The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 19

by Stephen Jones

  Gimet gave out with a hoarse cry, scuttled back, clacking nails and knees against the floor. When he moved, he moved so quickly there seemed to be missing spaces between one moment and the next. The buzzing of Gimet’s bees was ferocious.

  Jubil grabbed the lantern, struck a match and lit it. Gimet was scuttling along the wall like a cockroach, racing to the edge of the window.

  Jubil leaped forward, tossed the lit lantern, hit the beast full in the back as it fled through the window. The lantern burst into flames and soaked back, causing a wave of fire to climb from the thing’s waist to the top of its head, scorching a horde of bees, dropping them from the sky like exhausted meteors.

  Jubil drew his revolver, snapped off a shot. There was a howl of agony, and then the thing was gone.

  Jubil raced out of the protective circle and the deputy followed. They stood at the open window, watched as Gimet, flame-wrapped, streaked through the night in the direction of the graveyard.

  “I panicked a little,” Jubil said. “I should have been more resolute. Now he’s escaped.”

  “I never even got off a shot,” the deputy said. “God, but you’re fast. What a draw.”

  “Look, you stay here if you like. I’m going after him. But I tell you now, the circle of power has played out.”

  The deputy glanced back at it. The pages had burned out and there was nothing now but a black ring on the floor.

  “What caused them to catch fire in the first place?”

  “Evil,” Jubil said. “When he got close, the pages broke into flames. Gave us the protection of God. Unfortunately, as with most of God’s blessings, it doesn’t last long.”

  “I stay here, you’d have to put down more pages.”

  “I’ll be taking the Bible with me. I might need it.”

  “Then I guess I’ll be sticking.”

  They climbed out the window and moved up the hill. They could smell the odour of fire and rotted flesh in the air. The night was as cool and silent as the graves on the hill.

  Moments later they moved amongst the stones and wooden crosses, until they came to a long wide hole in the earth. Jubil could see that there was a burrow at one end of the grave that dipped down deeper into the ground.

  Jubil paused there. “He’s made this old grave his den. Dug it out and dug deeper.”

  “How do you know?” the deputy asked.

  “Experience . . . And it smells of smoke and burned skin. He crawled down there to hide. I think we surprised him a little.”

  Jubil looked up at the sky. There was the faintest streak of pink on the horizon. “He’s running out of daylight, and soon he’ll be out of moon. For a while.”

  “He damn sure surprised me. Why don’t we let him hide? You could come back when the moon isn’t full, or even half full. Back in the daylight, get him then.”

  “I’m here now. And it’s my job.”

  “That’s one hell of a job you got, mister.”

  “I’m going to climb down for a better look.”

  “Help yourself.”

  Jubil struck a match and dropped himself into the grave, moved the match around at the mouth of the burrow, got down on his knees and stuck the match and his head into the opening.

  “Very large,” he said, pulling his head out. “I can smell him. I’m going to have to go in.”

  “What about me?”

  “You keep guard at the lip of the grave,” Jubil said, standing. “He may have another hole somewhere, he could come out behind you for all I know. He could come out of that hole even as we speak.”

  “That’s wonderful.”

  Jubil dropped the now dead match on the ground. “I will tell you this. I can’t guarantee success. I lose, he’ll come for you, you can bet on that, and you better shoot those silvers as straight as William Tell’s arrows.”

  “I’m not really that good a shot.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jubil said, and struck another match along the length of his pants seam, then with his free hand, drew one of his revolvers. He got down on his hands and knees again, stuck the match in the hole and looked around. When the match was near done, he blew it out.

  “Ain’t you gonna need some light?” the deputy said. “A match ain’t nothin’.”

  “I’ll have it.” Jubil removed the remains of the Bible from his pocket, tore it in half along the spine, pushed one half in his coat, pushed the other half before him, into the darkness of the burrow. The moment it entered the hole, it flamed.

  “Ain’t your pocket gonna catch inside that hole?” the deputy asked.

  “As long as I hold it or it’s on my person, it won’t harm me. But the minute I let go of it, and the aura of evil touches it, it’ll blaze. I got to hurry, boy.”

  With that, Jubil wiggled inside the burrow.

  In the burrow, Jubil used the tip of his pistol to push the Bible pages forward. They glowed brightly, but Jubil knew the light would be brief. It would burn longer than writing paper, but still, it would not last long.

  After a goodly distance, Jubil discovered the burrow dropped off. He found himself inside a fairly large cavern. He could hear the sound of bats, and smell bat guano, which in fact, greased his path as he slid along on his elbows until he could stand inside the higher cavern and look about. The last flames of the Bible burned itself out with a puff of blue light and a sound like an old man breathing his last.

  Jubil listened in the dark for a long moment. He could hear the bats squeaking, moving about. The fact that they had given up the night sky, let Jubil know daylight was not far off.

  Jubil’s ears caught a sound, rocks shifting against the cave floor. Something was moving in the darkness, and he didn’t think it was the bats. It scuttled, and Jubil felt certain it was close to the floor, and by the sound of it, moving his way at a creeping pace. The hair on the back of Jubil’s neck bristled like porcupine quills. He felt his flesh bump up and crawl. The air became stiffer with the stench of burnt and rotting flesh. Jubil’s knees trembled. He reached cautiously inside his coat pocket, produced a match, struck it on his pants leg, held it up.

  At that very moment, the thing stood up and was brightly lit in the glow of the match, the bees circling its skin-stripped skull. It snarled and darted forward. Jubil felt its rotten claws on his shirtfront as he fired the revolver. The blaze from the bullet gave a brief, bright flare and was gone. At the same time, the match was knocked out of his hand and Jubil was knocked backwards, onto his back, the thing’s claws at his throat. The monster’s bees stung him. The stings felt like red-hot pokers entering his flesh. He stuck the revolver into the creature’s body and fired. Once. Twice. Three times. A fourth.

  Then the hammer clicked empty. He realized he had already fired two other shots. Six dead silver soldiers were in his cylinders, and the thing still had hold of him.

  He tried to draw his other gun, but before he could, the thing released him, and Jubil could hear it crawling away in the dark. The bats fluttered and screeched.

  Confused, Jubil drew the pistol, managed to get to his feet. He waited, listening, his fresh revolver pointing into the darkness.

  Jubil found another match, struck it.

  The thing lay with its back draped over a rise of rock. Jubil eased towards it. The silver loads had torn into the hive. It oozed a dark, odoriferous trail of death and decaying honey. Bees began to drop to the cavern floor. The hive in Gimet’s chest sizzled and pulsed like a large, black knot. Gimet opened his mouth, snarled, but otherwise didn’t move.

  Couldn’t move.

  Jubil, guided by the last wisps of his match, raised the pistol, stuck it against the black knot, and pulled the trigger. The knot exploded. Gimet let out with a shriek so sharp and loud it startled the bats to flight, drove them out of the cave, through the burrow, out into the remains of the night.

  Gimet’s claw-like hands dug hard at the stones around him, then he was still and Jubil’s match went out.

  Jubil found the remains of the Bible in his po
cket, and as he removed it, tossed it on the ground, it burst into flames. Using the two pistol barrels like large tweezers, he lifted the burning pages and dropped them into Gimet’s open chest. The body caught on fire immediately, crackled and popped dryly, and was soon nothing more than a blaze. It lit the cavern up bright as day.

  Jubil watched the corpse being consumed by the biblical fire for a moment, then headed towards the burrow, bent down, squirmed through it, came up in the grave.

  He looked for the deputy and didn’t see him. He climbed out of the grave and looked around. Jubil smiled. If the deputy had lasted until the bats charged out, that was most likely the last straw, and he had bolted.

  Jubil looked back at the open grave. Smoke wisped out of the hole and out of the grave and climbed up to the sky. The moon was fading and the pink on the horizon was widening.

  Gimet was truly dead now. The road was safe. His job was done.

  At least for one brief moment.

  Jubil walked down the hill, found his horse tied in the brush near the road where he had left it. The deputy’s horse was gone, of course, the deputy most likely having already finished out Deadman’s road at a high gallop, on his way to Nacogdoches, perhaps to have a long drink of whisky and turn in his badge.

  MARK SAMUELS

  A Gentleman from Mexico

  MARK SAMUELS IS THE AUTHOR of two short story collections, The White Hands and Other Weird Tales and Black Altars, as well as the novella The Face of Twilight. His tales have appeared in both The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and a third collection, Glyphotech, is due from PS Publishing. He recently completed another novella, The Dead Underground, and is now working on a dynastic weird novel set in London’s Highgate area.

  “One of the inspirations for this tale was the disappearance of Ambrose Bierce in Mexico sometime in 1914,” explains Samuels, “a mystery that, to this day, has not been satisfactorily explained. Better to have drowned in the delicious brandy at the capital’s Café Gambrinus than face Pancho Villa’s firing squad.

  “But it was not my intention to write more fiction concerning the Ambrose Bierce mystery, since great writers, such as Carlos Fuentes, have already done so. So I required a different angle.

  “What if an author who was long dead reappeared in Mexico rather than disappeared there? And what if his reappearance suggested that his fiction was bleeding over into reality and transforming it? I had the theme. Now I needed the correct author. Really, the choice was obvious.”

  Barlow, I imagine, can tell you even more about the Old Ones.

  —Clark Ashton Smith to August Derleth,

  13 April, 1937

  VÍCTOR ARMSTRONG WAS RUNNING LATE for his appointment and so had hailed a taxi rather than trusting to the metro. Bathed in cruel noon sunlight, the green-liveried Volkswagen beetle taxi cruised down Avenida Reforma. In the back of the vehicle, Armstrong rummaged around in his jacket pocket for the pack of Faros cigarettes he’d bought before setting off on his rendezvous.

  “Es okay para mí a fumar en tu taxi?” Armstrong said, managing to cobble together the request in his iffy Spanish.

  He saw the eyes of the driver reflected in the rear-view mirror, and they displayed total indifference. It was as if he’d made a request to fold his arms.

  “Seguro.” The driver replied, turning the wheel sharply, weaving his way across four lines of traffic. Armstrong was jolted over to the left and clutched at the leather handle hanging from the front passenger door. The right-hand seat at the front had been removed, as was the case with all the green taxis, giving plenty of leg-room and an easy entrance and exit. Like most of the taxi drivers in Mexico City, this one handled his vehicle with savage intent, determined to get from A to B in the minimum possible time. In this almost permanently gridlocked megalopolis, the survival of the fastest was the rule.

  Armstrong lit up one of his untipped cigarettes and gazed out the window. Brilliant sunshine illuminated in excruciating detail the chaos and decay of the urban rubbish dump that is the Ciudad de México, Distrito Federal, or “D.F.” for short. A great melting pot of the criminal, the insane, the beautiful and the macho, twenty-five million people constantly living in a mire of institutionalized corruption, poverty and crime. But despite all this, Mexico City’s soul seems untouched, defiant. No other great city of the world is so vividly alive, dwelling as it does always in the shadow of death. Another earthquake might be just around the corner, the Popocatéptl volcano might blow at any hour, and the brown haze of man-made pollution might finally suffocate the populace. Who knows? What is certain is that the D.F. would rise again, as filthy, crazed and glorious as before.

  They were approaching La Condesa, a fashionable area to the north of the centre that had attracted impoverished artists and writers ten years ago, but which had recently been overrun with pricey restaurants and cafes.

  Armstrong had arranged to meet with an English-speaking acquaintance at the bookshop café El Torre on the corner of Avenida Nuevo León. This acquaintance, Juan San Isidro, was a so-called underground poet specializing in sinister verse written in the Náhuatl language and who, it was rumoured, had links with the narcosatánicos. A notorious drunk, San Isidro had enjoyed a modicum of celebrity in his youth but had burnt out by his mid-twenties. Now a decade older, he was scarcely ever sober and looked twice his actual age. His bitterness and tendency to enter into the kind of vicious quarrels that seem endemic in Latin American literary circles had alienated him from most of his contemporaries.

  Armstrong suspected that San Isidro had requested a meeting for one of two reasons; either to tap him for money, or else to seek his assistance in recommending a translator for a re-issue of his poetical work in an English language edition in the United States. It was highly unlikely that San Isidro was going to offer him a work of fiction for one of his upcoming anthologies of short stories.

  The taxi pulled up alongside the bookshop.

  “¿Cuánto es?” Armstrong asked.

  “Veintiún pesos” The driver responded. Armstrong handed over some coins and exited the vehicle.

  Standing on the corner outside the bookshop was a stall selling tortas, tacos and other fast food. The smell of the sizzling meat and chicken, frying smokily on the hob, made Armstrong’s mouth water. Despite the call of “¡Pásele, señor!”, Armstrong passed by, knowing that, as a foreigner, his stomach wouldn’t have lasted ten minutes against the native bacteria. Having experienced what they called “Montezuma’s Revenge” on his first trip to D.F. a year ago, there was no question of him taking a chance like that again.

  Across the street an argument was taking place between two drivers, who had got out of their battered and dirty cars to trade insults. Since their abandoned vehicles were holding up the traffic, the rather half-hearted battle (consisting entirely of feints and shouting) was accompanied by a cacophony of angry car-horns.

  El Torre was something of a landmark in the area, its exterior covered with tiles, and windows with external ornate grilles. A three-storey building with a peaked roof, and erected in the colonial era, it had been a haunt for literati of all stripes, novelists, poets and assorted hangers-on, since the 1950s. During the period in which La Condesa had been gentrified some of El Torre’s former seedy charm had diminished and, as well as selling books, it had diversified into stocking DVDs and compact discs upstairs.

  Part of the ground floor had been converted into an expensive eatery, whilst the first floor now half-occupied a cafe-bar from where drinkers could peer over the centre of the storey down into the level below, watching diners pick at their food and browsers lingering over the books on shelves and on the display tables. As a consequence of these improvements, the space for poetry readings upstairs had been entirely done away with, and Juan San Isidro haunted its former confines as if in eternal protest at the loss of his own personal stage.

  As Armstrong entered, he glanced up at the floor above and saw the poet already waiting for hi
m, slumped over a table and tracing a circle on its surface with an empty bottle of Sol beer. His lank black hair hung down to his shoulders, obscuring his face, but even so his immense bulk made him unmistakable.

  Armstrong’s gaze roved around and sought out the stairway entrance. He caught sight of the only other customer in El Torre besides himself and San Isidro. This other person was dressed in a dark grey linen suit, quite crumpled, with threadbare patches at the elbows and frayed cuffs. The necktie he wore was a plain navy blue and quite unremarkable. His shoes were badly scuffed and he must have repeatedly refused the services of the D.F.’s innumerable boleros. They keenly polished shoes on their portable foot-stands for anyone who had a mere dozen pesos to spare. The man had an olive complexion, was perfectly clean-shaven, and about forty years old. His short black hair was parted neatly on the left-hand side. He had the features of a mestizo, a typical Mexican of mingled European and Native Indian blood. There was something in the way that he carried himself that told of a gentleman down on his luck, perhaps even an impoverished scholar given his slight stoop, an attribute often acquired by those who pore over books or manuscripts year after year.

  He was browsing through the books on display that were published by the likes of Ediciones Valdemar and Ediciones Siruela that had been specially imported from Spain. These were mostly supernatural fiction titles, for which many Mexican readers had a discerning fondness. Armstrong was glad, for his own anthologies invariably were comprised of tales depicting the weird and uncanny, a market that, at least in the Anglophone countries, seemed to have self-destructed after a glut of trashy horror paperbacks in the 1980s. But these were not junk, they were works by the recognized masters, and a quick glance over the classics available for sale here in mass-market form would have drawn the admiration of any English or American devotee.