The Year's Best Horror Stories 12

by Karl Edward Wagner (Ed. )

  Rachel knew that the names had been spoken at the moment of her birth: that her mother, legs spread, the waves of Rachel’s passage rolling down her stomach, had breathed the names between spasms long before Rachel’s own name had been pronounced. Rachel Rebecca Zuckerman. That final ZEISS had burst from her mother’s lips as Rachel had slipped out, greasy with birth blood. Rachel knew she had heard the names in the womb. They had opened the uterine neck, they had lured her out and beached her as easily as a fish. How often had her mother commented that Rachel had never cried as a child. Not once. Not even at birth when the doctor had slapped her. She knew, even if her mother did not, that she had been silenced by the incantation, the Zeiss a stopper in her mouth.

  When Rachel was a child, she had learned the names as another child would a nursery rhyme. The rhythm of the passing syllables was as water in her mouth, no more than nonsense words. But at five, beginning to understand the power of the names, she could say them no more. For the saying was not enough. It did not satisfy her mother’s needs. Rachel knew that there was something more she needed to do to make her mother smile.

  At thirteen, on her birthday, she began menstruating, and her mother watched her get dressed. “So plump. So zaftik.” It was an observation, less personal than a weather report. But she knew it meant that her mother had finally seen her as more than an extension, more than a child still red and white from its passage into the light.

  It seemed that, all at once, she knew what to do. Her mother’s duty had been the Word. Rachel’s was to be the Word Made Flesh.

  She stopped eating.

  The first month, fifteen pounds poured off her. Melted. Ran as easily as candle wax. She thought only of food. Bouillon. Lettuce. Carrots. Eggs. Her own private poem. What she missed most was chewing. In the camp they chewed on gristle and wood. It was one of her mother’s best tales.

  The second month her cheekbones emerged, sharp reminders of the skull. She watched the mirror and prayed. Barukh atah adonai elohenu melekh ha-olam. She would not say the words for bread or wine. Too many calories. Too many pounds. She cut a star out of yellow posterboard and held it to her breast. The face in the mirror smiled back. She rushed to the bathroom and vomited away another few pounds. When she flushed the toilet, the sound was a hiss, as if gas were escaping into the room.

  The third month she discovered laxatives, and the names on the containers became an addition to her litany: Metamucil, Agoral, Senokot. She could feel the chair impress itself on her bones. Bone on wood. If it hurt to sit, she would lie down.

  She opened her eyes and saw the ceiling, spread above her like a sanitized sky. A voice pronounced her name. “Rachel, Rachel Zuckerman. Answer me.”

  But no words came out. She raised her right hand, a signal; she was weaker than she thought. Her mother’s face, smiling, appeared. The room was full of cries. There was a chill in the air, damp, crowded. The smell of decay was sweet and beckoning. She closed her eyes and the familiar chant began, and Rachel added her voice to the rest. It grew stronger near the end:

  ABRAHMS

  BERLINER

  BRODSKY

  DANNENBERG

  FISCHER

  FRANK

  GLASSHEIM

  GOLDBLATT

  HEGELMAN

  ISAACS

  KAPLAN

  KOHN

  LEVITZ

  MAMOROWITZ

  MORGENSTERN

  NORENBERG

  ORENSTEIN

  REESE

  ROSENBLUM

  ROSENWASSER

  SOLOMON

  STEIN

  TANNENBAUM

  TEITLEMAN

  VANNENBERG

  WASSERMAN

  WECHTENSTEIN

  ZEISS

  ZUCKERMAN

  They said the final name together and then, with a little sputter, like a yahrzeit candle at the end, she went out.

  THE ATTIC by Billy Wolfenbarger

  Billy Wolfenbarger describes himself as “the eternal nonconformist, an old beatnik who never owned a driver’s license.” Born on October 12, 1943 in Joplin, Missouri, Wolfenbarger grew up in nearby Neosha and after high school went bumming on the road for seven years—eventually pausing in the Venice, California of the mid 1960s. He has “been a dishwasher, worked in a cheese processing plant, a cannery, an auto parts warehouse, a typist at the University of Oregon, a Christmas tree harvester, a wood stacker, the usual crazy things.” Since 1973 he has lived in Oregon, which “feels like home.”

  Wolfenbarger is primarily a poet, with his first sale in 1967 and two collections to date: The Lizard Speaks (1973) and The Wind Is My Brother (1978). Over the past decade he has been active in the fantasy small press, with poetry and fiction published in such places as Space and Time, Weirdbook, Fantasy Macabre, Grimoire, Eldritch Tales, and The Punk-Surrealist Cafe. “The Attic” appeared in Dark Horizons, the literary journal of the British Fantasy Society, and is a chapter from a novel-in-progress, The Inhabitant.

  Brown spiders lurched drunkenly all over Ray Bowen’s dreams and he had a rough time filtering them out. Tiny splotches of yellowish mold were littered across their ugly backs. But he’d begun the dream without them. The time was the present and yet it was many years ago, when he lived on Venice Beach and the great romance of voluntary poverty burned and shone in his soul as mysterious and intense as the nearer October stars. Feeble layers of darkness had come on, with only a rosy ghost-glow shuttling atop the restless Pacific. He’d tread from Ocean Front Walk, which fronted the beach, with three friends who had little to say, past Pacific Ocean Park at the edge of Venice West to Santa Monica where the bright, glary lights of the Santa Monica Pier dazzled in gaudy wonder.

  The beach itself was relatively empty. All the noises emanating from the people and the ‘amusements’ along the pier helped populate their unmarked path, all of which was company Bowen didn’t need. His friends all talked of silly, uninteresting and purely mundane things—nothing to inspire melancholy phantasmagorias or poetry. Bowen smoked a joint with them as they walked, and all shared a small can of tuna fish, which was their dinner and perhaps their breakfast as well. Then, as far as social amenities would permit, Ray Bowen stopped in his tracks and told these friends of his he was heading back to Venice. There was no problem here at all. The other three were determined to make for the Pier to pick up on chicks and wine and some more dope—with which Bowen could sympathize—but they’d blow it, they’d get too loud and rowdy, and get Bowen paranoid. Let them go. As he trod across the darkening sands, leaving the din of the world behind, Bowen buttoned the one button of his corduroy jacket, put his hands in blue jeans pockets and watched more stars come on, walking nearer to the ocean’s gossiping lip.

  Darkness brought the cold. A misted fog was piling up over the ocean, and would soon enough reach Venice beach. Bowen had enough change for a hot cup of good coffee at the Venice West cafe, the best place in town. He’d have to see if he could crash someplace besides the beach tonight.

  He was filled with a kind of necromantic enchantment—that is to say, stoned on the beach at night, anxious now for coffee and to fill his pocket notebook with poems and his dreams. Farther up, past where he was going and from which he would detour the beach, a jazz bongo played, primitive and real; a flute joined, as though it had always meant to be there. The music seeped into his blood. The ocean hissed, or the beach, or the oncoming fog, he couldn’t be sure; and the cold came, stronger. Bowen was aware that he was very much alive. He could see them now, mere blots or blobs in the misty darkness, local musicians and oldtime Bohemians out by the rocky point, lively in the California night. Bowen snapped his fingers to the beat, and they played rhythms that got down to cellular structures. The fog came pouring upon a wave from that ancient sea to cast it among the sands and the obscure figures by the point were lost to him. Strands of infinitely thin lines shot down from an invisible sky, down which brown spiders hastily manoeuvred, scrabbling over the sands as though blind and desperate,
groping, lurching, horrible and intense. They moved to him and away from him, littering the beach with their ugly bodies where tiny splotches of yellowed mold covered their backs like motes of consciousness.

  With a groan of agony he awoke, shaking spiders and beach and music and California night from his head. He was on a tattered sofa in Oregon. Night brimmed darkness. A train echoed past, a quarter of a mile away. At last it disappeared into the mouth of silence. Years had passed. In October it would be sixteen years. It was the lapse of May in the country where Bowen still wrote his poetry in notebooks, transcribing them later on a typewriter he had now, both typewriter and notebooks keeping him company through the evening hours, in the night years.

  The little house Ray Bowen lived in now was over ninety years old, though far from stately. It had one small bedroom upstairs, which he rarely used after living here in farmland-surrounding country quietly for five years. Adjoining it by a rude door was the attic, always dark, surrounding the remaining length of the house. He’d been inside only very rarely; he never had that much junk to store away. Once he’d used a flashlight; batteries had gone out, and he’d never bothered replacing them—candles would serve as well.

  A sea of unwritten poetry swept over him as he prepared coffee, though not yet a crescendo of feelings and images, words and lines he could set to any paper. And it would be dark verse, when it finally came. He recalled his dream and tried to forget it. The poem would be about the last days of humanhood, and of a wine which runed little songs in the dark. Like infinity a wind came up, blowing words across a moonless beach, and this gave him a flickering touch of fright—a thing beyond mere unease—to be time-travelling in a lonely old country house without the compulsive inclination to do so.

  Rain realmed the roof without warning, a common Northwest event, slowly, steadily, which only helped intensify the silences. Peering through green curtains, he witnessed the far distant glowing of a street light by the black-topped road, revealing nothing. Otherwise, from the background of his kitchen light, Bowen saw only the eye-glinting husk of his reflection. Standing, he sipped his coffee. Let it rain. Sometimes the rain would be a trillion tiny voices sounding as one, moving through the silence. And on a dream-haunted evening as this one, he needed their companionship. Restless, the poem far from formed in his mind, he sought some music of the spheres. This is a job for Mozart, he thought, and let the Jupiter Symphony retaliate his gloomings.

  Bowen wanted to travel far from the dreams, which might come at any time now. He listened to his thoughts until they bounded between the limits of his skull. It took a long while for Mozart to seep through.

  Restlessness gnawed him like an old wound, and he circulated between rooms, drinking the coffee held in his large warm hand—kitchen to dining room to living room where music was clearest, more divine. At random he picked up Beethoven to play next, then wandered, then sat in the living room, violins swelling in his head. Too restless for reading or writing, he’d have to simply wait it out dully or activate himself past it.

  Exhausted, Mozart ended and rain tapped at windows, ran across the roof and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony boomed out. Ray Bowen poured himself another cup of coffee, then selected two fat white candles, lit one, flopped the other in his jacket pocket and, holding coffee and candle, slowly walked up the fifteen wooden stairway steps with spiderwebs long growing out of each inner corner and the faded flowered paper on the wall grown to tender pulp. It reminded him of so many funky beatnik apartments. With a heartless shrug he continued, only three splintered steps groaning near the top. Then he’d reached the tiny landing leading to the bedroom, and strode four giant steps to face the candlelit-flickering attic door, the old paint a colour between white and grey.

  Without another thought he sat down coffee, opened the door whose knob was a small, single-nailed square of wood, then ventured the hand which held the light inside, sending dust-moted shadows flying away from him, shuddering into silent recesses. Stooping for his cup, Bowen wondered what the hell he was doing. None of this had anything to do with the as yet unwritten poem. He entered, leaving the door half open, although it seemed more like half closed.

  He had lured a stray tomcat up here not long ago, who’d grown fat quickly on the mice. The tom had been quite thorough. Later he’d sent the cat away, and as yet mice or rats hadn’t entered. But up here, in here now, he could intangibly smell the fear, gigantic, which the rodents hadn’t lived through.

  A pine footstool resided here, and Ray Bowen made a shapeless mass of shadows die or trickily retreat—he couldn’t tell which—as he seated himself and made a candle-holding wax pool atop an overturned tuna fish can. Also nearby was a cracked blue plastic saucer, which he used for the second candle, placing it more or less behind him and farther away. Shadows died or ghosted into light. Illuminated with sight, only the far opposite corners remained abysmal. It was true he didn’t have much junk up here—he’d never had much of anything anywhere. He’d always wished he’d had a storage trunk of some sort, but no. He did have cardboard boxes and one orange crate, lonely and mute as vegetable children. He swallowed coffee and looked around, listening to tattering Oregon rain and Beethoven settling down again, though gathering for the next sensory onslaught. Mozart had been kinder. A brave brown spider dangled seven inches from his eyes, and Bowen grabbed the webstrand above it, moving the thing hastily into candleflame. He enjoyed watching it crisp. He dug sand out of his eyes. He must be tiring after all. Tides broke, rushing tentacled seaweed across a shoreline. He took long deep breaths, trying to calm himself. Tree branches, the height of the attic, washing in a wind. Absently tugging a cigarette from a fresh pack, Bowen returned to Venice without knowing why, bumming a smoke and spare change on the beach in chilling winter, shivering in his insubstantial jacket, wanting to be anywhere at that moment but where he was. Groaning, he got the cigarette lit, the tin can jittering in his hand. He set it carefully upon the dusty floor. Hell of a note if he burned himself alive up here. Hell of a note to be bummed up here in the first place, he thought. Looking at his shoes, he remembered the time he’d walked from Hollywood to Los Angeles with a kilo of weed in a brown paper bag, errand for a friend. It had taken all day long. His suffering feet ... Stabbing the cigarette between lips, he reached outward with arms and hands and pulled a box before his feet. Opening up the flaps, he suddenly remembered the contents and, as Bowen folded the flaps back into place without looking, moisture formed in each eye. He didn’t want to remember why he’d kept these old science fiction magazines he’d purchased when he was sixteen and seventeen and living at his mother’s house in so long ago Missouri, before he’d taken off on the road and found himself gazing at the wino bums dooming through Los Angeles, and so spaced in Venice West he couldn’t get any poetry written for months, when every waking moment had been concerned with the simple hassle of survival. He didn’t need to remember when his notebooks of over eight hundred poems and his clothing in a backpack had been stolen by a spade businessman who’d stopped to give him a lift as he was hitching to Texas. Those old ghosts had no right to haunt him. They’d already haunted him for years afterwards; there’d been far enough pain already. Enough fear had washed over him to suffice twenty lifetimes. He shoved the box back with his foot.

  Below, the last note dramatized the pouring rain, pelting roof and Ray Bowen’s attic thoughts. He crashed the cigarette in the saucer, roaming with cup in hand. Candle-glow flickered across the shaft of chimney. Leaning a hand upon an overhanging rafter, palm and fingers pulled away years of dust. He coughed, disgusted. Underneath, his shoe crashed a vagabond pot seed. Bowen retreated, setting his cup down and picking up his saucer candle, setting it near the orange crate. It contained only a moth-eaten army blanket and a pair of moldy, toe-cracked boots he’d worn, not new even then, on his way to Miami; he’d been very grateful for the ride with the speedfreak trucker in the middle of nowhere, the highway surrounded by swampland, tired, hungry and bummed as he spied the alligator, swamplord
of the highway.

  Moving to a cardboard box, Bowen opened it, peering inside. Old clothing. On top was a black and white checked shirt he’d worn tripping on mescaline for the first time—two caps synthetic—with two friends, four-thirty or five Sunday morning, watching the slow seepings of tides pulling inward, the incredible wash of beach, though later to find the gross, horny gyrations of the fifty year old obese woman writhing and grovelling and pawing herself naked in sickeningly obscene gestures, making Bowen and the others want to vomit. They hurried away, away.

  Another box, lidless, contained only dust—though he peered deeper, to the bottom and found phantom memories of his father (couldn’t he hear him now?) as he rocked in a rocking chair, little Ray on his knee; and the outside shell of his father formed, hazily grey, his German tombstone ghostily glimmering in the space where the head would have been—buried these long absent years since World War two. Bowen wept, the tears would never stop, and these tears hit the bottom of the box in tiny beads, the dust surrounding them rising and falling within the blink of an eye, back into the years that might as well have been centuries.

  God, this was enough of all this. He moaned, pulling at his beard, roaming in the night attic in the evening years, glooming past the attic window as rain drooled down the glass. Bowen took another look outside where spiders, brown and phosphorescent, were begging desperate entry.

  Bowen blew out candles and, groping through blackness, turned once fleetingly to see the decomposing ghosts of all the women he’d ever loved trying to lurch out of boxes. Scrabbling down the stairs, he shut the door and locked it, passing a window where spiders cried, lurching and tumbling down ropes of Oregon rain.

  JUST WAITING by Ramsey Campbell

  Ramsey Campbell has appeared in all but one of the twelve volumes of DAW’s The Year’s Best Horror Stories to date—twice in three of them—and this under three different editors. This should come as no surprise to serious readers of this genre, as Campbell is clearly one of the finest writers of horror fiction that this literature has known. Born in Liverpool on January 4, 1946, Campbell was sixteen when he wrote his first book, The Inhabitant of the Lake & Less Welcome Tenants, published by August Derleth’s Arkham House in 1964. Campbell is another horror writer who owes his start to Derleth’s encouragement and advice, and whose earliest work was an unabashed imitation of H.P. Lovecraft. Campbell was soon to move far beyond these things, and two decades later he has become a major short story writer, novelist, and editor all in his own nerve-gnawing style.