After he looks at each of the portraits in turn, the Count drags himself to where the painter genuflects on the stone floor. Segmented sections of the Count’s body wrap around the painter, claws decorated with jagged hooklike scales press cruelly against the painter’s old skin. The painter smells air which is not quite breath, but which nonetheless has been expelled from deep within the body of the Count.
“I know that there’s one missing. Can you explain yourself, boy?” the Count says.
The painter looks up and locks his fullest concentration on the light, which is so dim as to almost be lost.
“Some things even you are denied, Master,” he said.
Dragon’s Blood is exceptionally sensitive to light.
LOST ALLEYS by Jeffrey Thomas
Jeffrey Thomas is the other half of the Thomas brother act in this volume of The Year’s Best Horror Stories. Yes, Jeffrey, there is a conspiracy. Watch for the coffee reference, as Thomas confesses all:
“I was born October 3, 1957, in Marlborough, MA. My dad is a painter/poet whose verses, mostly inspired by his Navy service in WWII, have received a lot of local attention. My mother used to write a column for a local paper, as did my sister, and one of my two younger brothers is Scott (“Memento Mori”) Thomas. I am married to a lovely deaf woman and we have a one-year-old son, Colin, who likes to grimace and contort like a Scanner, and laughs when he ‘blows up’ his dad or Uncle Scott.
“I have sold stories to the magazines Gorezone, Strange Days, and so on, one of my stories having been reprinted in the hard-cover ‘best of’ collection Quick Chills II. An SF story of mine will soon appear in Jerry Pournelle’s theme anthology Liberty and Justice for All. I am also a published artist, cartoonist, and poet, and am editor of the small press publication The End.
“I have a yin and yang tattooed on each hand, live life one coffee at a time, and aspire to be the Elvis Costello of horror.
“ ‘Lost Alleys’ was written under the inspiration of three of my favorite authors: H.P. Lovecraft, D.F. Lewis and W.H. Pugmire.”
There are places in cities only the drunk, drugged, or insane can find. Even if you have been there before, you will not find them again if sober—assuming you are one who occasionally regains sobriety. The angles and planes, the layout of buildings, conspire to direct you elsewhere, to more prosaic destinations. It may be this design is intentional. Streets point you past these alleys, and more conventional alleys bend eye and foot past the narrow suballeys. Magician’s misdirection and the psychology of art—but also our fear and inhibition of straying from the path—keep these places hidden.
I have found such secret or forgotten corners in several cities; I can usually remember what I saw at these places, but not always which city I found them in. I can’t always remember straight off in the morning which city I’m currently in. I suppose my proclivity for finding these shadowy caves in the mountain range of a city has to do with the fact that I am usually either drunk or drugged, and perhaps always insane.
Somehow tonight I had found my way back to a courtyard I had visited before in my somnambulistic wanderings. You never actually forget anything; your mind simply blots out what is unnecessary, or unwanted. But part of me must have wanted to return to see another of the battles in this tiny arena.
The walls were of brick, and stretched high, windowless. Perhaps it had been a great chimney; there was a black iron door, low to the ground. They kept some of the contestants in there. That other night, I had watched an Oriental dwarf battle a thylacine, one of those supposedly extinct Tasmanian tigers. Crates and cinder-blocks piled shoulder-high enclosed the fighting ring. When I arrived this night, several dozen dark forms ringed the ring. Only two chickens wearing spurs presently went at it.
I can’t stand cruelty to animals; I had been glad when the thylacine won. I stood back smoking a cigarette until more willing opponents were brought out. These two had made a decision to enter the ring. Not necessarily a rational decision, but they weren’t innocent victims. Well, victims yes, of many unknown tortures from without and within, but too far gone to merit much concern from me. I didn’t ask for their concern, either.
They were two naked men. One was tall and skeletal, the other short and even thinner. The tall one wore brass knuckles with spikes on one hand, in the other gripped a baling hook. His opponent held a railroad spike and a broken bottle with a much-taped neck for a handle. The short one was black, and had blacker keloids of scar tissue, primarily on his face, but I didn’t know if they were decorative or the wounds of past exhibitions.
I insinuated myself close to the ring’s barrier. Someone squeezed my ass but when I didn’t look they stopped, and anyway the battle had begun.
The gladiators sprang away from each other, the tall one swinging his brass-knuckled fist up into his own face, the short warrior gouging his bottle into his own inner thigh while pounding the dull chisel-point of his spike into his sternum. I leaned onto the wall; I’d never seen this before.
No one cheered them on. These matches were always nearly silent. Even the dying didn’t scream. A man in a three piece suit on my right clutched foreign-looking money in his fist, whispering encouragement to one of them under his breath.
The tall one had hooked himself in the leg and tore upward with terrible jerks. His blood was very distinct, if black, on his cadaverous skin. But now the black man charged him, linked arms with the man and wrestled him to the ground, the tall man’s ripped leg too agonized or damaged to resist this. The black man got his arms around both of the other’s and forced his face into the floor. Holding the tall man’s arms inside his elbows left the black man’s hands free to jab his bottle under his jaw and swing his forehead down onto the spike he clenched, hammering deep gashes into his own dark skin.
I understood now. The combatants were to combat themselves; one had to inflict more damage to himself than the other could do to his body, while preventing the other—without harming him—from mutilating himself. The black man had taken charge quickly, perhaps a running champion. But now the tall one twisted half free, and he had extricated the baling hook from his leg. He swung it up into his throat, and wrenched his arm out to one side with great force for so emaciated a creature. I heard a hiss of approval from the spectators, and a hiss of blood.
The black man bore all his slight weight down onto the other’s arm (he obviously wasn’t allowed to let go of either weapon to use his hands) but the wound was already too wide. The tall man quickly became mostly as dark as the black man, in the dim light. I felt a damp mist on my hand. The tall man convulsed under the smaller. Ah, now I knew. The black wasn’t the running champion, but the running loser, and the fight with one’s self had been to the death.
There were more contests. Two spirited adolescents one would have imagined engaged in a video game challenge instead. Two men wrestling to rape each other. A man with a spear in a wheelchair against two pit bulls which had been firmly lashed together so that they faced in opposite directions. All three lost, I understand, but I had then turned away to do the drugs I had brought with me.
I awoke inside a dark place. I realized it was the place behind that black iron door. Panic came over me. They were going to use me in the next games! But I could vaguely recall crawling into that space, and falling asleep there. When I pushed at the door, it opened on creaking rusty hinges.
Square of light at the top of the chimney, and though the shaft was blue with shadowed gloom, I was startled at the relative brightness of day. I was afraid to emerge from my safe tomb, but did. The arena was empty but for an obese man with a shaven head inside the ring, spray-painting over the dried blood. He just glanced at me. I wandered around the outside of the ring, between it and the walls of the chimney, as though circling lost in a spiral maze, smoking a broken cigarette I found.
The obese man gave me some drugs after I blew him. I sat against the brick wall, pulled my knees up close, waiting for night, saving the drugs in my pocket until much later. I
would take them before the fights, however; I did not want to see the fights without the drugs.
I couldn’t leave, you understand, until that night. It was daylight. I was sober. I didn’t know the way.
SALUSTRADE by D.F. Lewis
Born in 1948 in Walton-on-Naze, D.F. Lewis currently lives in Surrey. In 1968 August Derleth rejected two of his early stories as being “pretty much pure grue.” Derleth at that time was publishing through Arkham House stories by unknown beginners such as Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, and David Drake. Crestfallen, Lewis waited twenty years to reattempt his writing career. He did so with a vengeance: he has published over 550 stories since January 1987. True, most of these stories aren’t much longer than Joey Froehlich’s poems. True, most of these small press publications not even your editor has ever heard of. But over 550 stories ...
Jessica Amanda Salmonson has described Lewis as “a cross between Lovecraft and a large demented rat observing humanity from the vantage point of a dumpster or sewer drain.” Lewis writes that he will soon be featured in a special D.F. Lewis issue of Corset Digest, and I’m not at all certain he’s joking. I do know that TAL has published The Best of D.F. Lewis and that a second volume is forthcoming. Pity it wasn’t Arkham House twenty years ago, but then how many stories could Lewis have written during those missing two decades?
He could not remember much about arriving in Starship City. Somehow, a bedsit had been arranged above a secondhand bookshop. A secretary had also been provided, a straightlaced, middle-aged woman who mixed duties between the bookshop and his requirements. The flat was mediocre, most modern conveniences and, very important, his own front door. But how could he explain the subtle hatred he felt for the bookshop below? He even used the bookshop’s headed notepaper (discovered in an otherwise empty drawer in the bedsit) to write a letter of complaint to the bookshop. However, when he tried to recall the contents of the letter after he had posted it, all he could remember was one vague portmanteau expression involving “gladiola”—something about flowers, he thought, if it was spelled correctly.
The secretary was calling up the stairs to him. “Mr. Williams! Mr. Williams!!” Could she have a key to his front door? The sense of security seemed to dissolve as grounds melt to murky hot water. He opened the internal door and discerned the upturned gaze of the secretary.
“Miss Lakeminster, could you please knock on the front door in future? I didn’t know you had a master key.”
“I didn’t use a key, Mr. Williams. I really didn’t! I thought I spotted a dark shape—like a man—and it fiddled about in your porch. Mr. Williams, I was suspicious and when I got here, the door was open!”
“I haven’t seen anybody.”
“Well, it’s very peculiar.”
“The wind must have blown it open—I might have accidentally left it off the catch ...” He suddenly remembered the letter. “Did you get my letter?” He had forgotten she had typed it. He could hardly see Miss Lakeminster in the semidarkness of the stairs, but he shuddered as he imagined her parboiled face and damning eyes. Miss Lakeminster equally could hardly see Mr. Williams’ face staring bodilessly around the quarter-opened door. The dark shape of a figure, whose outline Miss Lakeminster had thought she had seen in the porch, was now hidden, between them on the stairs, by the converging half-darkness of each observer. It crouched and watched their dialogue.
“What letter?”
“You know, the letter you ...”
“Oh, do you mean this one?” She held up an unopened window envelope which had been in her pocket. Mr. Williams thought he saw her offer him a white oblong through the dimness, so he descended toward her. The figure squashed itself against the wall at the side of the stairs, thus allowing Mr. Williams to pass with only the merest brush of cloth on cloth. The dusk was now so deep that even at such close proximity, he did not notice the figure squatting against the pressure of the wall. As strangely as he had arrived in the city, the letter had become one addressed to him and, grabbing it from Miss Lakeminster, he tore it open at the foot of the stairs and read it greedily. The figure left the dark well of the stairs and gracefully glided to Mr. Williams’ shoulder. The letter informed any potential reader of the job for the purpose of which Mr. Williams had been sent to Starship City. He—Dan Williams—was to be the sole astronaut chosen for the heralded mission to outer space. He staggered under the shock of the message, gradually recalling the intensive training and habilitation he had undergone for many years. The figure smiled knowingly from the back of Dan’s shadow, unseen by Miss Lakeminster who was busy scrabbling on the threadbare carpet for something she thought she had lost.
The figure slipped through the open door. Whether she—Miss Lakeminster—did indeed see it, she failed even to show one flicker of recognition in her damning eyes. It scuttled through the dark gas-lit streets, away from the shop of old books—but, before it left the vicinity, it cupped hands to its lips and homed a message to the city’s twilit inhabitants. It riffled fingers across the stack of lasthand books which were kept outside for late night bargain hunters. It chuckled, thinking of the technology humming within underground domes. The streets were left almost medieval in some insane yearning for the past. Lobbing one of the dogeared books at a nearby gaslight, it scattered off to the launch pad—and, after scampering through back-doubles and rat-runs, across ill-lit squares with spluttering fountains at their centers, under badly repaired fences and beyond the rears of old-fashioned terraced two-up-two-downs, it reached the bleak fields at the city’s edge. There, silhouetted against a blotted moon, it surveyed the spire of civilization’s pervading religion. The tall tapering rocket was fused against the night sky in agonizing splendour—on one side could be seen the panorama of the mazy city’s lights and, on the other, the far stretching plains of nothingness. The figure cowered at the root of the rocket.
Dan Williams strode through the city streets with Miss Lakeminster in his wake. In a rather clumsy and unthinking way, they had just shared sex in his bedsit. Yet their limbs retained some tingling at the memory. The dawn was about to break as they headed toward the launch pad and he led her by the hand, almost like a father guiding his daughter through a fun-fair ghost house. The rocket was limned against a near-screaming margin of dawn-orange, while large birds wheeled with gullish screeches over its rearing point. Dan thought it seemed a rare orchid with black bees dipping for the pollen. Abruptly, there again loomed the figure, garbed as a gladiator, lurching from behind the base of the rocket. Holding its sword akimbo, it trumpeted at the mindless couple. Almost instantaneously, the scene became the day of the launch. Dan Williams, astronaut supreme, was established in the module at the rocket’s point. A burst of fire bloomed at the foot of the wick and, with outlandish noise of a lunatic’s scream of blue murder, it plummeted into the sky. The citizens shaded their eyes with salutes to see it grow no bigger than a bird—now alone in the withering welkin. Then, it appeared to shudder momentarily ... and explode. Merely that. A silver flash of sword blade, then a lightning shaft against an echoing sky ... and, beyond, nothing.
Turning back toward the second-hand bookshop, Miss Lakeminster shed a tear from her no longer damning eyes. Now knowing she wanted to give up being the secretary in a bookshop in Starship City, she was heartbroken by the loss of her loved one and decided to kill herself by lying on a bed and arranging for the bookshop’s owner to immerse her head in a pile of damp secondhand books. Before she lay down, she went to the small aperture in the wall and strained her eyes to survey the gaslit city. Yet another distant rocket ship, at the city’s edge, pointed spaceward from the launch pad and it seemed to her to be a finger of some prone giant raised in reprimand over the disheveled mazes of the city slums. She heard a faraway drunken cry emerge from a steamy cafe and, as suddenly, cease, beneath the heavy approach of night. She laid a hand on the sill and, almost without impulse, she toppled back upon the bed.
Mr. Weggs entered Miss Lakeminster’s room and, before him, in the half-light of S
tarship City’s dusk, lay the cadaverous shape of the stricken lady. Just the rim of the uppermost skin reflected the twilight’s weakly golden glow as it struggled through the grimy panes of the tiny lotto-hatch in the wall. She was quite naked. Mr. Weggs, knowing how prim she had been during his acquaintance with her, shook his head in disbelief.
The sockets, where his eyes must have rested, pulsed darker than the shadow of his skull. The huddle of books in his aching arms were just another shapeless stranger of black and he wondered which of these books would hold the final suffocating victory over her breath. He strode toward the recumbent figure and carefully placed the books in a makeshift pyramid over her mouth, nose and eyes. She had loved that astronaut Williams and, now, her boss, meticulously patting the damp books into place over her features, involuntarily admired her unutterable loyalty to the deceased spaceman: he sprinkled over the pyramid of books some black blooms which had been crimson in daylight hours but now night-stained with death juice. They fell haphazardly over and through the damp pages. But she stirred slightly at this rustle of petals and her face gradually rose, spilling the books to the floor like lumpy porridge. She realized with some unexpected force that the remains of her astronaut had not been found. The explosion of the rocket far up in the wide sky had surely shattered him beyond corporeal existence. Perhaps a shred of flesh or splinter of bone fell to earth. Perhaps he had fluttered down like a slow scattering of broken petals. Perhaps he was alive, beckoning to her with a split finger. Mr. Weggs prudently withdrew from the room as a tear swelled at the tip of her nose. The books around her were nothing but memories, too—mere pages of live, thoughts that were all but dead. How could the bone of one finger split into a “V”? For a book to live, though, must it not in fact become such a “V”? As she finally died, the tear fell from her nose to the open book that had fallen in front of her and the page read: “Elizabeth Lakeminster was the secretary in a bookshop ...” May she rest in peace.
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