The Year's Best Horror Stories 22

by Karl Edward Wagner (Ed. )

  The old woman muttered something in a language new to me. The men stiffened.

  “Come,” said one. “I will show you.”

  I glimpsed Marjory’s eyes. They were cold but curious, the earlier fright gone. She glanced at the stone table. “Wait here,” I said to her.

  If looks could kill I’d be dead. I turned my back on her and walked round the end of the wall.

  “Where are you going?” she demanded. “What’s going on?”

  “Shut up and wait,” I snapped back over my shoulder as I followed the man.

  We walked to the sea wall and climbed over the enormous stones to the top. He sat down and lit a cigarette. I glanced back at the others and sat down beside him.

  “The old woman has called it,” he said without looking at me. “It will come soon.”

  I studied his profile. He was weathered, his face stubbly, his dark cropped hair greying. His jaw was square, the cheekbones solid, his nose slightly flat with a touch of Africa in it. He was a solid man, tough, not one to argue with.

  “Watch the sea,” he said.

  It was as dark as the clouded sky. The moon I hadn’t seen since we left the apartment. Small swells rolled over the lowest stones of the wall. The sound was strangely comforting.

  “When you see, you will understand,” said the man.

  “And then what? My wife?”

  “It is up to you. The sea always acknowledges our gifts.”

  We sat in silence for a few minutes, a nippy breeze plucking at my sweater. And then it came, a hundred feet offshore, huge and fleshy, scaleless but not finless. Its back broke the surface, revealing thirty feet of almost glowing pink skin topped by a long spiny dorsal fin. And then it was gone.

  I craved to see more. The sight had excited me more than anything else I’d ever seen. My wish was fulfilled.

  It broke the surface closer this time, head first, and rose above the water, up and up, like a rocket, its mouth and teeth alarmingly close to human, its eyes that of the old woman’s. I saw large fleshy gill covers, pectoral and pelvic fins, and as it touched the sky, long soft dorsal and anal fins, then runs of finlets and finally its tail fin, wide and thin like a Marlin’s. For a second it seemed to hang motionless, a grotesque and profoundly fascinating Dali creation, over a hundred feet long, human-hued with a trace of eel in its delineation. And then it did something I’ve never seen a fish do. It bent in the middle, like a diver, and—before disappearing into the water with a minimum of splash—it turned its head in my direction, in the same manner as the old woman had done, but with its dead fish eyes suddenly imbued with a dreadful yearning that impaled me like a stake of ice. I sat shivering and stared at the spot for a long time after it had vanished. And still I craved for more.

  “Now do you understand?” asked the man after a respectful wait.

  “Yes,” I whispered. Oh, yes. Those eyes had soaked me with what I had lost over the years. Missed opportunities, friendships and love. They had also soaked me with the absolute mindlessness I had had to put up with, the quagmire of triviality and deceit. “Take her,” I told the man, and he stood and moved back down over the stones. A few seconds later I heard Marjory, but her scream was cut short. Very short.

  I stayed staring at the sea, having no wish to know what they were going to do with her, my wife of thirty years. Thirty years, damn it! Not so much wasted as retarded. Now I would be free.

  “You wish to see her before she goes?” It was the man who had sat with me. His voice was deliberately soft.

  “Tell me more about the God-fish.”

  “You have seen it, felt it. What more is there to say?”

  I stood and stared at him. “What is it? Where does it come from? How long has this business been going on? That’s what I want to know.”

  “Then you must be disappointed. For we know no more.”

  “The old woman?”

  He shook his head.

  “What happens if no gift is made to the God-fish, the sea, whatever?”

  “Always a gift is given when required. There is no choice. The call of the God-fish will be heard, the desire to comply imbued, the action guided, the victim found, the gift given. And acknowledged. This is the way it has always been. Since time immemorial.”

  “You say acknowledged—how? When it looked at me I felt something, saw something, my life, mistakes, things lost. Is that it?”

  “Yes, but there is more.” He started to move away. “You will see.”

  “When?”

  “Soon,” and he made his way to the others by the table. Something larger than before was on it. I followed after him but stopped at the foot of the sea wall. The men carefully removed the body from the table and carried it to the quay. I looked across Fish Harbor and tasted the air. It was fishy, invigorating. The men gently placed the body into a fishing boat. Already I was swaying with the swell of the sea. I moved to the table, saw traces of fresh blood on the smooth slab. Good-bye Marjory. Good-bye.

  One of the men approached me. “We go now,” he said. I nodded. “When we return, you can stay at the old woman’s house. Perhaps there you will learn more.” I nodded again. “You must come with us. You know?” I nodded and walked with him to the quayside.

  Before I got down into the boat I looked across to the wall where Marjory and I had first crouched. A street light eased the darkness behind it, revealing the road and path, but the wall cast a shadow on its harbor side, adding a blacker density to the night-sprung darkness along its length. As I stared at the wall, I became aware of an indistinct figure moving in front of it, as if searching the ground for something. I wondered what the old woman’s house would be like. Wondered what she was looking for.

  I turned and got into the boat, the body beside me, covered with tarpaulin. I put a hand on the cover, felt a surge of guilt and tried to resist the thoughts about what they had done to her. I failed and succumbed to an overwhelming need to see.

  As the boat moved off, I lifted a corner of tarpaulin; heard my name shouted from the quayside; saw bloody eye sockets in an old woman’s face, a child by her side; saw Marjory looking down at me, rubbing her head; saw her face change from anger as she shouted “They attacked me, Jack. They hit me on the head,” to shock as her eyes met mine and she screamed “Your eyes, Jack. What have they done to your eyes?” and realized then how horribly, horribly wrong I had got it all.

  I touched my eyes, rubbed them; they felt normal. What had Marjory meant? Panic-stricken, I looked at the men.

  “You said you understood,” said one.

  “You will like my mother’s house,” said a second, glancing at the old woman’s body.

  “My sister lives there,” said a third. “She is understanding and will make a good wife.”

  “You have nothing to fear,” said a fourth. “You are amongst friends. We will always help you.”

  And then the oldest man, the one I had sat with on the sea wall, looked up, his hard dark eyes transfixing me.

  “The old woman was getting beyond her years. She wanted peace with her maker. I thought you knew this.” He looked back to the quayside, to Marjory. “You thought the gift would be her?” he said, looking back at me.

  Marjory’s voice screamed out into the darkness. “Jack, you bastard. You wait until you get back. I’ll have the police here waiting for you and your murderous friends. You just wait, I’ll have you in jail and divorce you. You won’t get away with this.” Her voice took too long to recede into the distance.

  “She’ll get the police,” I muttered.

  “It doesn’t matter,” replied the oldest man.

  “Doesn’t matter? Doesn’t matter? She’s a witness. Maybe one of many. The restaurant on the other side; the owners probably live in it. The buildings along the road. Someone could have looked out of the—”

  “Do not worry yourself.”

  The other men started to chuckle.

  “What do you mean—don’t worry? When she calls the—”

 
; “It will be no problem for us.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I own the restaurant,” said one of the men.

  “And I own the buildings on the road,” said another. “They are offices and always empty at night.”

  “And I am the Chief Administrator for the island,” said a third.

  “And I am the Harbor Master,” said the fourth.

  I looked at the oldest man. “And I suppose you’re a policeman?” I said.

  His face lit up with a warm smile. “We have not been formally introduced,” and he held out his hand. “My name is Vicente Montero. I am the Chief of Police for Lanzarote, and I see no problems for us. No problems at all.”

  And he was right. And so was Marjory, in part. She spent the rest of her holiday in a police cell on a trumped-up charge, conveniently dropped two hours before her plane was due to take off. I saw her once before she left, at a time when the darkness is as comforting as the deeper depths of the sea.

  When I removed my sunglasses, the dull light in her cell screamed into my eyes. (They say my eyes will slowly adapt to light, but it will take time). When Marjory started to scream I put my sunglasses back on, but her screaming continued. I left, unable to bear her noise. Besides, I had nothing to say. My eyes said it all, though I doubt she would ever be able to understand. Anyway, I really only wanted one last look at her.

  When she returned to England, she divorced me. My children flew out to see me, but my new friends took me to a small fishing village in Tenerife until they had returned home. They write, and I reply, but never with an invitation. They wouldn’t understand either. And they certainly wouldn’t understand my new wife.

  I don’t miss them, for I have other children now. Sometimes at night I lie in bed and swim with them. Their life is a free life, and what they give me is so much more than what I can give them. Which is to be expected, for they are older than the oceans and have never been caught by net or hook, and the blackest depths they inhabit are so much more illuminating than the harsh glare of the other world, your world.

  God-fish; their name was not ill-chosen.

  RIDI BOBO by Robert Devereaux

  “Ridi Bobo” is a very strange story from that great bastion of the unnerving, Weird Tales. I read this in manuscript form last year and would have included it in that year’s The Year’s Best Horror Stories, but the story was bumped to a 1993 issue, making it ineligible for the 1992 harvest of horrors. Ellen Datlow had the same problem with the story for her year’s best anthology. Fortunately, we solved the problem for 1993.

  Robert Devereaux was coy when asked to furnish the usual biographical notes, and I’m tempted to make some of them up just to serve as warning to others. He did admit to living in Fort Collins, Colorado, and having had a first horror novel, Deadweight, published this past March by Dell/Abyss. Since the end of 1990 he has had about a dozen stories published in the small press and in anthologies. And he is at work on his next novel.

  Devereaux also was once changed into a herring, eats paper clips and eight-track tapes, feeds expresso to pigeons, and has twice been seen with Elvis atop Boulder Dam.

  At first little things niggled at Bobo’s mind: the forced quality of Kiki’s mimed chuckle when he went into his daily pratfall getting out of bed; the great care she began to take painting in the teardrop below her left eye; the way she idly fingered a pink puffball halfway down her shiny green suit. Then more blatant signals: the creases in her crimson tent; the bored arcs her floppy shoes described when she walked the ruff-necked piglets; a wistful shake of the head when he brought out their favorite set of shiny steel rings and invited her, with the artful pleas of his expressive white gloves, to juggle with them.

  But Bobo knew it was time to seek professional help when he whipped out his rubber chicken and held it aloft in a stranglehold—its eyes X’d shut in fake death, its pitiful head lolled against the back of his glove—and all Kiki could offer was a soundless yawn, a fatigued cock of her conical nightcap, and the curve of her back, one lazy hand waving bye-bye before collapsing languidly beside her head on the pillow. No honker would be brought forth that evening from her deep hip pocket, though he could discern its outline there beneath the cloth, a coy maddening shape that almost made him hop from toe to toe on his own. But he stopped himself, stared forlornly at the flaccid fowl in his hand, and shoved it back inside his trousers.

  He went to check on the twins, their little gloved hands hugging the blankets to their chins, their perfect snowflake-white faces vacant with sleep. People said they looked more like Kiki than him, with their lime-green hair and the markings around their eyes. Beautiful boys, Jojo and Juju. He kissed their warm round red noses and softly closed the door.

  In the morning, Bobo, wearing a tangerine apron over his bright blue suit, watched Kiki drive off in their new rattletrap Weezo, thick puffs of exhaust exploding out its tailpipe. Back in the kitchen, he reached for the Buy-Me Pages. Nervously rubbing his pate with his left palm, he slalomed his right index finger down the Snooper listings. Lots of flashy razz-ma-tazz ads, lots of zingers to catch a poor clown’s attention. He needed simple. He needed quick. Ah! His finger thocked the entry short and solid as a raindrop on a roof; he noted the address and slammed the book shut.

  Bobo hesitated, his fingers on his apron bow. For a moment the energy drained from him and he saw his beloved Kiki as she’d been when he married her, honker out bold as brass, doing toe hops in tandem with him, the shuff-shuff-shuff of her shiny green pants legs, the ecstatic ripples that passed through his rubber chicken as he moved it in and out of her honker and she bulbed honks around it. He longed to mimic sobbing, but the inspiration drained from him. His shoulders rose and fell once only; his sweep of orange hair canted to one side like a smart hat.

  Then he whipped the apron off in a tangerine flurry, checked that the boys were okay playing with the piglets in the backyard, and was out the front door, floppy shoes flapping toward downtown.

  Momo the Dick had droopy eyes, baggy pants, a shuffle to his walk, and an office filled to brimming with towers of blank paper, precariously tilted—like gaunt placarded and stilted clowns come to dine—over his splintered desk. Momo wore a battered old derby and mock-sighed a lot, like a bloodhound waiting to die.

  He’d been decades in the business and had the dust to prove it. As soon as Bob walked in, the tramp-wise clown seated behind the desk glanced once at him, peeled off his derby, twirled it, and very slowly very deliberately moved a stiffened fist in and out of it. Then his hand opened—red nails, white fingers thrust out of burst gloves—as if to say, Am I right?

  Bobo just hung his head. His clownish hands drooped like weights at the ends of his arms.

  The detective set his hat back on, made sympathetic weepy movements—one hand fisted to his eye—and motioned Bobo over. An unoiled drawer squealed open, and out of it came a puff of moths and a bulging old scrapbook. As Momo turned its pages, Bobo saw lots of illicit toe hops, lots of swollen honkers, lots of rubber chickens poking where they had no business poking. There were a whole series of pictures for each case, starting with a photo of his mopey client, progressing to the flagrante delicto evidence, and ending, almost without exception, in one of two shots: a judge with a shock of pink hair and a huge gavel thrusting a paper reading DIVORCE toward the adulterated couple, the third party handcuffed to a Kop with a tall blue hat and a big silver star on his chest; or two corpses, their floppy shoes pointing up like warped surfboards, the triumphant spouse grinning like weak tea and holding up a big pistol with a BANG! flag out its barrel, and Momo, a hand on the spouse’s shoulder, looking sad as always and not a little shocked at having closed another case with such finality.

  When Bobo broke down and mock-wept, Momo pulled out one end of a checkered hanky and offered it. Bobo cried long and hard, pretending to dampen yard upon yard of the unending cloth. When he was done, Momo reached into his desk drawer, took out a sheet with the word CONTRACT at the top and two X’d lines for
signatures, and dipped a goose-quill pen into a large bottle of ink. Bobo made no move to take it but the old detective just kept holding it out, the picture of patience, and drops of black ink fell to the desktop between then.

  Momo tracked his client’s wife to a seedy Three-Ring Motel off the beaten path. She hadn’t been easy to tail. A sudden rain had come up and the pennies that pinged off his windshield had reduced visibility by half, which made the eager Weezo hard to keep up with. But Momo managed it. Finally, with a sharp right and a screech of tires, she turned into the motel parking lot. Momo slowed to a stop, eyeing her from behind the brim of his sly bowler. She parked, climbed up out of the tiny car like a soufflé rising, and rapped on the door of Room Five, halfway down from the office.

  She jiggled as she waited. It didn’t surprise Momo, who’d seen lots of wives jiggle in his time. This one had a pleasingly sexy jiggle to her, as if she were shaking a cocktail with her whole body. He imagined the bulb of her honker slowly expanding, its bell beginning to flare open in anticipation of her little tryst. Momo felt his bird stir in his pants, but a soothing pat or two to his pocket and a few deep sighs put it back to sleep. There was work afoot. No time nor need for the wild flights of his long-departed youth.

  After a quick reconnoiter, Momo went back to the van for his equipment. The wooden tripod lay heavy across his shoulder and the black boxy camera swayed like the head of a willing widow as he walked. The rest—unexposed plates, flash powder, squeezebulb—Momo carried in a carpetbag in his free hand. His down-drawn mouth puffed silently from the exertion, and he cursed the manufacturers for refusing to scale down their product, it made it so hard on him in the inevitable chase.

  They had the blinds down but the lights up full. It made sense. Illicit lovers liked to watch themselves act naughty, in Momo’s experience, their misdoings fascinated them so. He was in luck. One wayward blind, about chest high, strayed leftward, leaving a rectangle big enough for his lens. Miming stealth, he set up the tripod, put in a plate, and sprinkled huge amounts of glittery black powder along his flashbar. He didn’t need the flashbar, he knew that, and it caused all manner of problems for him, but he had his pride in the aesthetics of picture-taking, and he was willing to blow his cover for the sake of that pride. When the flash went off, you knew you’d taken a picture; a quick bulb squeeze in the dark was a cheat and not at all in keeping with his code of ethics.