The Year's Best Horror Stories 22

by Karl Edward Wagner (Ed. )

  Now the sea fog had deposited salt on the lawn and bushes. It looked as if a thick frost had turned everything white.

  “Weee-urd.” Spuggy stood by the big front door swigging lager from a can. “Out for a walk in our nightie were we, sweetheart?”

  “If anyone’s weird it’s you, Spuggy,” said Joe, pushing past him to get into the house.

  “Inside,” ordered Viper, “and get the blasted door shut. This fucking fog is getting on me wick.”

  For a while they drank more cans of Special Brew, tossing the gold cans round the sitting room with its luxurious leather armchairs and settee. An oil painting of three black horses hung on one wall; it was as big as a garage door. The girl stared out of the window. Viper didn’t know why. The fucking fog was thicker than ever and it was as black as his granny’s armpit.

  Spuggy got up and walked to the door, through into the hall. The front door slammed. He was back in three minutes, almost embarrassed.

  “Can’t find the sodding van. That fog’s bleedin’ solid.”

  The girl turned. “I’ll show you,” she said.

  Grinning, Spuggy followed her and Viper heard him sneer under his breath. “Like a lamb to the bleedin’ slaughter.”

  Pisshead. Viper opened a beer. Spuggy was gone a long time. Full cans became empty cans, and Viper and Joe slumped deeper into the armchairs too pissed to even talk. Viper drifted in and out of sleep. The room spun slowly round in a way that turned his stomach over ... and over ... over ... and over ... and ...

  He opened his eyes. The room was full of mist. The furniture had turned frosty white ... shut that damn door ... and over ... and over ... Spuggy’s cooked some manky sausage ... ugh ... Viper couldn’t see straight ...

  He licked his lips.

  Salt. They were coated in salt.

  His eyes opened. Viper saw Joe stretched out on the settee—all white—like he’d been covered in icing sugar. Christ, he wished he’d not drunk so much bloody ...

  “Joe. Shut the door. The fog’s in the bloody house. Joe!”

  Joe did not move.

  “Christ.” Muscles aching like they were wasted with AIDS, he limped across the floor. “Shift yourself.” Viper dragged Joe off the settee. He moaned and hauled himself to his feet.

  In the hallway, Viper found the front door open with the fog flowing in like water through a breached dam. Bastard Spuggy. Left the bastard door open. He made it to the library.

  Spuggy had been working.

  “Christ, the mad bastard,” grunted Viper, and spat. Salt bit his tongue and burnt his throat.

  Spuggy had set up two of the nicked camcorders on tripods; a color television showed the image of a teenage girl tied to book shelving.

  It was no film. The camcorder pointed at the weird girl with the long hair and short nightie. Spuggy had tied her to the shelves with curtain cords. Her face was expressionless.

  “Damn. I’ll find Spuggy, Joe. You stay here, you look like shit.”

  “Feel like it,” Joe grunted. He leaned against the wall, his hair, face, clothes, leather jacket all white.

  Viper looked at his own arms. The tattoo snakes had vanished, obliterated by a coating of salt. Forcing his shaking legs to move, Viper began a search of the house.

  Empty room upon empty room. Fancy four-poster beds, dressing rooms, bathrooms with gold taps. No Spuggy. Bastard.

  As Viper trotted down a long passageway, he almost cracked into Spuggy. The idiot was carrying a portable TV and what looked like an ornamental dagger with a blade as long as your arm.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Viper tried to spit the salt out of his burning mouth.

  Spuggy’s eyes blazed. Viper had never seen the man so excited. “Snuff movie,” Spuggy panted, dribbling. “Snuff movie.” He pushed past Viper and hurried downstairs.

  Thrash the bastard. Viper nodded to himself. Thrash the bastard, let him know who’s boss. Aching, he followed.

  This place ... Viper shook his head dizzily. He opened his eyes to find himself outside the library, on his knees. How long had he been like that?

  He hauled himself through the doorway. Even though mist and salt bleached out whole chunks of the scene, he could see enough. He could see enough ...

  Joe had changed. No, he was white. He had lost his edges to the burning whiteness. Viper lurched toward him. Joe leaned against the wall where Viper had left him but he was coated in white a centimeter, two centimeters, thick.

  Salt.

  “Joe?” Viper’s voice was a faint croak.

  “Don’t bother. He’s dead,” called Spuggy callously. He was adjusting the position of the camcorders, the pictures on the two sets swinging drunkenly every time he kicked at the leg of a tripod. The girl tied to the bookshelves watched him impassively.

  Viper looked at Joe’s salt-caked face. The features were almost all gone. He was ...

  No, no. Viper looked into his eyes. They were covered by a thickening film of salt, but he could see Joe’s blue eyes. And they were moving rapidly from side to side with the quick movements of a frightened baby.

  Spuggy spoke cheerfully. “Gonna do a snuff movie, Viper.”

  “No.”

  “Who’s gonna stop me, Viper?”

  “Me.” Viper tried to take a step, but he could not move his feet. He tried to raise his arms, then to twist his torso. He couldn’t. His whole body was thickening with salt. Stiff. It was as if he was turning to stone.

  Bastard! Bastard legs, bastard arms ... It was getting difficult to breathe; his vision came and went in gouts of white. Sort of misty.

  Viper could only watch as Spuggy switched on the camcorder. On the portable was a medium shot of Joe now entombed in salt, like an Egyptian mummy swathed in white. Just a white amorphous blob.

  The other TV showed the girl, her head turned away as if trying to see through the window. Viper no longer saw her face. His head was frozen. Only Spuggy and the girl seemed free of the settling salt.

  Then Spuggy had the dagger with its vicious blade cutting the mist. You could have sliced up a whole bullock with that thing.

  Spuggy waved the knife in front of him and Viper realized he was showing it to the cameras. On the large screen, he saw the girl turn her head to face the camera.

  Jesus, it must be the booze. Viper shuddered. He struggled to draw in breath, his eyes locked onto the picture of the girl’s face. Christ, yes, it was the booze. Just pissed, Viper old son, just pissed.

  Now he recognized the girl’s face.

  Forget her long hair. Somehow the face reminded him of how he looked when he was thirteen or fourteen. Sort of clean, unlived in, innocent. The same shaped eyes and nose with a spattering of freckles.

  Spuggy stabbed her. Once. Twice. Three times. Slowly.

  But it wasn’t right. He must have missed, cut himself somehow. Spuggy had split his right forearm open from elbow to wrist; blood washed down his legs like the red wine they had splashed about the cellar earlier.

  He stabbed again.

  This time he only managed to pierce his groin with the steel blade. He was yelling and swearing and screaming. He blundered against the tripods sending the pictures swinging wildly on the TVs.

  Viper could only hear dimly. Spuggy’s face was just a mask, blown up like a Halloween balloon twisting and splitting in pain and fury.

  He struck again at the girl’s breast.

  Again he missed and the huge blade ended up lodged deep in his ribs just above his belly. The screaming mask face seemed to deflate and Spuggy flopped limply down.

  On the screen, Viper could just make out the girl. She was unhurt. Her face, expressionless, still looked how he once did as a boy. She was watching him. He sensed she wanted to help him but didn’t know how. Or maybe he simply didn’t know how to ask for her help.

  Christ, he wished he could breathe. He was locked solid in this concrete hard salt crust. Suffocating.

  On the portable TV he saw himself. A large white blob
. Like a maggot or an insect pupa. Motionless.

  I’ll get through this. I will live. I’ll drive that vanful of shit back to that stinking slum in the backside of Yorkshire. All it needs is willpower. I’m alive.

  Keep saying it, Viper, mate. Say it Viper.

  Say it, you bastard! SAY IT!

  I’m alive ...

  I AM ALIVE.

  I AMM ALLI-IVE!

  I I I AM—I AM

  I ... I I ... I I I I I I

  LADY’S PORTRAIT, EXECUTED IN ARCHAIC COLORS by Charles M. Saplak

  Charles M. Saplak was born April, 1960 in Beckley, West Virginia. He’s worked at numerous jobs, including a six-year stint in the Navy during which he traveled the Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans on the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga. He lives now in Radford, Virginia with his wife and six-year-old daughter Charlene. He’s published poems and stories in the past few years in places like Expanse, Argonaut, Urbanite, Terminal Fright, and in the Horror’s Head Press Noctulpa anthologies. He’s just finished a historical/fantasy novel entitled The Four Talismans, which is to be the first in a five book series. He needs an agent and/or publisher.

  Saplak would like to acknowledge the encouragement and inspiration of Alayne Gelfand, editor of Prisoners of the Night. He had her market in mind when writing this story, and when he missed her deadline, she encouraged him to try elsewhere, which got the story into the Writers of the Future Contest. That’s known as landing on your feet.

  Cerulean blue is the color of a cloudless sky.

  Sandra watched the sky lighten over the city. She struggled to keep from feeling depressed these days. It was getting near the end of March and spring was late in coming. She would be thirty-five this spring.

  “You’re young,” she said to herself, out loud. “Cheer up, you big baby.” Still, when she looked at the sky, she got that feeling, as if she should cry. The sky here was the same sky that people were looking up to in China and Africa. Over the royal family in England and orphans in Vietnam, it was the same sky.

  Only a few windows in the buildings she could see showed lights. A lot of the apartments had curtains drawn. She was used to seeing the city wake up as she got ready to sleep. She’d been on the night shift at Sacred Heart for the past four months, where she was an ICU nurse.

  Her attention was drawn to one large square of light in the building directly opposite hers. In one of the top floor studio apartments a man worked at a canvas on an easel; directly across the room from him a woman sat on a sort of stool or chair over which a dark cloth was draped.

  Sandra was by no means prudish, nor was she a voyeur, but she couldn’t help but be fascinated by this tableau before her. The man was frantically painting; from palette to canvas his arms made broad, bold gestures. Sandra watched for a few minutes before she noticed that the woman was totally naked.

  As the morning sunlight hit the window directly, it created a glare through which Sandra could no longer see. She stood for a moment, then stepped well back from the window to remove her own clothes, to prepare for bed. As she undressed she looked back to the window, reassuring herself that no one could see in. Visible to her through the window at this angle was nothing but the cloudless sky.

  Red madder is extracted from fields of flower.

  The city has a population of approximately one hundred and twenty-six thousand, including homeless and transients who do not appear on any census, voters’ register, or tax roster. Also included are an undisclosed number of criminals whose dealings are mainly cash, designed to leave no traceable records.

  The population of the city fluctuates. The Hopeful arrive. The Disillusioned leave. Births. Deaths. This cycle of population is somewhat like the breathing of a tremendous sleeping beast, like a biological cycle of an animal.

  In any given day apartments are left vacant; families are seemingly deserted; automobiles are abandoned to rust and vandalism; houses are left filled or half-filled with belongings. People seemingly vanish.

  Some of these disappearances create quite a stir, depending on the visibility of the vanished, and upon the intricacy and depth of their relationships with those they left behind.

  The people of the city enjoy a sort of privacy in numbers, a sort of chosen anonymity.

  As that winter turned over to spring, numerous single, “unattached” women disappeared, relatively unnoticed.

  Ochres harmonize a scene through their dulling qualities.

  The intensive care unit at Sacred Heart has the qualities of a chapel, a sepulcher, a spacecraft module, a mortuary, a medieval prison. The ward has room for eight patients. The patients are separated by opaque curtains of off-white; the ceilings, walls, and floor are coordinated in the most neutral tones of beige, ecru, ivory.

  Some of the patients hallucinate and frequently speak to dead friends or relatives. Others are not conscious. Some are attended by their own watchful friends or relatives in three-minute periods every two hours. Still others are alone. Most are attached to machinery designed to monitor, regulate, control, or even stimulate anatomical functions of living.

  Sandra moves among these people every night. She is competent and professional, and she often reminds herself of the necessity for compassion, the importance of maintaining perspective in difficult situations.

  She sometimes cries without knowing it.

  She is meticulous and conscientious in matters of recordkeeping and maintenance.

  Often her work causes her to touch people, making skin-to-skin contact, as they die.

  Viridian is somewhat transparent, but withstands the ravages of light as it ages.

  By accident, Sandra met the painter soon after that. She had stopped off in a coffee shop near her apartment, and there he was, sitting at one of the booths. She couldn’t have explained exactly how she knew it was he; she just knew. He had greenish eyes and hair of an indistinct color which was thinning, but which was thinning all over, not in the usual pattern. He had a sketch pad open on the table top in front of him. A cup of weak-looking tea sat cooling near his right hand; the morning light passed through faint vapors of steam above the cup. His hands were exceptionally slender and his fingers exceptionally long. His right hand was poised over the blank page of the sketch book, and his ring finger was bent so that the pad of the fingertip could rest on the paper. He moved his finger in a lazy, slow, delicate circle, over and over.

  “I recognize you,” he said.

  Sandra realized that she had been staring. Her eyes met his and she was ready to turn away in embarrassment, but something stopped her. His face was so open and relaxed, so natural, he was like a sleepy child.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and smiled back.

  “Don’t apologize. Sometimes that’s what life is like. Recognition. The statue hidden within the stone, the spirit hidden within the body. Or the picture within the page.”

  He held up the sketch pad and Sandra saw that there was a picture there, a woman unclothed, totally without tension, more like a spirit than a person, but just as the woman’s body was uncurled and open, so was her face unlocked, and her eyes open and streaming tears. But actually, as Sandra blinked, she saw that the page was in fact blank and held no picture there. Undoubtedly the previous six hours at Sacred Heart had made her susceptible to imagination.

  “Maybe I’ll paint you someday,” he said.

  “Stranger things have happened,” Sandra answered, and it wasn’t a yes and it wasn’t a no, but after eight years in this city—this city of rapists and con artists—she was surprised to hear herself say it.

  She turned back to her toast and apple juice, and felt his eyes on her back, but it wasn’t exactly an unpleasant sensation like it could have been, so she turned back again, and of course he was gone.

  Indigo is obtained from roots of the plant of that name. It fades.

  “That corner is having a bad night,” her supervisor, Nurse Mitchell, says, glancing at Sandra over her hornrimmed glasses. “She may not
last.”

  Sandra nods but thinks: That woman is not “that corner.” She is not “bed number eight.” She is not “the subject.” She is not the three-hundred-and-forty dollar per day Medicare payment. She has a name, a life. She still has a name, a life.

  That night Sandra adjusts a heparin lock on the wrist of that woman. She moves with sure, gentle motions. Even through the narcotics the wrist and arm respond to pain. In the dim fluorescence Sandra notices the ancient skin. Sandra notices the pigmentation which looks dull but in fact contains myriad colors of the spectrum, the purplish bruise, bluish veins, the pale white of scars, the dull pink of feminine skin, and as the needle of the IV is seated within the lock the plastic tube is momentarily touched with the deep night indigo of human blood.

  I will be alone in a bed like this someday. This will be me.

  She may not last.

  Umber is important for shadows.

  In the bathroom in his apartment, Sandra undressed. As a nurse, Sandra had seen nude people hundreds of times. She hadn’t imagined that she would feel so uncomfortable removing her clothes here and putting on the chenille bathrobe he had advised her to bring for covering up when taking a break.

  He was standing by his easel when Sandra entered, laying out tubes and jars of paint, arranging rows of brushes, glancing into the canvas. He mixed some tubes of pigment in with binders which reminded Sandra of thick lymphatic substance. She pulled back the shoulders of the robe, pulled it off completely, folded it and set it away from where he had an off-white cloth draped over a small padded chair.

  With her clothes off, in the warm room, she had the fleeting sensation that her breasts were inadequate. Whenever she had undressed before a man for the first time, she had been very conscious of her breasts. All the hideous, silly teenager thoughts—will he think they’re too small, too large, the “right” shape?—all of these melted away as he looked at her. She somehow knew that in his eyes, she just was.