The Year's Best Horror Stories 9

by Karl Edward Wagner (Ed. )

  Just at that moment, from directly behind us came an inhumanly high-pitched caterwauling that pierced the air like a siren, rising above the whine of the engines. It came with heart-stopping suddenness, and we both went rigid. I saw my companion’s mouth gape as if to echo the scream. So much for the past; we’d become two old men gone all white and clutching at themselves. It was really quite comical. A full minute must have passed before I could bring myself to turn around.

  By this time the stewardess had arrived and was dabbing at the place where the man behind me, dozing, had dropped his cigarette on his lap. The surrounding passengers, whites especially, were casting angry glances at him, and I thought I smelled burnt flesh. He was at last helped to his feet by the stewardess and one of his teammates, the latter chuckling uneasily.

  Minor as it was, the accident had derailed our conversation and unnerved my companion; it was as if he’d retreated into his beard. He would talk no further, except to ask me ordinary and rather trivial questions about food prices and accommodations. He said he was bound for Florida, looking forward to a summer of, as he put it, “R and R,” apparently financed by his sect. I asked him, a bit forlornly, what had happened in the end to the grounds keeper; he said that he had died. Drinks were served; the North American continent swung toward us from the south, first a finger of ice, soon a jagged line of green. I found myself giving the man my sister’s address—Indian Creek was just outside Miami, where he’d be staying—and immediately regretted doing so. What did I know of him, after all? He told me his name was Ambrose Mortimer. “It means ‘Dead Sea,’ ” he said. “From the Crusades.”

  When I persisted in bringing up the subject of the mission, he waved me off. “I can’t call myself a missionary anymore,” he said. “Yesterday, when I left the country, I gave up that right.” He attempted a smile. “Honest, I’m just a civilian now.”

  “What makes you think they’re after you?” I asked.

  The smile vanished. “I’m not so sure they are,” he said, not very convincingly. “I may just be getting paranoid in my old age. But I could swear that in New Delhi, and again at Heathrow, I heard someone singing—singing a certain song. Once it was in the men’s room, on the other side of a partition; once it was behind me on line. And it was a song I recognized. It’s in the Old Language.” He shrugged. “I don’t even know what the words mean.”

  “Why would anyone be singing? I mean, if they were following you?”

  “That’s just it. I don’t know.” He shook his head. “But I think—I think it’s part of the ritual.”

  “What sort of ritual?”

  “I don’t know,” he said again. He looked quite pained, and I resolved to bring this inquisition to an end. The ventilators had not yet dissipated the smell of charred cloth and flesh.

  “But you’d heard the song before,” I said. “You told me you recognized it.”

  “Yeah.” He turned away and stared at the approaching clouds. We were passing over Maine. Suddenly the earth seemed a very small place. “I’d heard some of the Chaucha women singing it,” he said at last. “It was a sort of farming song. It’s supposed to make things grow.”

  Ahead of us loomed the saffron yellow smog that covers Manhattan like a dome. The “No Smoking” light winked silently on the console above us.

  “I was hoping I wouldn’t have to change planes,” my companion said presently. “But the Miami flight doesn’t leave for an hour and a half. I guess I’ll get off and walk around a bit, stretch my legs. I wonder how long customs’ll take.” He seemed to be talking more to himself than to me. Once more I regretted my impulsiveness in giving him Maude’s address. I was half tempted to make up some contagious disease for her, or a jealous husband. But then, quite likely he’d never call on her anyway; he hadn’t even bothered to write down the name. And if he did pay a call—well, I told myself, perhaps he’d unwind when he realized he was safe among friends. He might even turn out to be good company; after all, he and my sister were practically the same age.

  As the plane gave up the struggle and sank deeper into the warm encircling air, passengers shut books and magazines, organized their belongings, made last hurried forays to the bathroom to pat cold water on their faces. I wiped my spectacles and smoothed back what remained of my hair. My companion was staring out the window, the green Air Malay bag in his lap, his hands folded on it as if in prayer. We were already becoming strangers.

  “Please return seat backs to the upright position,” ordered a disembodied voice. Out beyond the window, past the head now turned completely away from me, the ground rose to meet us and we bumped along the pavement, jets roaring in reverse. Already stewardesses were rushing up and down the aisles pulling coats and jackets from the overhead bins; executive types, ignoring instructions, were scrambling to their feet and thrashing into raincoats. Outside I could see uniformed figures moving back and forth in what promised to be a warm gray drizzle. “Well,” I said lamely, “we made it.” I got to my feet.

  He turned and flashed me a sickly grin. “Good-bye,” he said. “This really has been a pleasure.” He reached for my hand.

  “And do try to relax and enjoy yourself in Miami,” I said, looking for a break in the crowd that shuffled past me down the aisle. “That’s the important thing—just to relax.”

  “I know that.” He nodded gravely. “I know that. God bless you.” I found my slot and slipped into line. From behind me he added, “And I won’t forget to look up your sister.” My heart sank, but as I moved toward the door I turned to shout a last farewell. The old lady with the eyes was two people in front of me, but she didn’t so much as smile.

  One trouble with last farewells is that they occasionally prove redundant. Some forty minutes later, having passed like a morsel of food through a series of white plastic tubes, corridors, and customs lines, I found myself in one of the airport gift shops, whiling away the hour till my niece came to collect me; and there, once again, I saw the missionary.

  He did not see me. He was standing before one of the racks of paperbacks—the so-called “Classics” section, haunt of the public domain—and with a preoccupied air he was glancing up and down the rows, barely pausing long enough to read the titles. Like me, he was obviously just killing time.

  For some reason—call it embarrassment, a certain reluctance to spoil what had been a successful good-bye—I refrained from hailing him. Instead, stepping back into the rear aisle, I took refuge behind a rack of gothics, which I pretended to study while in fact studying him.

  Moments later he looked up from the books and ambled over to a bin of cellophane-wrapped records, idly pressing the beard back into place below his right sideburn. Without warning he turned and surveyed the store; I ducked my head toward the gothics and enjoyed a vision normally reserved for the multifaceted eyes of an insect: women, dozens of them, fleeing an equal number of tiny mansions.

  At last, with a shrug of his huge shoulders, he began flipping through the albums in the bin, snapping each one forward in an impatient staccato. Soon, the assortment scanned, he moved to the bin on the left and started on that.

  Suddenly he gave a little cry, and I saw him shrink back. He stood immobile for a moment, staring down at something in the bin; then he whirled and walked quickly from the store, pushing past a family about to enter.

  “Late for his plane,” I said to the astonished salesgirl, and strolled over to the albums. One of them lay faceup in the pile—a jazz record featuring John Coltrane on saxophone. Confused, I turned to look for my erstwhile companion, but he had vanished in the crowd hurrying past the doorway.

  Something about the album had apparently set him off; I studied it more carefully. Coltrane stood silhouetted against a tropical sunset, his features obscured, head tilted back, saxophone blaring silently beneath the crimson sky. The pose was dramatic but trite, and I could see in it no special significance: it looked like any other black man with a horn.

  New York eclipses all other cities in the spont
aneous cordiality and generosity of its inhabitants—at least, such inhabitants as I have encountered.

  —Lovecraft, 9/29/1922

  How quickly you changed your mind! You arrived to find a gold Dunsanian city of arches and domes and fantastic spires . . . or so you told us. Yet when you fled two years later you could see only “alien hordes.”

  What was it that so spoiled the dream? Was it that impossible marriage? Those foreign faces on the subway? Or was it merely the theft of your new summer suit? I believed then, Howard, and I believe it still, that the nightmare was all your own; though you returned to New England like a man reemerging into sunlight, there was, I assure you, a very good life to be found amid the shade. I remained—and survived.

  I almost wish I were back there now, instead of in this ugly little bungalow, with its air conditioner and its rotting wicker furniture and the humid night dripping down its windows.

  I almost wish I were back on the steps of the natural history museum where, that momentous August afternoon, I stood perspiring in the shadow of Teddy Roosevelt’s horse, watching matrons stroll past Central Park with dogs or children in tow and fanning myself ineffectually with the postcard I’d just received from Maude. I was waiting for my niece to drive by and leave off her son, whom I planned to take round the museum; he’d wanted to see the life-size mockup of the blue whale and, just upstairs, the dinosaurs . . .

  I remember that Ellen and her boy were more than twenty minutes late. I remember too, Howard, that I was thinking of you that afternoon, and with some amusement: much as you disliked New York in the twenties, you’d have reeled in horror at what it’s become today. Even from the steps of the museum I could see a curb piled high with refuse and a park whose length you might have walked without once hearing English spoken; dark skins crowded out the white, and mambo music echoed from across the street.

  I remember all these things because, as it turned out, this was a special day: the day I saw, for the second time, the black man and his baleful horn.

  My niece arrived late, as usual; she had for me the usual apology and the usual argument. “How can you still live over here?” she asked, depositing Terry on the sidewalk. “I mean, just look at those people.” She nodded toward a park bench around which blacks and Latins congregated like figures in a group portrait.

  “Brooklyn is so much better?” I countered, as tradition dictated.

  “Of course,” she said. “In the Heights, anyway. I don’t understand it—why this pathological hatred of moving? You might at least try the East Side. You can certainly afford it.” Terry watched us impassively, lounging against the fender. I think he sided with me over his mother, but he was too wise to show it.

  “Ellen,” I said, “let’s face it. I’m just too old to start hanging around singles bars. Over on the East Side they read nothing but best-sellers, and they hate anyone past sixty. I’m better off where I grew up—at least I know where the cheap restaurants are.” It was, in fact, a thorny problem: forced to choose between whites whom I despised and blacks whom I feared, I somehow preferred the fear.

  To mollify Ellen I read aloud her mother’s postcard. It was the prestamped kind that bore no picture. “I’m still getting used to the cane,” Maude had written, her penmanship as flawless as when she’d won the school medallion. “Livia has gone back to Vermont for the summer, so the card games are suspended & I’m hard into Pearl Buck. Your friend Rev. Mortimer dropped by & we had a nice chat. What amusing stories! Thanks again for the subscription to McCall’s; I’ll send Ellen my old copies. Look forward to seeing you all after the hurricane season.”

  Terry was eager to confront the dinosaurs; he was, in fact, getting a little old for me to superintend, and was halfway up the steps before I’d arranged with Ellen where to meet us afterward. With school out the museum was almost as crowded as on weekends, the halls’ echo turning shouts and laughter into animal cries. We oriented ourselves on the floor plan in the main lobby—YOU ARE HERE read a large green dot, below which someone had scrawled “Too bad for you”—and trooped toward the Hall of Reptiles, Terry impatiently leading the way. “I saw that in school.” He pointed toward a redwood diorama. “That too”—the Grand Canyon. He was, I believe, about to enter seventh grade, and until now had been little given to talk; he looked younger than the other children.

  We passed toucans and marmosets and the new Urban Ecology wing (“concrete and cockroaches,” sneered Terry), and duly stood before the brontosaurus, something of a disappointment: “I forgot it was just the skeleton,” he said. Behind us a group of black boys giggled and moved toward us; I hurried my nephew past the assembled bones and through the most crowded doorway, dedicated, ironically, to Man in Africa. “This is the boring part,” said Terry, unmoved by masks and spears. The pace was beginning to tire me. We passed through another doorway—Man in Asia—and moved quickly past the Chinese statuary. “I saw that in school.” He nodded at a stumpy figure in a glass case, wrapped in ceremonial robes. Something about it was familiar to me, too; I paused to stare at it. The outer robe, slightly tattered, was spun of some shiny green material and displayed tall, twisted-looking trees on one side, a kind of stylized river on the other. Across the front ran five yellow-brown shapes in loincloth and headdress, presumably fleeing toward the robe’s frayed edges; behind them stood a larger one, all black. In its mouth was a pendulous horn. The figure was crudely woven—little more than a stick figure, in fact—but it bore an unsettling resemblance, in both pose and proportion, to the one on the album cover.

  Terry returned to my side, curious to see what I’d found. “Tribal garment,” he read, peering at the white plastic notice below the case. “Malay Peninsula, Federation of Malaysia, early nineteenth century.” He fell silent.

  “Is that all it says?”

  “Yep. They don’t even have which tribe it’s from.” He reflected a moment. “Not that I really care.”

  “Well, I do,” I said. “I wonder who’d know.”

  Obviously I’d have to seek advice at the information counter in the main lobby downstairs. Terry ran on ahead, while I followed even more slowly than before; the thought of a mystery evidently appealed to him, even one so tenuous and unexciting as this.

  A bored-looking young college girl listened to the beginning of my query and handed me a pamphlet from below the counter. “You can’t see anyone till September,” she said, already beginning to turn away. “They’re all on vacation.”

  I squinted at the tiny print on the first page: “Asia, our largest continent, has justly been called the cradle of civilization, but it may also be a birthplace of man himself.” Obviously the pamphlet had been written before the current campaigns against sexism. I checked the date on the back: “Winter 1958.” This would be of no help. Yet on page four my eye fell on the reference I sought:

  . . . The model next to it wears a green silk ceremonial robe from Negri Sembilan, most rugged of the Malayan provinces. Note central motif of native man blowing ceremonial horn, and the graceful curve of his instrument; the figure is believed to be a representation of “Death’s Herald,” possibly warning villagers of approaching calamity. Gift of an anonymous donor, the robe is probably Tcho-tcho in origin, and dates from the early 19th century.

  “What’s the matter, uncle? Are you sick?” Terry gripped my shoulder and stared up at me, looking worried; my behavior had obviously confirmed his worst fears about old people. “What’s it say in there?”

  I gave him the pamphlet and staggered to a bench near the wall. I wanted time to think. The Tcho-Tcho People, I knew, had figured in a number of tales by Lovecraft and his disciples—Howard himself had called them “the wholly abominable Tcho-Tchos”—but I couldn’t remember much about them except that they were said to worship one of his imaginary deities. For some reason I associated them with Burma . . .

  But whatever their attributes, I’d been certain of one thing: the Tcho-Tchos were completely fictitious.

  Obviously I’d been wrong.
Barring the unlikely possibility that the pamphlet itself was a hoax, I was forced to conclude that the malign beings of the stories were in fact based upon an actual race inhabiting the Southeast Asian subcontinent—a race whose name the missionary had mistranslated as “the Chauchas.”

  It was a rather troublesome discovery. I had hoped to turn some of Mortimer’s recollections, authentic or not, into fiction; he’d unwittingly given me the material for three or four good plots. Yet I’d now discovered that my friend Howard had beaten me to it, and that I was put in the uncomfortable position of living out another man’s horror stories.

  Epistolary expression is with me largely replacing conversation.

  —Lovecraft, 12/23/1917

  I hadn’t expected my second encounter with the black horn-player. A month later I got an even bigger surprise: I saw the missionary again.

  Or at any rate, his picture. It was in a clipping my sister had sent me from the Miami Herald, over which she had written in ballpoint pen, “Just saw this in the paper—how awful!!”

  I didn’t recognize the face; the photo was obviously an old one, the reproduction poor, and the man was clean-shaven. But the words below it told me it was him.

  CLERGYMAN MISSING IN STORM

  (Wed.) The Rev. Ambrose B. Mortimer, 56, a lay pastor of the Church of Christ, Knoxville, Tenn., has been reported missing in the wake of Monday’s hurricane. Spokesmen for the order say Mortimer had recently retired after serving nineteen years as a missionary, most recently in Malaysia. After moving to Miami in July, he had been a resident of 311 Pompano Canal Road.