The Year's Best Horror Stories 12

by Karl Edward Wagner (Ed. )

  Recently, two 1950s’ science-fiction flicks had been shunted into a two-and-a-half hour timeslot on Sunday afternoon television. A quick check of a paperback TV-film book revealed their total running time to be 160 minutes. The local independent station not only edited the films to accommodate the inadequate time allotment, but shaved further in order to squeeze in another twenty minutes of used-car, rock-and-roll, pimple-killing, free-offer, furniture-warehouse, Veg-o-Matic madness per feature. Viewers were naturally pissed, but not pissed enough to lift their telephones. The following week boasted the singularly acrobatic teat of Tod Browning’s Dracula corking a one-hour gap preceding a “Wild Kingdom” rerun.

  Edited for Television notices always grated Clay’s nerves when they intruded in video white across the bottom of his 24-inch screen. The J.A. Bijou wonderfulness was a kind of vengeance realized against the growly box; a warm, full-belly feeling. No one seemed to realize that the J.A. Bijou prints were also of first-rate, sterling caliber and clarity, lacking even a single ill-timed splice. They were all too stunned by the new footage. Justifiably.

  Clay sat and viewed Fredric March again, but this time as Dr. Jekyll, mutating for the first time into the chunky fiend Hyde without the crucial potion—a scene never released, along with another sequence where Jekyll witnessed the bloody mauling of a songbird by a cat, a scene that serves as the catalyst for another gruesome transformation.

  He watched a print of Murnau’s premier vampire movie, Nosferatu—not the remake—clearly not from the 1922 pirate negatives; in short, an impossibility. Bram Stoker’s widow had recognized Murnau’s film as an unabashed plagiarism of her husband’s novel, Dracula, and won the right in court to have all extant prints and negatives of Nosferatu destroyed. The film survived only because film pirates had already hoarded illegal prints, and it was from these less-than-perfect “originals” that all subsequent prints came. Yet what Clay watched was a crystal-sharp, first-generation original, right down to the title cards.

  He saw Lon Chaney Jr. as Lawrence Stewart Talbot, wrestling a cathedral-sized grizzly bear in The Wolf Man. Not the remake. He watched a version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers a full five minutes longer than normal. Not the remake.

  He saw Janet Leigh’s naked breasts bob wetly as she cowered through her butcher-knife finish in an incarnation of Hitchcock’s Psycho that was one whole reel more complete. He wondered idly when they would get around to grinding out a tacky remake of this classic as well, before he actually thought about it and realized that second-rate producers had been trying and failing for years.

  The blanket denials by the film outlet that had shipped the entire festival as a package deal were amusing to hear, as related by J.A. Bijou’s staff. The most the tinny voices from LA would concede was that maybe the films had come out of the wrong vault. That other phone calls were being made to them, along with lengthy and excited letters, was undeniable.

  This expanding miracle had hefted an unspoken weight from Clay’s shoulders. It was overjoy, giddiness, a smattering of cotton-candied jubilation, a reappearance of fun in his life, sheer and undeniable. A shrink would delve so far beyond this simple idea that Clay would become certifiable; so, no shrinks. Accept the fun, the favor.

  The “favor” of J.A. Bijou’s was, Clay reasoned, repayment to him, personally, for his basic faith in the films—a faith that endured the years, and that he allowed to resurface when given an opportunity. This made sense to him, though he did not totally comprehend the why, yet. He did toy with the phrasing, concocting impressive verbiage to explain away the phenomena, but he always looped back around to the simplicity of his love for the films. He was one with the loose, intimate brotherhood that would remain forever unintroduced, but who would engage any handy stranger in a friendly swap of film trivia.

  He felt that, despite his happiness, the picture was still incomplete. The miracle of the films he was viewing was a kind of given. Given A, B then follows ... He discussed his idea with other (unintroduced) J.A. Bijou regulars. Had anyone the power to inform him of the turn of events to follow, Clay would have thought them as whacko as his imaginary psychiatrist would have diagnosed him. If he had told anyone. He didn’t.

  The projection booth of J.A. Bijou’s was a cluttered, hot closet tightly housing two gargantuan, floor-mounted 35 mm. projectors and a smaller 16mm. rig, along with an editing/winding table and a refugee barstool. Knickknacks of film equipment were jumbled together on tiers of floor-to-ceiling shelving. Homemade, egg-carton soundproofing coating the interior walls, throwing soft green shadows under a dim work light. The windows were opaqued with paint and the floors were grimy. A large cardboard box squatted to receive refuse film just beneath a rack on which hung the horribly over-used Coming Attractions strips that got spliced hundreds of times per month, it seemed.

  J.A. Bijou’s air-conditioning system was almost as old as the vintage brownstone that housed the theatre. The first time it gave up the ghost was during the mid-Thursday afternoon showing of Psycho, just as Vera Miles began poking about the infamous Bates mansion. There was a hideous shriek as metal chewed rudely into metal, followed by a sharp spinning that wound down with a broken, wagon-wheel clunk. The audience nearly went through the ceiling, and afterward, everyone laughed about the occurrence as things were makeshifted back to order.

  The insulation on the cooler’s motor held out until Friday night, for the benefit of the overflow audience. The years of humid dampness and coppery, wet decay had been inexorable. The engine sparked and shorted out, fuses blew, and as the blades spun down a second time, the theatre filled up with acrid electrical smoke, from the vents.

  Gray smoke wafted dreamily around near the ceiling as the exits were flung open. A few moved toward the fresher air, but most kept stubbornly to their prize seats, waiting.

  In the darkness of the booth, the projectionist had concluded that a melted hunk of old film might be jamming the film gate, and was leaning over to inspect it when the lights went out. Sitting in the dark, he groped out for his Cinzano ashtray and butted his Camel as a precaution against mishaps in the dark.

  It did not do any good.

  When the cardboard film bin later puffed into flames, the projectionist had temporarily abandoned the booth in search of a flashlight. The preview strips quickly blackened, curled, and finally ignited, snaking fire up to the low ceiling of the booth. The egg-cartons blossomed a dry orange. The wooden shelves became fat kindling as the roomful of celluloid and plastic flared and caused weird patterns of light to coruscate through the painted glass. It took less than thirty seconds for the people sitting in front of the booth to notice it, dismiss it, and finally check again to verify.

  The projectionist raced back. When he yanked open the door, the heat blew him flatly on his ass. People were already panicking toward exits; Clay rose from his seat and saw.

  The bearded kid had already scurried to the pizzeria to trip the local fire alarm. Nobody helped the projectionist. The sudden chaos of the entire scene remained as a snapshot image in Clay’s mind as he rapidly located a fire extinguisher, tore it from its wall-mount, and hurried to the booth. A crackerbox window blew outward and the fire licked out of the opening, charring the wall and lighting up the auditorium.

  Lightly dazed, the projectionist was up and had one foot wedged over the threshold of the booth entrance, but the sheer heat buffeted him back as he exhausted his own tiny CO2 canister. He yelled something unintelligible into the fire, then he stepped back, fire-blind and nose-to-nose with Clay, shouting for him to get out.

  Clay haltingly approached the gaping doorway and nozzled his larger extinguisher into the conflagrant oven. A better inferno could not have been precipitated if the Monster himself had tipped an ancient oil-lamp into dry straw. Clay’s effort reduced the doorway to smoke and sizzle, and he stepped up in order to get a better aim on the first projector, which was swathed in flames. He took another excruciating step inside.

  The Monster, having tried his misun
derstood best, always got immolated by the final reel. Friday night’s screening of Psycho keynoted the close of the honor classics festival at J.A. Bijou’s. Clay understood, as he moved closer to the flaming equipment and films. It would not hurt much.

  Above the booth, a termite-ridden beam exploded into hot splinters and smashed down through the ceiling of the booth, showering barbecue sparks and splitting the tiny room open like a peach crate. It was a support beam, huge, weighty and as old as the brownstone, and it impacted heavily, crushing the barstool, collapsing the metal film racks and wiping out the doorway of the booth.

  It was a perfect, in-character finish, complimented by the welling sound of approaching sirens.

  One of the health food places threatened a lawsuit after the fire marshal had done his job—J.A. Bijou’s had been unsafe all along, etcetera. Negligence, they claimed.

  The festival package of films was gone, gone to scorched shipment cans and puddles of ugly black plasma. When the projection booth died, so did they, even though they were being stored at the theatre manager’s house for safekeeping. They had been, after all, perfect prints, and the door-locks at J.A. Bijou’s had not yet been updated against a particular kind of desperate collector.

  Now the new sprinkler and air-conditioning systems were in. The new projection booth was painted and inspected; the new equipment, spotless and smelling of lubricant. J.A. Bijou’s insurance, plus the quick upsurge in income, sparked financial backing sufficient to cause its rebirth in time for the following semester at the university.

  With the new goods in place and all tempers balmed, the projectionist’s somewhat passionate tale of an unidentified customer supposed to have died in the blaze was quickly forgotten or attributed to his excited state during the crisis. He steadfastly insisted that he had witnessed a death, and maintained his original story without deviation despite the fact that no corpse or suggestion of a corpse had ever been uncovered in the wreckage. No one had turned up tearfully seeking dead relatives.

  But no one could explain about the films, either. And from opening night onward, none of the J.A. Bijou staffers bothered to consider why, on fullhouse nights (weekends, for the college crowd), the ticket count always came up two seats short. Nor could they give a solid, rational reason explaining why J.A. Bijou’s was the sole theatre—in the universe, apparently—that regularly featured peculiar, never-before-seen cinema gems. The phone voices still had no answers.

  The bearded kid suggested that J.A. Bijou’s had a guardian spirit.

  Clay relished the cool anonymity of the darkened theatre. As always, the crowds were friendly, but unintroduced. The film bond held them together satisfactorily without commitment. He had been cussing/discussing the so-called auteur theory with a trio of engineering majors seated behind him, when the house lights dimmed. You never learned their names.

  The first feature was The Man Who Would Be King, starring Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable. Clay had not decided what the second feature would be, yet.

  Marissa returned, with the popcorn, as the trailers commenced.

  ELLE EST TROIS, (LA MORT) by Tanith Lee

  Tanith Lee has become one of the most popular fantasy authors to emerge during the past ten years. Born in north London in September, 1947, Lee attended grammar school, then drifted through that series of miscellaneous jobs that almost seems to be part of an author’s apprenticeship: librarian, shop-work, waitressing, clerical work. “After these and subsidiary disasters,” as Lee recalls them, she allowed herself a year at art school—at the age of twenty-five. Her first book, The Dragon Hoard, was published in 1971, followed by several other books for children and young adults. In 1975 DAW Books published The Birthgrave, which brought Tanith Lee to the attention of American readers and which allowed her to become a full-time writer.

  To date she has had twenty-one books in the adult fantasy/science fiction field, nine books for young readers, and eighty short stories—in addition to four BBC radio plays and two television scripts for Blake’s Seven. Still living in London, Lee’s current project is her first historical novel: “a mile long bloodbath about the French Revolution.” The following story ably demonstrates how keenly Tanith Lee can capture the atmosphere of the historical past.

  Across the river, the clock of Notre Dame aux Lumineres was striking seven. How deep the river, and how dark, and how many bones lying under it that the strokes of the great gilded clock upon the Gothic tower, winged with its lace-work, did not rouse. Down there, all those who had thrown themselves from the bridges, off the quays of the city: the starving, the sick and the drugged, the desperate and the insane.

  Armand looked down in the water, black as the night, looked down and searched for them—and there, a pale hand waved from the flowing darkness, a drift of drowning hair, now passed under the parapet—a girl had flung herself into the river, and should he rescue her, was it morally right that he should save her from whatever horror had driven her to this?

  The young man, a poet, rushed across the bridge and stared over from the other parapet. This time there was help. A lamp globe at the bridge’s far end caught the suicide as she glided out again into view. The poet, Armand, sighed with relief and a curious disappointment. The thing in the water was only a string of rags and garbage woven together by the current.

  Straightening, Armand pulled his threadbare coat about him. It was spring, but the city was cold in spring. There was no stirring in its stones, or in his blood. He glanced now, with familiar depression, at the cathedral towers on the far bank of the river, the tenements on the nearer bank, towards which, returning, he was bound. Above, the stars, and here and there below a greenish lamp. So little light in the darkness.

  He had not eaten in two days, but there had come to be enough money to buy cheap wine in the cafe on the Rue Mort. And for the other thing, purchased—was it yesterday?

  He had been walking all afternoon until purpose ended in a leaden sunset. As flakes of the day sank in the river, Notre Dame aux Lumineres towered up before him, as if out of the water itself, an edifice from a myth. Compelled as any knight, he had entered her vast drum of incense and shadow. Standing beyond the ghostly rainbow bubbles that were cast from the stained-glass windows to the ground, he lit one of her candles.

  (My name is Armand Valier. I announce myself since I think you don’t remember me, God. As why should you? Why am I lighting the candle? For a dead work, a dead poem. She died in my arms today. I burned her.)

  When night had wiped away the coloured windows, Armand left and began to walk back across the bridge.

  He walked slowly, lost not in thought but in some inner country that faintly resembled the bridge, the river, the dimming banks—one drawing away, one drawing nearer, both equally unreal—a country nourished by facts of surrounding and atmosphere, yet denying them. So that halfway across the bridge, the young man paused in the clinging chill, his dark head bowed. (Where am I, then, if not here? Is it some place I recall from a dream? Have I crossed some barrier in time and latitude? And is this some world so like the world I have just vacated I may be deceived for a while, as though I had moved through the surface of a mirror?)

  The impression of change, or of strangeness, became then so sharp a galvanic sensation ran through his nerves. In that instant, seeing no apparent alteration, he looked over the bridge and beheld the dead girl in the water who, a moment later, from the other parapet, became a chain of flotsam. Which convinced Armand, the poet, that merely by crossing from one parapet of the bridge to the other, he had re-crossed the boundaries of normality.

  But it was very cold. Shuddering in the inadequate coat, he began to stride briskly on, toward the pallid globe of the lamp that swam there against the uninviting homeward bank.

  Mist was rising from the river, fraying out the poor light mysteriously, like a gauzy scarf. As Armand hurried closer, the impulse came to him that he should once more cross to the opposite parapet, and pass by the mysterious lamp in, as it were, that other partly-d
ifferent world where rags became drowned girls.

  Presently, he obeyed the impulse; it was easy enough to accommodate, merely the matter of a briefly diagonal path. He found, unaccountably, his heart—but perhaps only from lack of food, and tiredness—beating urgently now. He gazed into the misty ambience of the light as it approached nearer and nearer.

  Until, suddenly, he saw a figure at the end of the bridge beneath the lamp.

  Armand checked, continuing to move forward, yet much more slowly now. He heard his footsteps very keenly, over the counterpoint of the river, over the remote whisperings of the city. Louder than both, his own breathing. He could already see clearly the figure was that of a woman.

  She was dressed in a wave of black velvet. It was a cloak such as those worn by the rich and the fashionable to the Opera. But it wrapped her within itself as if it, too, were alive, some organic creature, folding her as if in the petals of a black orchid. Behind her head, one petal was raised, a hood like the hood of a striking cobra, framing a face smudged by the mist. He made out an impression of her features. They were aristocratic and quite fixed, perhaps incapable of expression. All but the eyes, which were overlined by long black sloping brows, and which had an indecipherable blueness about the upper lids that was neither paint nor shadow, but suggested the translucent wings of two iris-like insects, pasted there ... Her mouth was hardly generous, yet it was soft, and seemed disposed to smile. Yet this might have been, as so much else, a trick of the mist. But now there was a turn of the whole head. Against the cameo cheek a tendril of night-coloured hair, the twenty simultaneous struck sparks of jewel-drops fringing the hood. A gloved hand pierced the cloak like a knife. The material of the glove was a curious mauvish-blue, pearly and luminescent, insubstantial as a newborn gas flame. The gloved hand made the unmistakable mime of drawing closed a curtain.