—You didn’t accidentally erase it, maybe, or—
—Sure. I mean, what’m I gonna do - tape Wheel of Fortune over it?
—And - who’d you show it to, exactly?
—Nobody. I saw it, the SO saw it, but aside from him who’m I gonna show it to? Her parents, assuming I ever found out who they were? Tell ‘em hey, your daughter slipped sideways in time, got herself eaten by Jurassic fuckin’ … (PAUSE) Shit, right.
—But you still have it.
—Like I said two times already, sure. Why?
(VERY LONG PAUSE)
—… how much would you want for it?
THE END
Gemma Files was born in London and now lives in Canada. A former freelance movie reviewer, she now teaches screenwriting and Canadian film history at the Toronto branch of the International Academy of Design. In 1999, her short story ‘The Emperor’s Old Bones’ won the Best Short Story award from the International Horror Guild. She has been published in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Queer Fear, The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women, Twilight Showcase, Grue, Transversions, Palace Corbie, Selective Spectres, Demon Sex and Northern Frights. Collections of her fiction are available through Quantum Theology Publications, and four of her stories have been adapted for the anthology TV series The Hunger. She is currently working on her first novel. ‘The idea for “Job 37” came to me pretty much full-blown,’ Files reveals. ‘I wanted to write an M. R. James-type ghost story for the quote-quote New Millennium, one which combined brisk, no-nonsense utilitarianism and outright sidelong creep. I could vaguely remember having read an interview somewhere with a crime-scene clean-up expert who claimed their particular morbid area of expertise constituted the fastest-growing new career option in North America - and what do you know? A brief surf of the net proved them absolutely correct. Enlightened and grossed-out in roughly equal measure, I had the first draft written within a week. Enjoy!’
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Mother, Personified
YVONNE NAVARRO
Monday, October 25
‘I never meant to mistreat you.’
The blinds are tightly drawn, the air stale and cool, washing over him like the damp, foetid rush from an opened basement door. In the gloom, his mother’s voice is barely a whisper in his head and Levy Moreless has to lean forward to hear it.
‘I’m so sorry, Levy. It was my life - it was so hard, being a single mother back then, homeless. There were drugs, and booze, and I didn’t have any money. I couldn’t support you, I couldn’t…’
‘It’s all right,’ he interrupts, trying his best to sound soothing. He nervously pats the bedspread around her shoulders, feeling perspiration gather along the high line of his forehead as he waits for her next words. What she’s said so far has made him uncomfortable, but at the same time he feels vindicated and … proud. He was right all along in his belief that she would have never done what she had to him - left him like that - if she’d been given a choice, had a fair shot at life. All those years of patience on his part, of waiting to hear what she had to say about the past, have finally paid off and now he knows the truth: she isn’t a bad woman, just underprivileged, like so many others. Misunderstood. It is not an equal world and she was born at the bottom and stayed there, hadn’t had the stamina to pull herself up as others were able to do. Sometimes a person has it in them, and sometimes they don’t.
She tries to shake her head but the strength isn’t there - the best she can do is stare at him with glassy eyes. ‘Not all right,’’ he hears her rasp. She eats these flowery purple candies and the sweet scent of her mouth caresses his face, the smell of old age and illness, like lavender-scented decay too deep to hide. Despite his embarrassment, Levy leans closer, needing to hear the rest of it, her self-condemnation at her final act of abandonment; perhaps she can feel his want because he hears her struggle to continue. ‘I shouldn’t have … I should have never—’ Her words breaks off and the vacancy of her gaze becomes permanent.
Damn her. All those soft words, but still, at the end, she denies him.
Friday, October 6
‘Never seen anything like it,’ Sheriff Markhall says. ‘Christ on a stick - where’s the, uh, rest of her?’
‘That would be the middle part,’ says Wayne Bailey.
Markhall is amazed at the lack of surprise or emotion, of anything, in the other man’s voice. He had no doubt that Bailey has seen a lot of things in his career, but this … Christ on a stick. Aloud, he only agrees. ‘Yeah, the middle part.’
‘Gone.’
Frustration gets the best of him, if only for a moment. ‘Well, hell, Wayne, I’m not blind. I can see that.’
Bailey shrugs, then squints around the murder scene. It is autumn and they are standing on a patch of heavily treed land along the banks of Sugar Creek, just at the back of the Quentin farm. The elder Quentin found the body this morning when he let his German Short Hair loose and the dog came trotting back with a skinny, decomposing human arm dangling from its mouth. Last night had given them a steady downpour, shaking free a good portion of what was left of the leaves on the trees; now their branches, nearly clean, reach towards the sky like fingers at the ends of spindly, starving limbs.
‘Hard telling in all this muck,’ Bailey says. ‘I won’t be sure how long she’s been dead until I get her back to the lab, but if I was to guess I’d say about six or seven days.’ He frowns down at the body. ‘I will say this though - we’re not looking at a youngster here. This woman looks to be in her fifties or sixties.’
Markhall says nothing as his mind turns this over but comes up empty. This is a small town and things like this just don’t happen; no one is missing, there have been no domestic calls for at least a month, and as far as he knows, no one even has relatives in from out of town - that said, because while she wasn’t looking very attractive right now, he thinks there is enough of the victim’s facial structure and features left for him to know she isn’t anyone he’d recognise.
How on earth has a nightmare like this fallen in the back pocket of his quiet little town?
SUGAR CREEK HERALD, Monday – October 9
GRUESOME SUGAR CREEK DISCOVERY
The Sheriff’s office responded to a call from Leroy Quentin on Friday and discovered the body of a woman on the Quentin property where it ends at the banks of Sugar Creek. The victim’s name is being withheld pending notification of family members, and county officials also refused to release the details of the murder other than it was obviously by foul play and the exact cause of the woman’s death has not yet been determined. This death is the first murder to occur in Sugar Creek in fourteen years.
Monday, October 23
‘Well,’ Levy says as he stares at his mother. He can’t decide whether he is happy or unhappy. After all this time, perhaps he is only numb, encased in a protective shell carefully constructed over the course of his life. ‘That’s all there is. I can’t do any more than I have for you. I guess it was just your time to go.’
He draws the sheet carefully over the face of the still form on the bed, then goes to the kitchen and gets out the telephone book. He shuffles back and forth through the pages until he finds what he wants, thinking how even the fluttering of the yellow paper seems loud now that she is gone. He finds the numbers he needs and makes a list of who to call first thing in the morning: the newspaper, a casket place about forty miles away, a nice dress shop where he can pick up fitting apparel. No need to call the cemetery because he already owns a family plot, had thought ahead enough to buy that a couple of years ago.
The calls are more difficult than he expects; the grief weighs on him and it is amazing how nosey people are, even when they don’t know you. Is it such a crime for a man to want to lay his mother quietly to rest, without all the fuss and muss that usually makes the undertakers rich? He doesn’t have several thousand dollars to drop on a fancy wake with accoutrements, and his mother wouldn’t have wanted him to wa
ste his money anyway - a trucker’s wage is hard to come by when you have to spend a good deal of your time caring for a sick parent.
But finally it’s done. His rig is empty and he will pick up the casket in the morning, then stop by the dress shop. In the meantime there are more things to do to ready her for her final resting place, no matter how tired he feels. Week after week, Levy thinks as he gets up and goes back into her bedroom, all that time fighting to keep her going when others would have given up, would have called him crazy for hanging on as long as he did. But a son’s love for his mother is unequalled when it’s heartfelt, and he can be proud of himself and free of regrets or guilt, especially considering what she did to him. He will not hold the long-ago abandonment against her, though - he will be a better person than that and not turn his back in her time of need as she did to him. Those who forgive will find forgiveness in the eyes of God, and he has striven hard to be worthy of His holy gaze all these years, and to be at peace with himself.
HARMONY DAILY EXAMINER, Tuesday - October 24
Drannon, Ida, passed away on Monday, October 23, of natural causes. Born February 23, 1945 in Harmony, Georgia, she is survived by son Levy Moreless of 1212 West Central Parkway, Harmony. Services and burial will be private.
Wednesday, October 25
‘This is pretty unusual, Mr Moreless. Most people have their undertakers purchase their casket.’
‘Well, no one’s actually died,’ Levy says. He’s already decided that a fabrication will be the path of least resistance, so he puts on his most engaging smile. ‘What we’re doing is putting together this Hallowe’en spookhouse for the kids. We figure on painting this thing black and having a vampire pop out of it.’
The look on the salesman’s face relaxes a bit and Levy notices a gold nameplate on the lapel of his suit jacket, a discreet little thing that says Robert. ‘Ah, I understand.’ Robert even grins a bit. ‘Then I guess you won’t be wanting the lacquer-black one with red satin lining, huh?’
Levy laughs easily, letting the guy think it’s all a just a fine, fun joke. In reality, he wants to pop the man in the nose, because there is nothing funny about the death of a loved one and wanting to do things yourself to make sure they get done right. Still, he has to deal with the real-life part - the assholes like this guy - so he puts on another smile and falls into it like it’s just another day in the life of a man who doesn’t have all these burdens to carry. ‘If only we had the budget for that. I guess we’ll be sticking with the basic pine, and we’ll just use black paint.’
‘Too bad.’ Robert winks at him, managing in that one facial gesture to take all the class out of his six-hundred-dollar suit and his designer shoes and his suave little name tab. Revealed instead is the true man, the one who probably drinks cheap beer in the roadhouse off Route 26 and tries to grope the barmaid while his girlfriend has gone to the ladies’ room. ‘Old Drac-baby would’ve looked awesome popping out of one of our mahogany dead-beds.’
Dead-beds? The term horrifies Levy, but he doesn’t dare show it. He stretches his grin a little wider instead, hoping it isn’t turning into a rictus. He is getting to the limit of his endurance here and his eyes flick to his watch; that movement and his knowledge of the area and highways - he’s in Fort Valley and needs to get back to Harmony - give him the excuse he needs. ‘That’s really funny,’ he says. ‘Listen, I hate to rush you but I really need to load up the casket and be on my way. I’m using my eighteen-wheeler to help out with supplies and whatnot, and I don’t want to get caught in that stop-and-go traffic coming out of the refinery off the interstate.’
Robert nods sympathetically. ‘Yeah, I got you. When I was a kid, before that refinery was built, we didn’t have any traffic to speak of out here. Everything was different then. Now the shift whistle blows over there and we get crammed up the ass going in both directions. Unbelievable, isn’t it?’
Levy only shrugs and pulls out his chequebook to pay for the casket. ‘There are lots of things in this world that are unbelievable,’ he says. And leaves it at that.
HARPERVILLE EXAMINER, Thursday - October 19
MISSING MISSISSIPPI WOMAN FOUND MURDERED
The body of fifty-four-year-old Stella Jackson, a resident of Scott County, Mississippi, was found Tuesday morning in a disused area of the Davidson County Fairgrounds by Tennessee State maintenance personnel preparing the fairgrounds for the upcoming Fallfest. The widowed Mrs Jackson was reported missing from her home eight days ago. The Davidson County Sheriff’s Department has refused to release the cause of death, but confidential sources inside the Department revealed that identification was made via her driver’s license and fingerprints because Mrs Jackson’s head had been removed from her body and had not yet been found. The Sheriff’s Department has refused to comment.
Sunday October 15
‘If you don’t behave, the Cannibal Man will come in the night and eat you,’ Robin Landers snaps at her eight-year-old son. ‘Just like he done to that Stella Jackson woman.’
The temper tantrum that Jimmy is working himself into atop the braided rug on the living room floor stops abruptly, and Robin is proud of herself for thinking so fast on her feet. That pride, however, falters when she sees the look of grim terror that slips over her boy’s face. Damn - what was this? She didn’t mean it seriously. The story’s just a local version of the bogeyman, for God’s sake, something started the week after that woman was found out at the fairgrounds with her head cut off. She hadn’t thought Jimmy would know about that part, but that was a stupid assumption, wasn’t it? He might only be in third grade but the rumours had probably zinged wildly amongst the older boys and no doubt Jimmy had overheard something on the bus. God, now she’s probably done some kind of permanent mental damage or something, sometimes the littlest thing—
Jimmy begins to cry. ‘Don’t let him get me, Mom - don’t let him steal my head!’
Hating herself just a little, Robin gathers him in her arms and rocks him. ‘Don’t worry, honey. Mommy was just kidding - it’s just a story, that’s all, it’s not real. He can’t even get in here, you know? Remember that cartoon you saw on the TV this morning? We’re just like that - safe and snug as bugs in a rug.’ She hugs him tightly and lets her gaze wander to the front door and the big lock above the doorknob, until she is satisfied it’s turned the way it should be.
Never hurts to be sure.
Thursday, October 26
It takes him forty minutes to find a place to put his eighteen-wheeler, and Levy thinks again that he should have bought that old pick-up truck from Bobby McNamara a month ago. Should have done a lot of things, he supposes, but that doesn’t do him any good now. By the time he gets into the dress shop it’s nearly two o’clock and he’s starting to worry - what if they don’t have anything that will fit her properly, what if he finds something that’s okay but has to get it altered? He measured his mother’s corpse this morning and thinks he can get the size right with just a little bit of help, but that won’t do him any good if they don’t have anything appropriate. He wants something in lace, white or cream, the kind of dress his mother would have been married in had she been lucky enough to have that kind of a life.
While her luck hadn’t been so good in decades past, his is still holding. When Levy opens the front door to the exclusive little dress shop, his gaze immediately settles on a rack in the back left corner - lots of lace and glitter, all colours and sizes, not a bad selection for a small town like Harmony where the upper-class folks like the Middletons and the Carters had a tendency to do their shopping in Underground Atlanta. The saleslady looks at him warily, taking in everything about him with a quick, sharp eye: his worn but clean jeans, the way the collar of his favourite flannel shirt is frayed on the left side, his ragged trucker’s fingernails that are scrubbed clean because he has had to wash his hands so many times over the past week.
Nevertheless she is pleasant; appearances are deceiving and nowadays you never know what the rich will wear in their spare
time. Often a person can’t tell a society child from trailer trash, a round-bellied trucker from a loyal, loving son who’d do anything for his mother.
‘May I help you?’ she asks sweetly.
‘Sure,’ Levy says. ‘I’m looking for a dress for my mother. We’ve got a big family event coming up and she needs something really special.’
‘Ah. And do you know what size she wears?’
Rather than answer, Levy hands her the slip of paper with the measurements written on them. She reads what’s there but for a moment it doesn’t compute, then she gives him a quick, worried frown before returning her gaze to the paper. ‘I’m sorry - I meant dress size. I can see the usual bust, waist and hips, but I’m not sure what the rest of these are. We don’t generally use these, the woman just comes in—’
‘She’s bedridden,’ Levy puts in quickly, then remembers the extra inches he added. He has sealed the bedroom and cranked the air conditioning up all the way, but his mother’s body is still swelling a bit. ‘And she’s gained a bit of weight.’ He nods at the paper, mentally trying on different personae until he finds the one he wants. ‘I don’t know anything about women’s dress sizes,’ he says and gives her a sheepish grin. ‘That’s why I measured her neck and wrists and what all. I guess you don’t need that much information?’
The saleswoman smiles. ‘No, we usually don’t. But let’s see what we can come up with - do you see one you like?’
Levy glances again at the rack that first caught his attention. ‘Something from there,’ he says. ‘A light colour. Dark colours don’t go well with her complexion.’
‘Okay.’ He follows the woman over to the rack and waits while she works her way through what’s there, checking the tags until she finds a size that satisfies her. ‘How about this?’
Dark Terrors 6 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology] Page 22
