Dark Terrors 6 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology]

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  When he’s gone, I hear Tilton over me. Clothes shuffle and I feel a warm stream on my chest and neck, on my face and head.

  He’s pissing on me and I just want to laugh. It’s his foul little way of saying he won, of saying he’ll have Joey and I’ll have six feet of dirt in a pauper’s grave.

  ‘Fuck you,’ Tilton says. ‘You selfish bitch. He never loved you. He loves me. But he couldn’t see it because you wouldn’t get your tits out of his face.’

  He zips up and walks away.

  ‘Have a great death,’ he mutters over his shoulder.

  Not a great death, there is no such thing. But a fulfilled one. It’s what I want and what I need to give Joey. I’m taking myself away from him, but I’m giving him himself back. No more of my medications or limitations.

  I hope he understands I do this not just for myself, but because I love him.

  Maybe I am a selfish bitch. Maybe I have done the wrong thing. Maybe letting Tilton bring me back from the dead would have solved my medical problems. Maybe I could have been as good as pre-heart attack.

  But what can I do now?

  Can I hear the snow falling? Have the streetlights turned it the same shade of yellow as Mama’s lemonade?

  Joey waited on the landing, next to Reaper Bob.

  ‘It’s good to be back,’ Joey said.

  The man nodded. ‘Yeah. Nothing better than breathing living air. You know, you were dead for a good long while.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Twenty-two, twenty-three hours. I seen people dead that long don’t come back at all.’ He shrugged. ‘Other hand, I seen them dead twice as long come back full.’

  Tilton came up the stairs, a question on his face. When Joey and the black man nodded, Tilton danced a quick little jig. ‘Oh, man. I am so glad. I was afraid you’d die.’

  Reaper Bob grinned and clapped Joey on the back. ‘I do good work. So, you get her?’

  Tilton looked away uncomfortably.

  ‘Who?’ Joey asked.

  ‘My mistake,’ Reaper Bob said. ‘I got him mixed up with some other cracker who was supposed to bring me his best friend’s wife.’

  ‘Speaking of wives,’ Joey said. He held up his ring finger. ‘The hell is this?’

  ‘Bad joke,’ Tilton said. ‘You were drunk. I tried to get you to marry that prostitute works out of Kitty’s.’

  Joey frowned, no memory of the Kitty’s pro in his head at all. ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘I must have had a load on.’

  Reaper Bob headed back inside. ‘Break’s over, I guess.’

  Joey offered his hand. ‘Thanks, man, I appreciate it.’

  ‘No problem.’

  The snow fell gently on Joey and Tilton’s faces, melting over their coats.

  ‘It’s a nice night,’ Joey said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘How about some ribs?’ Joey said. ‘Seems like a million years since I’ve had any.”

  Tilton nodded. ‘A few months, anyway.’

  ‘Maybe after dinner we can head down to Blue’s Mob, find us some loving.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Tilton said.

  Trey R. Barker was born in Texas and currently lives near Chicago, Illinois, with his wife LuAnn. A musician with an affinity for African percussion and Southern blues, his past jobs have included reporter, editor, pizza cook, sandwich-maker, phone solicitor, karaoke salesman and doll assembler. Barker’s short fiction, encompassing everything from fantasy to horror, science fiction to crime/mystery, traditional Westerns to poetry, has appeared in around a hundred publications. Kairwood Press recently released a chapbook of the author’s Green River stories, Where the Southern Cross the Dog. He was also co-editor of the critically acclaimed anthology Crime Spree from December Girl Press. Barker also works in the theatre, where he is the International Tour Technical Director for the David Taylor Dance Theater. His written work for the stage includes an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles and an original one-man show based on the life of Edgar Allan Poe. ‘Although I tend to use quite a large amount of biography in my stories,’ notes the author, ‘that was not my intention here. I actually sought to write about Camille Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals, a piece of programme music he wrote in 1886 (and wouldn’t allow to be published until after his death because he thought it too “silly” for a composer of serious reputation). But as I began to discover the characters in the story, the images of the animals became less important and stray elements of biography worked their way in. By the time I was finished, I had written one of those cathartic pieces writers so often talk about but which I had never experienced before.’

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  The Dinosaur Hunter

  STEPHEN BAXTER

  It was the morning of the last day.

  Joan Useb didn’t know that yet, of course. As it began it seemed like any other day in Joan’s life - although she herself regarded her life, and a typical day in it, as somewhat peculiar by most people’s standards.

  After breakfast, she emerged from her field tent under a sky that was already a washed-out bluewhite.

  She was surrounded by kilometres of badlands: layered rock coloured purple, red, brown, shaped into hillocks and valleys. Maybe half a kilometre from her father’s field site rolled the sluggish waters of the Fort Peck reservoir, a huge artificial lake made by damming the Missouri river.

  This was the setting in which she first saw the Silver Woman.

  Or thought she saw her. She couldn’t be sure; it was just something out of the corner of her eye, a figure standing alone.

  Staring at her.

  When she looked again, there was nothing there, nobody.

  This was Hell Creek, Montana. Joan was thirteen years old.

  As she had become aware of the state of the world beyond the cocoon in which she had grown up, Joan had had a lot of arguments with her father.

  ‘Let me out of this box you’ve brought me up in,’ she would say.

  ‘I’m trying to equip you to cope with a dangerous and unpredictable future,’ he would reply.

  And he would tell her his story of the lily-pond. Lovelock’s lily-pond, he called it.

  ‘Suppose you have a lily that doubles in size every day. Suppose at that rate it would take fifty days to cover the pond. It starts out small, just a scrap, a few petals. When it got to the point that it covered half the pond, you might start to worry. But you know when that would be? The forty-ninth day.’’

  ‘Dad, can’t you talk straight to me?’

  ‘You know what’s going on out there. I think the world’s problems are multiplying exponentially. I think things will fall apart faster than anybody expects.’

  ‘Dad—’

  ‘We won’t be able to tell when the forty-ninth day comes. I just want us to be somewhere safe when it does.’

  She was infuriated, of course. She felt as if he was talking to her like she was a kid.

  The oviraptor led her chicks through deepening snow.

  The ground was rising. They were climbing a young hill, in fact a foothill of the Rockies.

  The oviraptor was a small predatory dinosaur.

  This little family had been saved thus far from the great extinction, where so many had died, by a chance combination of clouds and rocks and trees, of wind direction, the closeness of a pond that gave shelter from the firestorms.

  But now they were in trouble.

  The snow - lying over what had been tropical vegetation just days ago - wasn’t thick. In fact, this time of darkness was a period of intense dryness, all over the planet. But the snow was a disaster for the mother oviraptor.

  She belonged to one of the smaller raptor species: she was about the size of a chicken. Her gaudy feathers helped keep out the cold, and her hind legs were long enough for her to step out of this baffling, terrifying white stuff.

  But for her four surviving chicks it was different. Just weeks old, they were too small to be able to lift thei
r bodies out of the snow. As they struggled to follow their mother their stubby feathers were already soaked, and the snow around their bellies was sucking away their body heat. They peeped mournfully, seeking their mother’s help.

  In her despair and anger the mother dinosaur snapped at the snow around her. But the snow did not respond.

  From a bay at the end of the reservoir, Joan followed a dry creek channel into the hills, picking her way over the rubble-littered floor. The channel had been water-cut through the sedimentary rocks here, like a slice through a cake. All the strata of sandstone and shale were horizontal, flat as the day they were laid down in vanished seas, and they were neatly displayed around her.

  She had her rock hammer at her belt - a gift from her dad when she was ten years old, already proudly scuffed by many hours in the field - and she used it now to dig through the crumbling surface layers until fresh unweathered rock was exposed.

  She knew the story of this land. The countless sand grains that made up the lowest layer of black shale had once been eroded by rainfall from the Rockies and washed down into a long-vanished ocean, warm and deep. The ocean bed had, in its turn, been hardened to rock, lifted back into the light by the Earth’s inner heat, and eroded again, here at the arid modern surface.

  Thus the substance of the world was recycled, over and over. That was an idea she had always liked.

  At last, buried in the black shale, she found a hard, white lump, an irregular bit of limestone. It cracked open to reveal shining red: an ammonite shell, a spiral about as big as her fist. Carefully she chipped away at the surrounding limestone, exposing the iridescent mother-of-pearl surface. The ammonites, who had died under the dinosaur-killer comet, had been a successful group worldwide. They were related to nautiluses, but this shell was far more fantastic and elaborate than any modern specimen.

  Satisfied, she tucked her hammer in her belt and, ammonite in hand, strode up the creek to find her father.

  It had all started to go wrong before Joan was even born.

  Earth had been long overdue for a major volcanic incident.

  Beneath the island of New Guinea, magma had been stirring: molten rock, a thousand cubic kilometres of it. This great bleeding had been moving up through faults in Earth’s thin outer crust, up towards the huge, ancient caldera called Rabaul, at a rate of ten metres every month. It was an astounding pace for a geological event, a testament to mighty energies.

  Rabaul had erupted cataclysmically many times before. Two such eruptions had been identified by human scientists, one some fifteen hundred years earlier, the other around two thousand years before that. It would surely happen again sometime.

  Or the mountain might go back to sleep.

  Most people didn’t think about it. It was a crowded world, with plenty of problems to worry about even more immediate than a grumbling volcano.

  They had been wrong.

  As Joan climbed, she rose up through the strata - and so up through time, for the younger layers of the rock overlay the old, the most basic principle of geology.

  Soon the black marine shales had been replaced by dark brown sandstones. These strata had been laid down at the shore of that ancient sea: she could make out impressions of snail and clam shells. One stratum was covered in ripples, just like a sandy beach in California, but when she touched the surface she found cold dead rock, for this beach had been dry for a hundred million years.

  Further up the creek she found thicker, lighter-coloured deposits, laid down by a river, probably feeding a fresh-water lake or a swamp. In the rocks here there were streaks of black - coal, made of plant material, compressed leaves and twigs, bark and flowers. She knew that if she looked hard enough she could find tiny blackened bones and teeth and vertebrae of animals, of lizards and mammals and birds, and dinosaurs.

  The sun had risen higher; by the time she had reached the uppermost layer she was sweating. But the rocks here were brighter in colour, red, brown and purple. They too contained bones of birds, mammals, crocodiles - but no dinosaurs. It was the relic of a different world.

  And lying sandwiched between the two worlds, new and old, was a layer of grey clay no thicker than her hand, shot through with coal. Her father called this the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary clay.

  She knew the story, of course.

  The comet had been at least ten kilometres in diameter, and had hit the Earth somewhere off the coast of Mexico. The resulting explosion was ten thousand times as strong as the detonation of all mankind’s nuclear weapons.

  It had been a bad day to be a dinosaur in Texas.

  When the dust and ash had finally rained out, it had laid down this clay, the boundary clay: a dirt that contained the ash of the lush Cretaceous forests, and millions upon millions of dinosaurs.

  Oviraptors were good mothers.

  Like their relatives the crocodiles, many dinosaurs had close family ties with their offspring. Oviraptors were particularly parental. Their fossilised bones were so often found in the presence of eggs, in fact, that uncomprehending human palaeontologists would later give them a name that meant egg-hunter.

  But this oviraptor mother, struggling through the dread comet winter, could do little to protect her chicks. That gruesome fact had turned the motherhood bond into a fiery rope that squeezed her heart.

  At last the oviraptor reached a steep rise. Scorched bare of vegetation, the rocky ground was slippery with frost and hard to climb. But the oviraptor gratefully hurried forward, out of the drifting snow.

  Her chicks followed, shivering and bedraggled bundles of feathers, looking more like baby birds than ferocious carnivorous dinosaurs.

  One of her favourite bedtime stories was about boundary clay.

  That told you a lot about how she had grown up, she thought.

  Her father said it was a kind of archaeologist’s urban myth. It told how an archaeologist out in the field, somewhere in the world, had - painstakingly, carefully - dug out from just under the Cretaceous boundary clay what could only be a bullet, embedded in the hip-bone of a tyrannosaur.

  It makes sense, George used to say to his wide-eyed daughter. Suppose you had a time machine, and you wanted to hunt dinos.

  Like in all those sci-fi stories, she would say.

  Yes. Like in the stories. But suppose you were scrupulous; suppose you didn‘t want to change history by killing a dinosaur that never got hunted in its original history. What would you do?

  I know what you’d do, she said. You’d go back and do your hunting where whatever you did would have made no difference at all. You’d go to the clay the comet hit. You‘d go to Texas.

  That’s right. Everything close to the comet impact zone - by close, I mean a thousand kilometres - was crisped. Honey, on that day you could have built a klick-high barbecue of brontosaurs and it would have made no difference to future history. That’s the place to go, to hunt your dinosaurs. The day the comet fell…

  As she approached her father’s field site she could hear voices, the occasional clank of hammers, blaring rock.

  Many of the dig workers were amateurs, what her father called his ‘Cretaceous irregulars’. They spent their summers discovering the past. They would pay for their own gas and drive into the badlands in pick-ups loaded with bags of plaster, rolls of burlap and beer. They worked long hours without pay - and often without much appreciation from those who used them.

  Of course times had changed; there were a lot fewer of them now.

  Her father, George, saw her coming. He hallooed and came to meet her.

  He wore a disreputable broad-brimmed hat that shaded his grinning face, and a pair of shorts that, however practical, made him look unforgivably like a nerd - a dusty-kneed nerd at that. But here he was greeting her with a brisk hug. ‘Hi, honey. Hot enough?’ He looked politely at her ammonite, but she could tell he was too excited about some discovery of his own. ‘I found a tooth …’

  ‘A tooth?’

  ‘Wait ‘til you see it!’

  So
she followed him to his table.

  A little way away, an immense bone lay on the brown dirt. Most of the field workers were working on the bone, slapping on burlap and bright white plaster. It looked like a hip bone, if she was any judge, maybe from Tyrannosaurus rex: no great surprise, as almost all the tyrannosaur fossils ever discovered had come from this area.

  She longed to go see the vast T. rex bone. And besides, she hankered to join the jokey party of young workers.

  … And there was the Silver Woman, again.

  She was standing behind the field workers, watching them carefully. But they didn’t seem to see her. She was short, Joan was able to see, by comparison with the workers, no more than four feet high. And she wore a kind of overall that shone bright silver.

  She cast no shadow on the ground. And the shadows and highlights on her chin, her fur, her clothes looked wrong, as if cast not by the sun, but by some invisible light source.

  She turned to look Joan in the eye. She had fur on her face, like a chimp.

  She vanished. As simple as that, like a clumsy special effect.

  Joan gasped, and felt oddly dizzy. But nobody else had reacted. Get a grip, Joan.

  Anyhow, her father had reached his table and she had to pay attention.

  When Rabaul had blown its top, George Useb had immediately taken his wife, his unborn child, his life, away, out of the cities, off into the archaeological field, in the interior of the continental US. He was seeking as much safety as he could find, out here in the most physically isolated part of Fortress America.

  Even when his wife had upped and left, pining for city life, he had insisted on keeping Joan here with him.

  Joan had spent little time in towns or cities, with people. Even now, she had been barely touched by the cataclysms that swept around the world. On the other hand, she had spent hardly any time with people her own age.

  She didn’t know if that was a good thing or not. How could she tell?

  It was a complex time to be thirteen years old. But then, it always was.