The Best New Horror 5

by Ramsay Campbell

  “. . . body!” Marcia finished for him. The two snorted laughter, and Grant smiled over his beer.

  Freddie shook his head and ran his hand over his shiny scalp; other than a fringe of wispy hair, he was as bald as a honeydew melon. A corpulent man – he had once been quite slender – his double chin overhung his loosened tie, and the expensive suit was showing strain. “Wonder how she’s held up. None of us look the same as then.” Quickly: “Except you, Marcia. Don’t you agree, Grant?”

  “As beautiful as the day I last saw her.” Grant raised a toast, and Marcia hoped she hadn’t blushed. After twenty-five years Grant McDade remained in her fantasies. She wished he’d take off those dark glasses – vintage B&L Ray Bans, just like his vintage white T-shirt and James Dean red nylon jacket and the tight jeans. His high school crewcut was now slicked-back blond hair, and there were lines in his face. Otherwise he was still the boy she’d wanted to have take her to the senior prom. Well, there was an indefinable difference. But given the years, and the fact that he was quite famous in his field . . .

  “You haven’t changed much either, I guess, Grant.” Freddie had refilled his beer cup. “I remember that jacket from high school. Guess you heart surgeons know to keep fit.”

  He flapped a hand across his pink scalp. “But look at me. Bald as that baby’s butt. Serves me right for always wanting to have long hair as a kid.”

  “Weren’t you ever a hippie?” Marcia asked.

  “Not me. Nam caught up to me first. But I always wanted to have long hair back when I was a kid – back before the Beatles made it OK to let your hair grow. Remember Hair and that song? Well, too late for me by then.”

  Freddie poured more beer down his throat. Marcia hadn’t kept count, but she hoped he wouldn’t throw up. From his appearance, Freddie could probably hold it.

  “When I was a kid,” Freddie was becoming maudlin, “I hated to get my hair cut. I don’t know why. Maybe it was those Sunday School stories about Samson and Delilah that scared me. Grant – you’re a doctor: ask your shrink friends. It was those sharp scissors and buzzing clippers, that chair like the dentist had, and that greasy crap they’d smear in your hair. ‘Got your ears lowered!’ the kids at school would say.”

  Freddie belched. “Well, my mother used to tease me about it. Said she’d tie a ribbon in my hair and call me Frederika. I was the youngest – two older sisters – and I was always teased that Mom had hoped I’d be a girl too, to save on buying new clothes, just pass along hand-me-downs. I don’t know what I really thought. You remember being a kid in the 1950s: how incredibly naive we all of us were.”

  “Tell me!” Marcia said. “I was a freshman in college before I ever saw even a picture of a hard-on.”

  “My oldest sister,” Freddie went on, “was having a slumber party for some of her sorority sisters one night. Mom and Dad were out to a church dinner; she was to baby sit. I was maybe ten at the time. Innocent as a kitten.”

  Marcia gave him her beer to finish. She wasn’t certain whether Freddie could walk as far as the keg.

  Freddie shook his head. “Well, I was just a simple little boy in a house full of girls. Middle of the 1950s. I think one of the sorority girls had smuggled in a bottle of vodka. They were very giggly, I remember.

  “So they said they’d initiate me into their sorority. They had those great big lollipops that were the fad then, and I wanted one. But I had to join the sorority.

  “So they got out some of my sisters’ clothes, and they stripped me down. Hadn’t been too long before that that my mother or sister would bathe me, so I hadn’t a clue. Well, they dressed me up in a trainer bra with tissue padding, pink panties, a pretty slip, lace petticoats, one of my fourteen-year-old sister’s party dresses, a little garter belt, hose and heels. I got the whole works. I was big enough that between my two sisters they could fit me into anything. I thought it was all good fun because they were all laughing – like when I asked why the panties didn’t have a Y-front.

  “They made up my face and lips and tied a ribbon in my hair, gave me gloves, a handbag, and a little hat. Now I knew why sissy girls took so long to get dressed. When Mom and Dad got home, they presented me to them as little Frederika.”

  “Did you get a whipping?” Marcia asked.

  Freddie finished Marcia’s beer. “No. My folks thought it was funny as hell. My mom loved it. Dad couldn’t stop laughing and got out his camera. This was 1955. They even called the neighbors over for the show. My family never let me live it down.

  “Pretty little Frederika! After that, I demanded to get a crewcut once a week. So now I’m fat, ugly, and bald.”

  “Times were different then,” Marcia suggested.

  “Hell, there’s nothing wrong with me! I was a Marine in Nam. I got a wife and three sons.” Freddie pointed to where his plump wife was dancing with an old flame. “It didn’t make me queer!”

  “It only made you bald,” said Grant. “Overcompensation. Physical response to emotional trauma.”

  “You should’ve been a shrink instead of a surgeon.” Freddie lurched off for more beers all around. He had either drunk or spilled half of them by the time he returned. He was too drunk to remember to be embarrassed, but would hate his soul-baring in the morning.

  Marcia picked up the thread of conversation. “Well, teasing from your siblings won’t cause hair loss.” She flounced her mass of chestnut curls. “If that were true, then I’d be bald too.”

  “Girls don’t have hair loss,” Freddie said, somewhat mopishly.

  “Thank you, but I’m a mature forty-one.” Marcia regretted the stiffness in her tone immediately. Freddie might be macho, but he was a balding unhappy drunk who had once been her unrequited dream date right behind Grant. Forget it: Freddie was about as much in touch with feminists as she was with BMW fuel injection systems.

  Marcia Meadows had aged well, despite a terrible marriage, two maniac teenaged sons, and a demanding career in fashion design. She now had her own modest string of boutiques, had recently exhibited to considerable approval at several important shows, and was correctly confident that a few years would establish her designs on the international scene. She had gained perhaps five pounds since high school and could still wear a miniskirt to flattering effect – as she did tonight with an ensemble of her own creation. She had a marvelous smile, pixie features, and lovely long legs which she kept crossing – hoping to catch the eye of Grant McDade. This weekend’s return to Pine Hill was for her something of an adventure. She wondered what might lie beneath the ashes of old fantasies.

  “I had – still have – ” Marcia corrected herself, “two older brothers. They were brats. Always teasing me.” She sipped her fresh beer. “Still do. Should’ve been drowned at birth.”

  Her hands fluttered at her hair in reflex. Marcia had an unruly tangle of tight, chestnut-brown curls – totally unmanageable. In the late 1960s it had passed as a fashionable Afro. Marcia had long since given up hope of taming it. After all, miniskirts had come back. Maybe Afros?

  “So what did they do?” Freddie prodded.

  “Well, they knew I was scared of spiders. I mean, like I really am scared of spiders!” Marcia actually shuddered. “I really hate and loathe spiders.”

  “So. Rubber spiders in the underwear drawer?” Freddie giggled. It was good he had a wife to drive him home.

  Marcia ignored him. “We had lots of woods behind our house. I was something of a tomboy. I loved to go romping through the woods. You know how my hair is – has always been.”

  “Lovely to look at, delightful to hold,” said Grant, and behind his dark glasses there may have been a flash of memory.

  “But a mess to keep combed,” Marcia finished. “Anyway, you know those really gross spiders that build their webs between trees and bushes in the woods? The ones that look like dried-up snot boogers with little legs, and they’re always strung out there across the middle of a path?”

  “I was a Boy Scout,” Freddie remembered.


  “Right! So I was always running into those yucky little suckers and getting their webs caught in my hair. Then I’d start screaming and clawing at my face and run back home, and my snotty brothers would laugh like hyenas.

  “But here’s the worst part.” Marcia chugged a long swallow of beer. “You know how you never see those goddamn spiders once you’ve hit their webs? It’s like they see you coming, say ‘too big to fit into my parlor,’ and they bail out just before you plow into their yucky webs. Like, one second they’re there, ugly as a pile of pigeon shit with twenty eyes, and then they vanish into thin air.

  “So. My dear big brothers convinced me that the spiders were trapped in my hair. Hiding out in this curly mess and waiting to crawl out for revenge. At night they were sure to creep out and crawl into my ears and eat my brain. Make a web across my nose and smother me. Wriggle beneath my eyelids and suck dry my eyeballs. Slip down my mouth and fill my tummy with spider eggs that would hatch out and eat through my skin. My brothers liked to say that they could see them spinning webs between my curls, just hoping to catch a few flies while they waited for the chance to get me.”

  Marcia smiled and shivered. It still wasn’t easy to think about. “So, of course, I violently combed and brushed my hair as soon as I rushed home, shampooed for an hour – once I scrubbed my scalp with Ajax cleanser – just to be safe. So, it’s a wonder that I still have my hair.”

  “And are you still frightened of spiders?” Grant asked.

  “Yes. But I wear a hat when I venture into the woods now. Saves wear and tear on the hair.”

  “A poetess,” remarked Freddie. He was approaching the legless stage, and one of his sons fetched him a fresh beer. “So, Grant. So, Dr McDade, excuse me. We have bared our souls and told you of our secret horrors. What now, if anything, has left its emotional scars upon the good doctor? Anything at all?”

  Marcia sensed the angry tension beneath Freddie’s growing drunkenness. She looked toward Grant. He had always been master of any situation. He could take charge of a class reunion situation. He’d always taken charge.

  Grant sighed and rubbed at his forehead. Marcia wished he’d take off those sunglasses, so she could get a better feeling of what went on behind those eyes.

  “Needles,” said Grant.

  “Needles?” Freddie laughed, his momentary belligerence forgotten. “But you’re a surgeon!”

  Grant grimaced and gripped his beer cup in his powerful, long-fingered hands. Marcia could visualize those hands – rubber-gloved and bloodstained, deftly repairing a dying heart.

  “I was very young,” he said. “We were still living in our old house, and we moved from there before I was five. My memories of that time go back to just as I was learning to walk. The ice cream man still made his rounds in a horsedrawn cart. This was in the late 1940s.

  “Like all children, I hated shots. And trips to the doctor, since all doctors did was give children shots. I would put up quite a fuss, despite promises of ice cream afterward. If you’ve ever seen – or tried to give a screaming child a shot, you know the difficulty.”

  Grant drew in his breath, still clutching the beer cup. Marcia hadn’t seen him take a sip from it since it had been refilled.

  “I don’t know why I was getting a shot that day. Kids at that age never understand. Since I did make such a fuss, they tried something different. They’d already swabbed my upper arm with alcohol. Mother was holding me in her lap. The pediatrician was in front of us, talking to me in a soothing tone. The nurse crept up behind me with the hypodermic needle. My mother was supposed to hold me tight. The nurse would make the injection, pull out the needle, quick as a wink, all over and done, and then I could shriek as much as I liked.

  “This is, of course, a hell of a way to establish physician-patient trust, but doctors in the 1940s were more pragmatic. If Mother had held my arm tightly, it probably would have worked. However, she didn’t have a firm grip. I was a strong child. I jerked my arm away. The needle went all the way through my arm and broke off.

  “So I sat in my mother’s lap, screaming, a needle protruding from the side of my arm. These were the old days when needles and syringes were sterilized and used over and again. The needle that protruded from my arm seemed to me as large as a ten-penny nail. The nurse stood helplessly. Mother screamed. The doctor moved swiftly and grasped the protruding point with forceps, pulled the needle on through.

  “After that, I was given a tetanus shot.”

  Marcia rubbed goosepimples from her arms. “After that, you must have been a handful.”

  Grant finally sipped at his beer. “I’d hide under beds. Run away. They kept doctor appointments secret after awhile. I never knew whether a supposed trip to the grocery store might really be a typhoid shot or a polio shot.”

  “But you got over it when you grew up?” Freddie urged.

  “When I was sixteen or so,” Grant said, “I cut my foot on a shell at the beach. My folks insisted that I have a tetanus shot. I flew into a panic, bawling, kicking, disgraced myself in front of everyone. But they still made me get the shot. I wonder if my parents ever knew how much I hated them.”

  “But, surely,” said Marcia, “it was for your own good.”

  “How can someone else decide what is your own good?”

  Grant decided his beer was awful and set it aside. He drank only rarely, but tonight seemed to be a night for confessions. “So,” he said. “The old identification with the aggressor story, I suppose. Anyway, I became a physician.”

  Freddie removed his tie and shoved it into a pocket. He offered them cigarettes, managed to light one for himself. “So, how’d you ever manage to give anybody a shot?”

  “Learning to draw blood was very difficult for me. We were supposed to practise on one another one day, but I cut that lab. I went to the beach for a day or two, told them I’d had a family emergency.”

  Marcia waved away Freddie’s cigarette smoke. She remembered Grant as the class clown, his blue eyes always bright with ready laughter. She cringed as he remembered.

  Grant continued. “Third-year med students were expected to draw blood from the patients. They could have used experienced staff, but this was part of our initiation ritual. Hazing for us, hell for the patients.

  “So, I go in to draw blood. First time. I tie off this woman’s arm with a rubber hose, pat the old antecubital fossa looking for a vein, jab away with the needle, still searching, feel the pop as I hit the vein, out comes the bright red into the syringe, I pull out the needle – and blood goes everywhere because I hadn’t released the tourniquet. ‘Oops!’ I say, as the patient in the next bed watches in horror: she’s next in line.

  “Well, after a few dozen tries at this, I got better at it – but the tasks got worse. There were the private patients as opposed to those on the wards; often VIPs, with spouses and family scowling down at you as you try to pop the vein first try.

  “Then there’s the wonderful arterial stick, for when you need blood gases. You use this great thick needle, and you feel around the inside of the thigh for a femoral pulse, then you jab the thing in like an icepick. An artery makes a crunch when you strike it, and you just hope you’ve pierced through and not just gouged along its thick muscular wall. No need for a tourniquet: the artery is under pressure, and the blood pulses straight into the syringe. You run with it to the lab, and your assistant stays there maybe ten minutes forcing pressure against the site so the artery doesn’t squirt blood all through the surrounding tissue.”

  Freddie looked ready to throw up.

  “Worst thing, though, were the kids. We had a lot of leukemia patients on the pediatric ward. They’d lie there in bed, emaciated, bald from chemotherapy, waiting to die. By end stage their veins had had a hundred IVs stuck into them, a thousand blood samples taken. Their arms were so thin – nothing but bones and pale skin: you’d think it would be easy to find a vein. But their veins were all used up, just as their lives were. I’d try and try to find a vein, to get a butte
rfly in so their IVs could run – for whatever good that did. They’d start crying as soon as they saw a white jacket walk into their room. Toward the end, they couldn’t cry, just mewed like dying kittens. Two of them died one night when I was on call, and for the last time in my life I sent a prayer of thanks to God.”

  Grant picked up his beer, scowled at it, set it back down. Marcia was watching him with real concern.

  “Hey, drink up,” Freddie offered. It was the best thing he could think of to suggest.

  Grant took a last swallow. “Well, that was the end of the ’60s. I tuned in, turned on, dropped out. Spent a year in Haight-Ashbury doing the hippie trip, trying to get my act together. Did lots of drugs out there, but never any needle work. My friends knew that I was almost a doctor, and some of them would get me to shoot them up when they were too stoned to find a vein. I learned a lot from addicts: How to bring up a vein from a disaster zone. How to use the leading edge of a beveled needle to pierce the skin, then roll it 180 when you’ve popped the vein. But I never shoved anything myself. I hate needles. Hell, I wouldn’t even sell blood when I was stone broke.”

  “But you went back,” Marcia prompted. She reached out for his hand and held it. She remembered that they were staying in the same hotel . . .

  “Summer of Love turned into Winter of Junkies. Death on the streets. Went back to finish med school. The time away was therapeutic. I applied myself, as they used to say. So now I do heart transplants.”

  “A heart surgeon who’s scared of needles!” Freddie chuckled. “So, do you close your eyes when the nurses jab ’em in?” He spilled beer down his shirt, then looked confused by the wetness.

  “How did you manage to conquer your fear of needles?” Marcia asked, holding his hand in both of hers.

  “Oh,” said Grant. He handed Freddie the rest of his beer. “I learned that in medical school after I went back. It only took time for the lesson to sink in. After that, it was easy to slide a scalpel through living flesh, to crack open a chest. It’s the most important part of learning to be a doctor.”