The Best new Horror 4

by Stephen Jones

  Lastly, the police’s latest discovery. The police found blood and hair samples in tools and on the work bench in Dahlquist’s mountain cabin and attached workshop. He hadn’t used it in the over two years he’d been renting it out. From whom had the samples come? Marianne Murphy. The name on the rental agreement? Ken Stolte’s.

  Patty’s head swam with testimony, the dreams, thoughts she fought to banish. She stared off, her eye lighting on Garrick. He turned, stared at her. She could feel unwanted desire from her dreams inflame her; the feeling swelled and eclipsed her awareness until they were alone in the courtroom, just the two of them, the razor sharp blade of her dreams edging them closer. She was being consumed, her breath sucked from her. He wasn’t through with her.

  She gasped. He smiled, triumphant. This was some kind of game to him. She forced herself to frown, to shake her head. No. She wasn’t going to play. He put his head back and let loose a silent laugh. She looked at her hands shaking in her lap, her pencil broken on the pages of her notepad.

  She drove home numbly, unsure of what to do. The imagined strength of her new dream had faded into real despair. If Garrick were simply someone her unconscious had chosen to teach her something in her dreams, then she couldn’t be hurt by him. Not in reality, in her waking life. This all had to be about Michael, about the unexamined feelings she still harbored about the relationship. The desire she still felt for him, for the perfection he promised but couldn’t make good on. Perhaps what she was about to learn would garner her the strength she’d only imagined. She could hope so.

  With that aspiration, she went to bed. She let the dream come as she knew it would. When she reached for his cock this time, he didn’t leave. She felt it, real and warm to the touch. She heard a low throaty chuckling as his body moved closer toward her. His cock stood erect, darkened rose, and pointed up at her. She pulled closer to see. The foreskin was mottled with holes and the flesh was pulled into strange configurations, some winged out in petals of scar tissue. He asked her to draw him into her mouth. His voice was not the deep masculine one she’d heard before. It was soft, deliberately breathy. She wasn’t going to be afraid. This man was harmless. A teacher. She laughed at her passing anxiety, then she realized she was looking right at his penis as she did. His mutilated foreskin.

  She heard herself scream as his hands came out of the darkness to strangle her. She saw his face, Garrick’s face, angry, full of vengeance, and she woke up. Why had she laughed? She felt the pressure of his fingers, still on her neck.

  When she arrived at the jury room the next morning, she discovered Dawn had gone out sick. She asked around—did anyone else notice Dawn hadn’t been feeling well? Had she been the only one to see Dawn’s darkening mood?

  It was up to Patty now as the last alternate to fill in. The responsibility she’d longed for was hers. She felt cold and shivery all day.

  Garrick took the stand. His attorney told the jury the defendant didn’t have to testify, but he wanted to tell how Dahlquist had framed him. David Allen Garrick rose from his seat wearing an orange uniform with large stenciled letters across the front. L.A. COUNTY JAIL. He swaggered to the witness stand and sat down. The prosecutor asked him what his relationship with Marianne Murphy was.

  “We were friends. I met her where she worked. I liked her. She was young and naive and sweet. I knew she had a crush on me and I guess I’m guilty of enjoying it. I called her, she called me. We talked. I asked her to meet me sometimes for coffee or Coke, whatever, but she always said no. It was okay with me. I had a girl, sort of. Anita, you know, she testified before. . . . Anyhow, I never wanted to sleep with Marianne. She was a virgin and wanted to stay that way. I respected that.”

  The dream voice, soft and breathy. Patty recognized it, only now it was close, clear, and deeper. She squinted at him and thought, “bull-shit.” “She believed she loved you, asshole. She wanted to love you so much it cost her her life. I know that voice, that body, those hands, that cock.” But there was no response. Garrick never glanced at the jury.

  When he was asked about Dahlquist’s wife, he told a complex fabrication of how the wife left because she was being abused, beaten, by a suspicious and jealous Dahlquist, that they had lived together for a while, then she left Garrick. He’d last seen her five months before she was found in the hotel bed.

  The questions went on all day and Garrick answered them with precision. Nothing he said put a dent in Patty’s certainty of his guilt. She was uneasy in her condemnation, knowing he was aware of it, and could, if she let him further into her dreams, give her cause to fear for her reality. She thought of Dawn. Dawn’s dreams.

  Liz called her at seven. Patty let her answering machine pick it up. She wanted to be left alone. It could all be over the next day when they went into deliberations. She just had to get through the night. She drank a few wine coolers just to take the edge off her angst, then fell asleep on her couch.

  The haze of her dream vision cleared as the man’s hands went to her throat. He knelt into the light. Garrick. She could smell him. Sweat and aftershave. He put his mouth close to her ear.

  “You loved the way I made you come, didn’t you?”

  His hands tightened around her neck. She nodded.

  Wake up. Wake the hell up!

  “You want me as much as I want you, don’t you?”

  She nodded. She hated the truth that drifted heavy through her denial.

  Please wake up. Damn it.

  “But you laughed at me because I’m not like your pretty husband, all smooth. He was perfect; had a prick like a porn star, didn’t he?”

  Again she nodded. Except for his foreskin, Garrick’s was just as . . . good. So very good. If only the reality were possible. No.

  “You know what I’m going to do, because I like you? I’m going to make you a deal. If you see to it the jury comes to a verdict of ‘not guilty,’ or hang it with your refusal to go with them, I’ll come see you, make love to you, just like I have been. But if you don’t, I’ll come back and kill you. Slowly. And you know how that is. So, how about it?” He let go of her neck and pulled her face to his and kissed her deeply.

  Wake up you stupid girl. This isn’t real. He is just in your imagination. He can’t hurt you.

  She agreed. Yes, please. Be my perfect lover. She ached for him.

  “Good girl. Now Dave will just leave you to your dreams. See you in court.”

  The haze returned. A beach, water lapping at a sandy shore, the sun was on her body. Trees swayed around her. She turned over to let the sun touch her back. She opened her eyes.

  She could hear her alarm down the hall in her bedroom. She moved her tongue over coated teeth. Another hangover. She avoided looking at herself as she dressed. She kept telling herself the same thing over and over. By agreeing to Garrick’s bargain, she had taken the easy way out, but just to buy herself some time.

  That morning Garrick went back on the stand to clarify loose ends, then both sides made closing arguments. Garrick stood as the jury filed out for their deliberations. He looked a little sad, a little hopeful, and very weary. Patty was nearly the last out the box. He looked at her as if she were the final card he was turning up in a game of blackjack. She smiled weakly, holding onto the façade.

  The door had barely settled into its jamb when they began shouting to hang the bastard. Ralph tried to get them into some semblance of order to pick a foreman. In three minutes, by secret ballots, they voted him foreman. He asked for a show of hands. Who thought Garrick was guilty? All went up but Patty’s.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” The housewife from Culver City frowned at her. “Weren’t you in that courtroom with the rest of us, or were you too busy ogling that killer’s ass to hear the truth?”

  Patty’s face went red with shame. Just how much had she bought into the dreams? What was she stalling for?

  “I think we need to review the judge’s instructions and follow the rules the bailiff gave us. We’re totally disregarding
the system.” She shrugged toward Ralph.

  “Bullshit.” Ralph shook his head.

  Her voice quivered. “Ralph, how is it going to look if after only ten minutes we walk out with a verdict? It should appear we took some time and considered the testimony.”

  Ralph mulled the thought over, then nodded. “Patty has a point. Well, let’s just read the law.” He shuffled the bound sheets the bailiff had given them to read.

  Patty was begging for more time, but she knew she was acting futilely. Garrick was guilty. She just didn’t want to die. Even if he wanted to kill her, which was beginning to seem a viable alternative to living in the hell of wanting to experience the perfection of his lovemaking under the threat of becoming nothing more than a Marianne Murphy-throwaway, she wanted more time.

  She really did want to feel she had done something important, and if she joined the others in the jury, she would get what she wanted. And very shortly after that, she could die. The small angry voice of desire in her was muffled into silence.

  Garrick would have to find some way out of prison to get at her and kill her. After all, she couldn’t die in reality when she died in a dream. She’d lived through Marianne’s death as Marianne. All he’d done so far was convince her she was being seduced. He could scare her, make her believe he was capable, but he couldn’t really hurt her. She smiled. She would vote against Garrick. And even if he owned her sleep for the rest of her life, he’d be behind bars.

  Then desire raised its lecherous head. Why couldn’t he just be happy to have her in his dreams where perfection was easy and no one ever had to be let down? Perhaps, she could try to convince him, as she had once with Michael.

  Patty gripped her notepad. “All right. I’m being overly cautious. The verdict is obvious. I’m with you.”

  When Ralph read the verdict, Garrick slumped in his chair. He hadn’t expected it. Patty knew that. His attorney tried to touch him. Garrick flinched. The sheriff had to support him as they hauled him from the courtroom, limp, beaten.

  Patty felt miserable, yet strangely free. She joined the jury members for a drink and to talk openly about the case. She didn’t dare ask about anyone’s dreams, and no one volunteered anything. They got drunk, laughed themselves silly, and spoke of reuniting for the sentencing hearing. She thought a lot about Dawn, flirted with a lawyer she met and ended up making out with the guy in her car. What the hell, she figured.

  Finally home, she slipped into bed and languished in the memory of feeling a man’s arms around her. The sheets felt cool and inviting, and she had no reason to get up early. The fear and nightmares were merely lapping at the corners of her mind. She read a few chapters in her novel, now bent into a mass resembling a spastic’s attempt at origami, and smoked a cigarette. She fell asleep with the light on, the book in her lap.

  She was at her wedding. Michael was dancing with her mother, she was dancing with Michael’s father. They reached out for each other, spinning and whirling, Michael released Patty’s mother and pulled Patty to him. They fell laughing into a chair. Michael’s arms went around her. Everyone looked at the happy couple and applauded.

  “They think we make a great couple, Patty.” It wasn’t Michael’s voice. She turned to see Garrick smiling sadly.

  “YOU!” Patty struggled to get up. She was no longer in her wedding dress, but wore her nightslip and nothing else. Everyone stared.

  “Yes, I made you a bargain. You changed your mind. I’m just keeping my end. Now you’re going to die.”

  “Please. We can continue the lovemaking. It will make the time in jail go easier. For both of us. Easier.” She whimpered.

  She kept struggling, feeling a warmth emanate from beneath her. “You can’t kill me in my dreams. I know. All the times I was Marianne, I wasn’t hurt. I didn’t die when she did.”

  Garrick waved his hand and a circle of flames rose up around them. “Maybe I didn’t want you to die yet, so you didn’t. I just wanted you to know what I could do, so that when I made my deal, you would do as I asked.”

  Patty was feeling hot, unbearably hot. And she was feeling pain. Far worse than when she was Marianne in the trunk of the car. “Like Dawn? You make her the deal too?”

  The flames grew higher. Garrick now stood outside the fire and shouted to her through the smoke, over the crackling and spitting sounds of Patty’s burning flesh. She felt weak, paralyzed. The pain was so real, so terribly real.

  “Yes, and you know what that bitch did, don’t you? I came to her as the woman of her dreams. The dyke wasn’t interested, no. But she paid for it.” He spat.

  “Getting hot enough yet?” He laughed at her.

  “You know you did me a favor. I would have hated to have sex with you every night. It was really a chore, just like Michael said. He was right about you—so repressed, so emotionally withholding. All those conditions you put out there. Shit. He wanted to see you come alive, learn to accept all of his and your imperfections, didn’t he? He thought it was such a pity a beautiful woman like you was wasted on all that pretense and bullshit about how it should be. He tried for three years. I sure wouldn’t have. You aren’t worth it. He wouldn’t have needed other women if you just hadn’t held on so fucking hard to your uptight values. . . .”

  She couldn’t breathe. Wake up. Now. Wake up! Her mind was growing muzzy. She could smell the stench of her flesh burning. It seemed so real.

  “You want to wake up, don’t you? Well, wake up, Patty. You sure made this easy, choosing your own way to go. Thanks for the help. Good death to you.”

  Garrick disappeared and the dreaminess was gone. Patty coughed in the thick black smoke and felt the flames lick at what was left of her face and arms, her lower body already charred to the bone. Her thoughts raced from her with her breath and she remembered the cigarette she’d been smoking when she fell asleep. She could hear the sound of knocking at her door, shouting outside. She thought of Dahlquist’s wife and Marianne Murphy, and all the jurors who had fallen ill during the trial, the dreams. Fatal synchronicity? Then thought of Garrick’s voice telling her what she’d known all along, been too afraid to admit because she knew she couldn’t live with the truth. And she felt the bite of tears welling in her eyes, too late to put out the flames.

  CLIVE BARKER

  The Departed

  SINCE THE PUBLICATION of his ground-breaking sextet of Books of Blood collections (1984–5), Clive Barker has produced very little short fiction, prefering to concentrate on such novels as The Damnation Game, Weaveworld, The Hellbound Heart, Cabal, The Great and Secret Show, Imajica, The Thief of Always and Everville.

  However, he did find time to contribute “Lost Souls” to Time Out, “Coming to Grief” to Good Housekeeping, and “On Amen’s Shore” to Demons and Deviants. The atmospheric ghost story published here originally appeared under the title “Hermione and the Moon” in the New York Times the day before Hallowe’en 1992, and it was reprinted the following day under its present title in Britain’s The Guardian Weekend magazine.

  More recently, Barker was executive producer on the movies Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992), Candyman (1992, based on his story “The Forbidden”), and a feature-length animated adaptation of his bestselling Young Adult novel The Thief of Always.

  Eclipse is continuing the series of handsome graphic novels based on his stories, he has created the concepts for a “Barkerverse” of new titles from Marvel Comics (Hyperkind, Hokum and Hex, Ecktokid and Saint Sinner), and New York’s Bess Cutler Gallery mounted an extensive exhibition of his paintings and drawings in 1993. There have also been a number of recent stage productions based on his fiction.

  With all the above and more happening, perhaps it is not so surprising that Barker rarely gets the time nowadays to write short stories. But he hasn’t turned his back on them, or on the macabre, as the following proves . . .

  IT WAS NOT ONLY PAINTERS WHO were connoisseurs of light, Hermione had come to learn in the three days since her death; so too were those obliged
to shun it. She was a member of that fretful clan now—a phantom in the world of flesh—and if she hoped to linger here for long she would have to avoid the sun’s gift as scrupulously as a celibate avoided sin, and for much the same reason. It tainted, corrupted, and finally drove the soul into the embrace of extinction.

  She wasn’t so unhappy to be dead; life had been no bowl of cherries. She had failed at love, failed at marriage, failed at friendship, failed at motherhood. That last stung the sharpest. If she could have plunged back into life to change one thing she would have left the broken romances in pieces and gone to her six-year-old son Finn to say: trust your dreams, and take the world lightly, for it means nothing, even in the losing. She had shared these ruminations with one person only. His name was Rice; an ethereal nomad like herself who had died wasted and crazed from the plague but was now in death returned to corpulence and wit. Together they had spent that third day behind the blinds of his shunned apartment, listening to the babble of the street and exchanging tit-bits. Towards evening, conversation turned to the subject of light.

  “I don’t see why the sun hurts us and the moon doesn’t,” Hermione reasoned. “The moon’s reflected sunlight, isn’t it?”

  “Don’t be so logical,” Rice replied, “or so damn serious.”

  “And the stars are little suns. Why doesn’t starlight hurt us?”

  “I never liked looking at the stars,” Rice replied. “They always made me feel lonely. Especially towards the end. I’d look up and see all that empty immensity and . . .” He caught himself in mid-sentence. “Damn you, woman, listen to me! We’re going to have to get out of here and party.”

  She drifted to the window.

  “Down there?” she said.

  “Down there.”

  “Will they see us?”

  “Not if we go naked.”

  She glanced round at him. He was starting to unbutton his shirt.