The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 24 (Mammoth Books)

by Stephen Jones

  He had the chair set up so he could gaze out across the desert that spread out behind the motel, away from the highway that fed out through the south-west corner of Colorado and into the rest of the West. That desert was as flat and featureless and as seamlessly light or as seamlessly dark as the ocean, depending on the time of day and the position of the sun and the moon. So much depended on those relative positions, and the things that waited beyond, much more than most human beings were destined to know.

  Out on the distant edges of that desert, out at the farthest borders the sharpest human eye could see, lay shadowed dunes and hard rock exposures, ancient cinder cones and mesas, flat top islands in the sky. He had never been to such a place, but it had been a location fixed in his dreams for most of his life.

  Every day Walker sat there in the chair, the eaves of the motel roof providing some minimal protection from glare, a notepad in his lap, a blue cooler full of beer at his feet, and watched those barely distinguishable distant features, waiting for something to change or appear, or even just for some slight alteration in his own understanding. “I’m working out our future plans and finances,” was what he told Angie, and of course she’d believed him. If she’d only taken a peek at that notepad she would have seen the doodles depicting people and animals being consumed by creatures whose only purpose was to consume, or the long letters to beings unknown using words few human tongues could say. But no doubt she would not have understood what she was seeing, in any case. If he had a sense of humour he might say, “It’s a letter from my father.” But since he had never seen the utility of humour he did not.

  Angie had never asked him why they had to travel so far just to wait for the results of some job applications, especially when there were no jobs at Crossroads or anywhere within a hundred miles of that place. He hadn’t even bothered to concoct a story because he’d been so sure she wouldn’t ask. This woman was making him lazy.

  Once or twice he’d told her directly how stupid she was. She’d looked as if she might break apart. Part of him wanted to feel sorry for what he’d said. Part of him wanted to know what the feeling was like, to feel like your face was going to break. But he didn’t have the capacity in him. He supposed some people were born victims. And some people were born like him. Predator was a good word for people like him, he supposed. There were a great many predators on this planet.

  Their two kids had been climbing the walls. Not literally, of course, but that’s the way Angie had expressed it. The only place they had to play was the motel parking lot. As far as he was concerned they should let them loose out there – the children could learn a few lessons about taking care of themselves. If they saw a car coming, let them learn to get out of the way. But Angie wouldn’t allow it. He was their father, of course – they had his wise blood in their bodies. He could have insisted. But sometimes you let the mother have the final say where the care of the children is concerned.

  Walker’s own mother let him wander loose from the time he was six years old – that had been her way. It didn’t mean she had no caring in her for him. Actually, he had no idea how she felt. She could have felt anything, or nothing. That was simply the way she was.

  He’d never met his father, but he felt as if he knew him – certainly he could feel him. She’d lain with a hundred men or more, so it could have been anyone, or anything he supposed. But Walker felt he’d know his father if he saw him, however he manifested himself. It never bothered him. And if he did see this creature, his father, he wasn’t even sure he’d say hello. But he might have questions. He might want a sample of his blood. He might want to see what happened if he poured his father’s blood onto the grounds of the Crossroads.

  The boy – they’d named him Jack – threw something at the girl. Gillian, or Ginger, depending on the day. Walker had never quite found a name he’d really liked for her, or even remembered from one day to the next. Walker didn’t know what the boy tried to hit her with – he never saw anything. He didn’t watch them very closely. And there was no sense in asking them – they were both little liars. That was okay with him – in his experience most human beings didn’t respond well to the truth in the best of cases. These children were probably better off lying.

  But Angie wouldn’t stop. “They’re going to grow up to be monsters! Both of them! Jack slaps her. Gillian kicks him. This crap goes on all day! Do you even care how they might turn out?”

  “Of course I care,” he’d lied. Because it would have been inconvenient if Angie had fully understood his basic attitude toward their children. He couldn’t have her attempting to take the children and leave before things had completed. “I’ll talk to them.” The relief in her face almost made him smile.

  The children looked up at him sullenly, defiantly. This was good, he thought. Most children were naturally afraid of him. “Jack, what did you throw at her?” he asked.

  “It was a rock,” Gillian or Ginger said. Walker slapped her hard across the face, her little head rocking like a string puppet’s.

  “I asked Jack,” he explained.

  She didn’t cry, just stared at him, a bubble of blood hanging from one nostril.

  “It was a rock,” Jack said quietly. Walker examined his son’s face. Something dark and distant appeared to be swimming in his light green eyes. Angie’s eyes were also that colour, but Walker had never seen anything swimming there.

  “Would it have made you feel badly if you had really hurt her?”

  Jack stared up at him dully. Then the boy turned to his sister and they looked at each other. Then they both looked back up at Walker.

  “I don’t know,” Jack replied.

  “If you continue to behave this way where other people can see you, eventually you may be detained and imprisoned. It’s your decision, but that is something to think about. Right now, you are upsetting your mother. You do not want to do that. You upset her and she becomes troublesome for me. You do not want that, do you understand?” Both children nodded. “Very well, go play quietly for awhile. Stay out of my field of vision.”

  After they left Walker saw that a couple of drops of his daughter’s blood were resting on top of the sand. He kicked at them and they scurried away.

  When they’d first checked in the Crossroads had been practically empty, just a single elderly couple with a camper who’d checked out the very next day. But since then a series of single guests and families had wandered in, almost unnoticeable at first since they mostly came in during the night, but the last couple of days there had been a steady stream, so by week’s end the motel was full. Still, more people came into the parking lot, or stopped in the empty land around the building, some on foot with backpacks who set up small tents or lean-tos, others in cars they could sleep in. Despite their numbers these new visitors were relatively quiet, remaining in their rooms or whatever shelter they’d managed, or gathering casually to talk quietly amongst themselves. Many had no particular focus to their activities, but some could not keep their eyes off that horizon far beyond the motel, with its vague suggestion of dunes and mesas shimmering liquidly in the heat.

  “Why are they all here?” Angie eventually came around to asking.

  “They’re part of some travelling church group. They’ll be on their way after they rest, I’m told.”

  For the first time she looked doubtful about one of his improvised explanations, but she said nothing.

  As more people gathered his son and daughter became steadily more subdued, until eventually they were little more than phantom versions of their former selves, walking slowly through the crowd, looking carefully at every one of them, but not speaking to them, even when some of the newcomers asked them questions.

  This continued for a day or two, and although Walker could see a great deal of nervousness, a great many anxious gestures and aimless whispering, and although his sense of the bottled-up energy contained in this one location unexpectedly made his own nerves ragged, there was no explosion, and no outward signs of violence. Some
of the people in the crowd actually appeared to be paralysed. One young, dark-bearded fellow had stood by the outside elbow of the motel for two days, Walker was sure, without moving at all. Parts of the man’s cheeks had turned scarlet and begun to blister.

  He noticed that the longer the people stayed here, interacting, soaking up one and another’s presence, the more they appeared to resemble one another, and him, and his children, as if they had gathered here for some large family reunion. Walker wondered if he were to cut one of them whether their blood would also walk, and he was almost sure it would.

  He took his morning barefoot walk – why his own feet hadn’t burned he had no idea; he didn’t really even care to know – by the invisible pool. An old woman crouched there like some sort of ape. At first he thought she was humming, but as he passed her he realised she was speaking low and rapidly, and completely incomprehensibly. She sounded vaguely Germanic, but he suspected her speech wasn’t anything but her own spontaneous creation.

  He gradually became aware of a rancid stink carried on the dry desert wind. Looking around he saw that those who had sought shelter outside the poor accommodations of the Crossroads were up and about, although moving slowly. When he went toward them, it quickly became obvious that they were the source of the smell.

  A tall woman with long dark hair approached him. “You seem familiar,” she said weakly, and raised her hand as if to touch his face. He stepped back quickly, and it wasn’t because he now saw that a portion of the left cheek of her otherwise beautiful face appeared melted, but because he’d never liked the idea of strangers touching him. He knew this made little sense because he’d always been a lone figure among strangers. Angie, certainly, was a stranger as far as he was concerned, and his children Jack and (what was the girl’s name?) little better.

  Then an elderly man appeared beside her, and a young boy, all with bubbling, disease-ridden skin. Walker darted past them, and into a crowd of grasping, distorted hands, blisters bursting open on raw, burnt-looking skin. He squirmed his way out, but not without soiling himself with their secretions.

  He felt embarrassed to be so squeamish. Was he any different than they? He’d seen the dark familiar shapes swimming in their eyes like the reflections of still-evolving life forms. Clearly, he was no longer alone in the world, because what he had seen in them was both familiar and vaguely familial. But it was an uncomfortable, even an appalling knowledge.

  He was some kind of mongrel, a blending of two disparate species, and yet so were they. He doubted any of them had known their fathers. His own children were their blood kin, but at least they knew their father.

  The two most familiar children came out of the crowd and gazed at him, their faces running with changes. He felt a kind of unknowable loss, for a kind of kinship that had never been completely his, for the simpler Sunday afternoon picnic world of humanity that would now be forever out of his reach.

  Angie came outside for her children then, bellowing the dumb unmelodic scream of a despairing cow, and he struck her down with indifferent blows from both suddenly-soleaden hands. She had been his last possible door into humanity, and he had slammed her irrevocably closed. Her children looked on as unconcerned as an incursion of sand over an abandoned threshold.

  And now they’ve come out of those distant mesas and deserts, on their astounding black wings, on their thousandlegged spines, their mouths open and humming like the excited blood of ten thousand boiling insects, like the secret longings of the bestial herd, like his blood preparing to leave the confines of vein, like his blood crawling out of the midnight of collective pain, the liquid horizon unfolding.

  And out of that shimmering line the fathers come to reclaim their children, the keepers of their dark blood. And Walker must collapse in surrender as these old fathers out of the despairing nights of human frailty, in endless rebellion from the laws of the physical universe, these fathers, these cruel fathers, consume.

  GLEN HIRSHBERG

  His Only Audience

  A Normal and Nadine Adventure

  GLEN HIRSHBERG’S story collections include The Janus Tree and Other Stories, American Morons and The Two Sams, and have earned him a Shirley Jackson Award and three International Horror Guild Awards.

  His most recent novel, Motherless Child, originally published by Earthling in 2012, will be reprinted by Tom Doherty Associates/Macmillan in 2014 and followed by two sequels. He is also the author of two previous novels, The Book of Bunk and The Snowman’s Children.

  With Peter Atkins and Dennis Etchison, he co-founded the Rolling Darkness Revue, an annual touring show composed of live music, performance and ghost story readings that travels the west coast of the United States each autumn.

  “‘His Only Audience’ appeared originally in The Raven of October, the 2012 Rolling Darkness Revue chapbook,” explains Hirshberg. “It inaugurated a new, occasional series of occult detective-derived pieces featuring Normal (aka the Collector) and his long-time partner, Nadine.

  “That gives me the excuse to write about pretty much everything I love thinking about when I’m not teaching, parenting or writing other stuff. In this case, that means sea stories, crazy collectors and subcultures, disappearing radio signals, music. And people, and their ghosts, of course . . .”

  AROUND AND BENEATH them, the houseboat thumped and shuddered, and, as usual on their visits here, Nadine wished the Collector and his client would just turn off the shortwave and sit still for a while. Maybe, instead of hunching forever at the wooden table in this windowless hold, they could try the deck in the starlight, or the porthole down below, and let the world bring its wonders to them, for once. All those things down there in the bay, living or just floating. Knocking against hulls. Murmuring hello.

  “Got one,” Spook said, straightening in his chair as though called to attention. Out of the hiss and static, the spurts of Iranian classical music and snippets of BBC-wherever broadcasts, the dot–dash chirruping from ships so out of time that they still used Morse code as though anyone were out there to receive or translate it, a voice flared. Flickered out. Caught as Spook worked the console knob, locked in on the signal, and held.

  Ice-voice. The voice ice would speak in, if ice spoke. Female, if ice had gender.

  “Seven. Three. Six. Eight. Five. No.” Crackle. Empty frequency. And then again. “Seven. Three. Six . . .”

  And by the third repetition, as always, Nadine felt herself leaning forward, too, forgetting the bay, uncrossing her legs, lowering her ear toward the receiver with its console knob and compass face, its wooden casing warped and blistered.

  “A new one?” she said.

  “I think so.” Spook grabbed his notebook off the shelf behind him and scrolled quickly through his pages and pages and of charts. Lists, mostly, of all the numbers stations he’d ever located in decades of scouring the shortwave bands. Usually, he could tell just by the voice if he’d heard the signal before, though Nadine wasn’t sure how, given that so many of them used identical, inflectionless tones. She wondered if there’d been a voice-over school for numbers stations right after World War II, when they were apparently in actual use, and not just left, forgotten, to bleat their coded messages into the air for absolutely no one. Had there been a Bletchley Park for blankness, where you learned to drain yourself entirely out of your own speech?

  When he’d reached the end of his lists, Spook nodded. “Brand new.” With his mechanical pencil, he noted down the number string.

  “But not your dad’s?” Nadine asked.

  She’d said it so gently, and still the shadow swept over Spook’s lined, sun-mottled, friendly face, the way it did every time anyone asked about his father.

  “No,” he said, and closed his notebook. Only then did he seem to notice his own posture, the ramrod attention the chanting ice-voice had drawn from him. He shook his head, and the second time he did it, the shadow fell away. “And there I was wondering why they call me Spook.”

  “You never were one, were you?”
said the Collector, though his eyes and his attention remained fixed on the radio. Cataloguing, Nadine knew. Storing away information, though God knew into what sub-folder in which drawer in the bottomless pit of a file cabinet that passed for his head.

  “Me?” Spook waved a callused hand across his forehead and through his white-grey hair. “I’m a carpenter. Houseboat handyman. That’s all I’ve ever been or wanted to be.”

  “Son of Spook,” Nadine said, even more lightly, and this time, Spook laughed.

  “Son of Spook. Hey. Sorry. What are we drinking tonight?”

  “Something Belgian,” blurted the Collector, as though beating a televised Jeopardy contestant to an answer.

  Nadine rolled her eyes. “Wow, Mr Smartie, you’re on fire tonight. Now let’s try, Something More Specific for $200?” But she grinned. These evenings, after all, were rare in their lives. Spook did, technically, qualify as a client. But unlike virtually everyone else who employed the Collector, he didn’t want to beat anybody to a rediscovery or hoard away something esoteric. He simply wanted to hear, and maybe locate, numbers stations, and maybe one day pinpoint the one that had beamed out coded orders to his father the spy throughout the Cold War, and then brought him back. Home, but blank. Even more than he wanted that, though, Spook wanted company. And he served them Belgian beer, and sometimes warm Camembert. Which, in terms of her life with the Collector, almost qualified these evenings as social occasions. Couples Club.

  “Rodenbach, I think,” Spook said. “It’s a Rodenbach night.” And he smiled at Nadine, at the Collector, at his radio – which, okay, would have to do as Spook’s contribution to the Couples part of the proceedings, but still – and got up.