them that. You tell them Pol Pot’s daughter wishes to make amends and has chosen them. Tell them the dead speak to me on their mobile phones.”

  She spun on her heel and walked out. She left the photographs with him.

  That night she and the motoboy had another feast and burned the last of the unmourned names. There were many thousands.

  The next day she went back to Hello Phones.

  “I lied about something else,” she told Dara. She took out all the reports from the fortunetellers. She told him what Hun Sen’s fortuneteller had told her. “The marriage is particularly well favoured.”

  “Is that true?” He looked wistful.

  “You should not believe anything I say. Not until I have earned your trust. Go consult the fortunetellers for yourself. This time you pay.”

  His face went still and his eyes focused somewhere far beneath the floor. Then he looked up, directly into her eyes. “I will do that.”

  For the first time in her life Sith wanted to laugh for something other than fear. She wanted to laugh for joy.

  “Can we go to lunch at Lucky7?” she asked.

  “Sure,” he said.

  All the telephones in the shop, all of them, hundreds all at once began to sing.

  A waterfall of trills and warbles and buzzes, snatches of old songs or latest chart hits. Dara stood dumbfounded. Finally he picked one up and held it to his ear.

  “It’s for you,” he said and held out the phone for her.

  There was no name or number on the screen.

  Congratulations, dear daughter, said a warm kind voice.

  “Who is this?” Sith asked. The options were severely limited.

  Your new father, said Kol Vireakboth. The sound of wind. I adopt you.

  A thousand thousand voices said at once, We adopt you.

  In Cambodia, you share your house with ghosts in the way you share it with dust. You hear the dead shuffling alongside your own footsteps. You can sweep, but the sound does not go away.

  On the Tra Bek end of Monivong there is a house whose owner has given it over to ghosts. You can try to close the front door. But the next day you will find it hanging open. Indeed you can try, as the neighbours did, to nail the door shut. It opens again.

  By day, there is always a queue of five or six people wanting to go in, or hanging back, out of fear. Outside are offerings of lotus or coconuts with embedded josh sticks.

  The walls and floors and ceilings are covered with photographs. The salon, the kitchen, the stairs, the office, the empty bedrooms, are covered with photographs of Chinese-Khmers at weddings, Khmer civil servants on picnics, Chams outside their mosques, Vietnamese holding up prize catches of fish; little boys going to school in shorts; cyclopousse drivers in front of their odd, old-fashioned pedalled vehicles; wives in stalls stirring soup. All of them are happy and joyful, and the background is Phnom Penh when it was the most beautiful city in Southeast Asia.

  All the photographs have names written on them in old-fashioned handwriting.

  On the table is a printout of thousands of names on slips of paper. Next to the table are matches and basins of ash and water. The implication is plain. Burn the names and transfer merit to the unmourned dead.

  Next to that is a small printed sign that says in English HELLO.

  Every Pchum Ben, those names are delivered to temples throughout the city. Gold foil is pressed onto each slip of paper, and attached to it is a parcel of sticky rice. At 8:00 am food is delivered for the monks, steaming rice and fish, along with bolts of new cloth. At 10:00 a.m. more food is delivered, for the disabled and the poor.

  And most mornings a beautiful daughter of Cambodia is seen walking beside the confluence of the Tonlé Sap and Mekong rivers. Like Cambodia, she plainly loves all things modern. She dresses in the latest fashion. Cambodian R&B whispers in her ear. She pauses in front of each new waterfront construction whether built by improvised scaffolding or erected with cranes. She buys noodles from the grumpy vendors with their tiny stoves. She carries a book or sits on the low marble wall to write letters and look at the boats, the monsoon clouds, and the dop-dops. She talks to the reflected sunlight on the river and calls it Father.

  GLEN HIRSHBERG

  Devil’s Smile

  GLEN HIRSHBERG’S MOST RECENT collection, American Morons, was published by Earthling in 2006. The Two Sams, his first collection, won the International Horror Guild Award and was selected by Publishers Weekly and Locus as one of the best books of 2003.

  Hirshberg is also the author of the novels The Snowman’s Children (published by Carroll & Graf in 2002) and Sisters of Baikal (forthcoming). With Dennis Etchison and Peter Atkins, he co-founded the Rolling Darkness Revue, a travelling ghost story performance troupe that tours the West Coast of the United States each October.

  His fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including multiple appearances in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Dark Terrors 6, The Dark, Inferno, Trampoline, Cemetery Dance, Summer Chills and Alone on the Darkside. He lives in the Los Angeles area with his wife and children.

  “This story grew out of a delicious winter evening spent reading my children a book by Donald J. Sobol called True Sea Adventures,” Hirshberg recalls, “in which we discovered the astonishing story of Charles F. Tallman, his boat the Chri
stina, and the blizzard of January 7th, 1866.

  “But the whole piece coalesced during my visit to New Bedford, Massachusetts, which still feels grim and blubber-soaked and strange even before you stick your head in the Whaling Museum and see the wall of implements for carving up whales at sea – as terrifying and poignant in their shapes as the gynaecological instruments for working on ‘mutant women’ in David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers – or the photographs of forests of baleen drying on the docks.”

  “In hollows of the liquid hills

  Where the long Blue Ridges run

  The flatter of no echo thrills

  For echo the seas have none;

  Nor aught that gives man back man’s strain –

  The hope of his heart, the dream in his brain.”

  – Herman Melville

  TURNING IN HIS SADDLE, Selkirk peered behind him through the flurrying snow, trying to determine which piece of debris had lamed his horse. All along what had been the carriage road, bits of driftwood, splintered sections of hull and harpoon handle, discarded household goods – pans, candlesticks, broken-backed books, empty lanterns – and at least one section of long, bleached-white jaw lay half-buried in the sand. The jaw still had baleen attached, and bits of blown snow had stuck in it, which made it look more recently alive than it should have.

  Selkirk rubbed his tired eyes against the grey December morning and hunched deeper into his inadequate long coat as the wind whistled off the whitecaps and sliced between the dunes. The straw hat he wore more out of habit than hope of protection did nothing to warm him, and stray blond curls kept whipping across his eyes. Easing himself from the horse, Selkirk dropped to the sand.

  He should have conducted his business here months ago. His surveying route for the still-fledgling United States Lighthouse Service had taken him in a crisscrossing loop from the tip of the Cape all the way up into Maine and back. He’d passed within fifty miles of Cape Roby Light and its singular keeper twice this fall, and both times had continued on. Why? Because Amalia had told him the keeper’s tale on the night he’d imagined she loved him? Or maybe he just hated coming back here even more than he thought he would. For all he knew, the keeper had long since moved on, dragging her memories behind her. She might even have died. So many did, around here. Setting his teeth against the wind, Selkirk wrapped his frozen fingers in his horse’s bridle and led her the last down-sloping mile and a half into Winsett.

  Entering from the east, he saw a scatter of stone and clapboard homes and boarding houses hunched against the dunes, their windows dark. None of them looked familiar. Like so many of the little whaling communities he’d visited during his survey, the town he’d known had simply drained away into the burgeoning, bloody industry centers at New Bedford and Nantuckett.

  Selkirk had spent one miserable fall and winter here fourteen years ago, sent by his drunken father to learn candle-making from his drunken uncle. He’d accepted the nightly open-fisted beatings without comment, skulking afterward down to the Blubber Pike tavern to watch the whalers: the Portuguese swearing loudly at each other and the negroes – so many Negroes, most of them recently freed, more than a few newly escaped – clinging in clumps to the shadowy back tables and stealing fearful glances at every passing face, as though they expected at any moment to be spirited away.

  Of course, there’d been his cousin, Amalia, for all the good that had ever done him. She’d just turned eighteen at the time, two years his senior. Despite her blond hair and startling fullness, the Winsett whalers had already learned to steer clear, but for some reason, she’d liked Selkirk. At least, she’d liked needling him about his outsized ears, his floppy hair, the crack in his voice he could not outgrow. Whatever the reason, she’d lured him away from the pub on several occasions to stare at the moon and drink beside him. And once, in a driving sleet, she’d led him on a midnight walk to Cape Roby Point. There, lurking uncomfortably close but never touching him, standing on the rocks with her dark eyes cocked like rifle sites at the rain, she’d told him the lighthouse keeper’s story. At the end, without any explanation, she’d turned, opened her heavy coat and pulled him to her. He’d had no idea what she wanted him to do, and had wound up simply setting his ear against her slicked skin, all but tasting the water that rushed into the valley between her breasts, listening to her heart banging way down inside her.

  After that, she’d stopped speaking to him entirely. He’d knocked on her door, chased her half out of the shop one morning and been stopped by a chop to the throat from his uncle, left notes he hoped she’d find peeking out from under the rug in the upstairs hallway. She’d responded to none of it, and hadn’t even bothered to say goodbye when he left. And Selkirk had steered clear of all women for more than a decade afterward, except for the very occasional company he paid for near the docks where he slung cargo, until the Lighthouse Service offered him an unexpected escape.

  Now, half-dragging his horse down the empty main street, Selkirk found he couldn’t even remember which grim room the Blubber Pike had been. He passed no one. But at the western edge of the frozen, cracking main thoroughfare, less than a block from where his uncle had kept his establishment, he found a traveler’s stable and entered.

  The barn was lit by banks of horseshoe-shaped wall sconces – apparently, local whale oil or no, candles remained in ready supply – and a coal fire glowed in the open iron stove at the rear of the barn. A dark-haired stable lad with a clam-shaped birthmark covering his left cheek and part of his forehead appeared from one of the stables in the back, tsked over Selkirk’s injured mount and said he’d send for the horse doctor as soon as he’d got the animal dried and warmed and fed.

  “Still a horse doctor here?” Selkirk asked.

  The boy nodded. He was almost as tall as Selkirk, and spoke with a Scottish burr. “Still good business. Got to keep the means of getting out healthy.”

  “Not many staying in town anymore, then?”

  “Just the dead ones. Lot of those.”

  Selkirk paid the boy and thanked him, then wandered toward the stove and stood with his hands extended to the heat, which turned them purplish red. If he got about doing what should have been done years ago, he’d be gone by nightfall, providing his horse could take him. From his memory of the midnight walk with Amalia, Cape Roby Point couldn’t be more than three miles away. Once at the lighthouse, if its longtime occupant did indeed still live there, he’d brook no romantic nonsense – neither his own, nor the keeper’s. The property did not belong to her, was barely suitable for habitation, and its lack of both updated equipment and experienced, capable attendant posed an undue and unacceptable threat to any ship unlucky enough to hazard past. Not that many bothered anymore with this particular stretch of abandoned, storm-battered coast.

  Out he went into the snow. In a matter of minutes, he’d left Winsett behind. Head down, he burrowed through the gusts. With neither buildings nor dunes to block it, the wind raked him with bits of shell and sand that clung to his cheeks like the tips of fingernails and then ripped free. When he looked up, he saw beach pocked with snow and snarls of seaweed, then the ocean thrashing about between the shore and the sandbar a hundred yards or so out.

  An hour passed. More. The tamped-down path, barely discernible during Winsett’s heyday, had sunk completely into the shifting earth. Selkirk stepped through stands of beach heather and sand bur, pricking himself repeatedly about the ankles. Eventually, he felt blood beneath one heavy sock, but he didn’t peel the sock back, simply yanked out the most accessible spines and kept moving. Far out to sea, bright, yellow sun flickered in the depths of the cloud cover and vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. Devil’s smile, as the Portuguese sailors called it. At the time, it hadn’t occurred to Selkirk to ask why the light would be the devil, instead of the dark or the gathering storm. Stepping from the V between two leaning dunes, he saw the lighthouse.

  He’d read the report from the initial Lighthouse Service survey three years ago, and more than on
ce. That document mentioned rot in every beam, chips and cracks in the bricks that made up the conical tower, erosion all around the foundation. As far as Selkirk could see, the report had been kind. The building seemed to be crumbling to nothing before his eyes, bleeding into the pool of shorewater churning at the rocks beneath it.

  Staring into the black tide racing up the sand to meet him, Selkirk caught a sea-salt tang on his tongue and found himself murmuring a prayer he hadn’t planned for Amalia, who’d reportedly wandered into the dunes and vanished one winter night, six years after Selkirk left. Her father had written Selkirk’s father that the girl had never had friends, hated him, hated Winsett, and was probably happier wherever she was now. Then he’d said, “Here’s what I hope: that she’s alive. And that she’s somewhere far from anywhere I will ever be.”

  On another night than the one they’d spent out here, somewhere closer to town but similarly deserted, he and Amalia once found themselves beset by gulls that swept out of the moonlight all together, by the hundreds, as though storming the mainland. Amalia had pitched stones at them, laughing as they shrieked and swirled nearer. Finally, she’d hit one in the head and killed it. Then she’d bent over the body, calling Selkirk to her. He’d expected her to cradle it or cry. Instead, she’d dipped her finger in its blood and painted a streak down Selkirk’s face. Not her own.

  Looking down now, Selkirk watched the tide reach the tips of his boots again. How much time had he wasted during his dock-working years imagining – hoping – that Amalia might be hidden behind some stack of crates or in a nearby alley, having sought him out after leaving Winsett?

  Angry now, Selkirk picked his way between rocks to the foot of the tower. A surge of whitewater caught him off guard and pasted his trousers to his legs, and the wind promptly froze them with a gust.