The Best new Horror 4

by Stephen Jones

  “I can see you perfectly well,” she told him.

  “But you’re dead, darling. The living have a lot more trouble.” He tugged off his shirt and joined her at the window. “Shall we dare the dusk?” he asked her, and without waiting for a reply, raised the blind. There was just enough power in the light to give them both a pleasant buzz.

  “I could get addicted to this,” Hermione said, taking off her dress and letting the remnants of the day graze her breasts and belly.

  “Now you’re talking,” said Rice. “Shall we take the air?”

  All Hallows’ Eve was a day away, a night away, and every shop along Main Street carried some sign of the season. A flight of paper witches here; a cardboard skeleton there.

  “Contemptible,” Rice remarked as they passed a nest of rubber bats. “We should protest.”

  “It’s just a little fun,” Hermione said.

  “It’s our holiday, darling. The Feast of the Dead. I feel like . . . like Jesus at a Sunday sermon. How dare they simplify me this way?” He slammed his phantom fists against the glass. It shook, and the remote din of his blow reached the ears of a passing family, all of whom looked towards the rattling window, saw nothing, and—trusting their eyes—moved on down the street.

  Hermione gazed after them.

  “I want to go and see Finn,” she said.

  “Not wise,” Rice replied.

  “Screw wise,” she said. “I want to see him.”

  Rice already knew better than to attempt persuasion, so up the hill they went, towards her sister Elaine’s house, where she assumed the boy had lodged since her passing.

  “There’s something you should know,” Rice said as they climbed. “About being dead.”

  “Go on.”

  “It’s difficult to explain. But it’s no accident we feel safe under the moon. We’re like the moon. Reflecting the light of something living; something that loves us. Does that make any sense?”

  “Not much.”

  “Then it’s probably the truth.”

  She stopped her ascent and turned to him. “Is this meant as a warning of some kind?” she asked.

  “Would it matter if it were?”

  “Not much.”

  He grinned. “I was the same. A warning was always an invitation.”

  “End of discussion.”

  There were lamps burning in every room of Elaine’s house, as if to keep the night and all it concealed at bay.

  How sad, Hermione thought, to live in fear of shadows. But then didn’t the day now hold as many terrors for her as night did for Elaine? Finally, it seemed, after 31 years of troubled sisterhood, the mirrors they had always held up to each other—fogged until this moment—were clear. Regret touched her, that she had not better known this lonely woman whom she had so resented for her lack of empathy.

  “Stay here,” she told Rice. “I want to see them on my own.”

  Rice shook his head. “I’m not missing this,” he replied, and followed her up the path, then across the lawn towards the dining room window.

  From inside came not two voices but three: a woman, a boy, and a man whose timbre was so recognisable it stopped Hermione in her invisible tracks.

  “Thomas,” she said.

  “Your ex?” Rice murmured.

  She nodded. “I hadn’t expected . . .”

  “You’d have preferred him not to come and mourn you?”

  “That doesn’t sound like mourning to me,” she replied.

  Nor did it. The closer to the window they trod, the more merriment they heard. Thomas was cracking jokes, and Finn and Elaine were lapping up his performance.

  “He’s such a clown!” Hermione said. “Just listen to him.”

  They had reached the sill now, and peered in. It was worse than she’d expected. Thom had Finn on his knee, his arms wrapped around the child. He was whispering something in the boy’s ear, and as he did so a grin appeared on Finn’s face.

  Hermione could not remember ever being seized by such contrary feelings. She was as glad not to find her sweet Finn weeping—tears did not belong on that guileless face. But did he have to be quite so content; quite so forgetful of her passing? And as to Thom the clown, how could he so quickly have found his way back into his son’s affections, having been an absentee father for five years? What bribes had he used to win back Finn’s favour, master of empty promises that he was?

  “Can we go trick-or-treating tomorrow night?” the boy was asking.

  “Sure we can, partner,” Thomas replied. “We’ll get you a mask and a cape and . . .”

  “You too,” Finn replied. “You have to come too.”

  “Anything you want . . .”

  “Son of a bitch,” Hermione said.

  “. . . from now on . . .”

  “He never even wrote to the boy while I was alive.”

  “. . . anything you want.”

  “Maybe he’s feeling guilty,” Rice suggested.

  “Guilty?” she hissed, clawing at the glass, longing to have her fingers at Thomas’s lying throat. “He doesn’t know the meaning of the word.”

  Her voice had risen in pitch and volume, and Elaine—who had always been so insensitive to nuance—seemed to hear its echo. She rose from the table, turning her troubled gaze towards the window.

  “Come away,” Rice said, taking hold of Hermione’s arm. “Or this is going to end badly.”

  “I don’t care,” she said.

  Her sister was crossing to the window now, and Thomas was sliding Finn off his knee, rising as he did so, a question on his lips.

  “There’s somebody . . . watching us,” Elaine murmured. There was fear in her voice.

  Thomas came to her side; slipped his arm around her waist.

  Hermione expelled what she thought was a shuddering sigh, but at the sound of it the window shattered, a hail of glass driving man, woman and child back from the sill.

  “Away!” Rice demanded, and this time she conceded; went with him, across the lawn, out into the street, through the benighted town and finally home to the cold apartment where she could weep out the rage and frustration she felt.

  Her tears had not dried by dawn; nor even by noon. She wept for too many reasons, and for nothing at all. For Finn, for Thomas, for the fear in her sister’s eyes; and for the terrible absence of sense in everything. At last, however, her unhappiness found a salve.

  “I want to touch him one last time,” she told Rice.

  “Finn?”

  “Of course Finn.”

  “You’ll scare the bejeezus out of him.”

  “He’ll never know it’s me.”

  She had a plan. If she was invisible when naked, then she would clothe every part of herself, and put on a mask, and find him in the streets, playing trick-or-treat. She would smooth his fine hair with her palm, or lay her fingers on his lips, then be gone, forever, out of the twin states of living death and Idaho.

  “I’m warning you,” she told Rice, “you shouldn’t come.”

  “Thanks for the invitation,” he replied a little ruefully. “I accept.”

  His clothes had been boxed and awaited removal. They untaped the boxes, and dressed in motley. The cardboard they tore up and shaped into crude masks—horns for her, elfin ears for him. By the time they were ready for the streets All Hallows’ Eve had settled on the town.

  It was Hermione who led the way back towards Elaine’s house, but she set a leisurely pace. Inevitable meetings did not have to be hurried to; and she was quite certain she would encounter Finn if she simply let instinct lead her.

  There were children at every corner, dressed for the business of the night. Ghouls, zombies and fiends every one; freed to be cruel by mask and darkness, as she was freed to be loving, one last time, and then away.

  “Here he comes,” she heard Rice say, but she’d already recognised Finn’s jaunty step.

  “You distract Thom,” she told Rice.

  “My pleasure,” came the reply, and the reven
ant was away from her side in an instant. Thom saw him coming, and sensed something awry. He reached to snatch hold of Finn, but Rice pitched himself against the solid body, his ether forceful enough to throw Thom to the ground.

  He let out a ripe curse, and rising the next instant, snatched hold of his assailant. He might have landed a blow but that he caught sight of Hermione as she closed on Finn, and instead turned and snatched at her mask.

  It came away in his hands, and the sight of her face drew from him a shout of horror. He retreated a step; then another.

  “Jesus . . . Jesus . . .” he said.

  She advanced upon him, Rice’s warning ringing in her head.

  “What do you see?” she demanded.

  By way of reply he heaved up his dinner in the gutter.

  “He sees decay,” Rice said. “He sees rot.”

  “Mom?”

  She heard Finn’s voice behind her; felt his little hand tug at her sleeve. “Mom, is that you?”

  Now it was she who let out a cry of distress; she who trembled.

  “Mom?” he said again.

  She wanted so much to turn; to touch his hair, his cheek; to kiss him goodbye. But Thom had seen rot in her. Perhaps the child would see the same, or worse.

  “Turn round,” he begged.

  “I . . . can’t . . . Finn.”

  “Please.”

  And before she could stop herself, she was turning, her hands dropping from her face.

  The boy squinted. Then he smiled.

  “You’re so bright,” he said.

  “I am?”

  She seemed to see her radiance in his eyes; touching his cheeks, his lips, his brow as lovingly as any hand. So this was what it felt like to be a moon, she thought; to reflect a living light. It was a fine condition.

  “Finn . . .?”

  Thom was summoning the boy to his side.

  “He’s frightened of you,” Finn explained.

  “I know. I’d better go.”

  The boy nodded gravely.

  “Will you explain to him?” she asked Finn. “Tell him what you saw?”

  Again, the boy nodded. “I won’t forget,” he said.

  That was all she needed; more than all. She left him with his father, and Rice led her away, through darkened alleyways and empty parking lots to the edge of town. They discarded their costumes as they went. By the time they reached the freeway, they were once more naked and invisible.

  “Maybe we’ll wander awhile,” Rice suggested. “Go down south.”

  “Sure,” she replied. “Why not?”

  “Key West for Christmas. New Orleans for Mardi Gras. And maybe next year we’ll come back here. See how things are going.”

  She shook her head. “Finn belongs to Thom now,” she said. “He belongs to life.”

  “And who do we belong to?” Rice asked, a little sadly.

  She looked up. “You know damn well,” she said, and pointed to the moon.

  POPPY Z. BRITE

  How to Get Ahead

  in New York

  POPPY Z. BRITE first appeared in these pages back in 1991 with her story “His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood”. Since then she has become one of the new rising stars of horror fiction, with the publication of two novels, Lost Souls and Drawing Blood, and the collection Swamp Foetus.

  She has lived all over the American South and recently returned to her birthplace of New Orleans to live. When she was a child, her father used to take her around the voodoo shops in the French Quarter, and she wrote her first horror story, “The Attack of the Mud Monster,” while still in second grade. Brite started submitting her stories to magazines at the age of 12, and sold her first story to The Horror Show when she was 18. She has worked as a candy maker, gourmet cook, mouse caretaker, artist’s model and stripper, and she appeared nude in a 1992 short film John 5, directed by Athens GA artist Jim Herbert, who also directs the REM videos. She is currently looking forward to seeing an autopsy.

  “How to Get Ahead in New York” is part of the further adventures of her characters Steve and Ghost, who also appear in the story “Angels” (1987) and her debut novel Lost Souls. “ ‘How to Get Ahead’ takes place the spring after Lost Souls,” explains the author, “as the guys are preparing to take off on an extended cross-country road trip and band tour (which should provide lots of other tales).

  “I’ve only been in the Port Authority Bus Terminal once and never intend to go back, but I did get a story out of it. I wasn’t attacked by homeless people, but the lady with cocoons in her hair was real.”

  She adds, “The thing with the heads didn’t happen to me (hell, I would’ve bought one), but it did happen to someone I know, right there on St Mark’s Place. Actually, I love New York. I hope that’s evident in the story.”

  We’ll leave it up to the reader to decide . . .

  CONSIDER THIS SCENE:

  Four a.m. in the Port Authority bus terminal, New York City. The Port Authority is a bad place at the best of times, a place where Lovecraft’s wrong geometry might well hold sway. The master of purple prose maintained that the human mind could be driven mad by contemplation of angles subtly skewed, of other planes where the three corners of a triangle might add up to less than a hundred and eighty degrees, or to more.

  Such is the Port Authority: even in the bustle of midday, corners do not appear to meet up quite right; corridors seem to slope from one end to the other. Even in full daylight, the Port Authority terminal is a bad place. At five a.m. it is wholly soulless.

  Consider two young men just off a Greyhound from North Carolina. They were not brothers, but they might be thought brothers, although they looked nothing alike: it was suggested in the way the taller one, crow-black hair shoved messily behind his ears, kept close to his fairhaired companion as if protecting him. It was implied in the way they looked around the empty terminal and then glanced at each other, exchanging bad impressions without saying a word. They were not brothers, but they had known each other since childhood, and neither had ever been to New York before.

  The corridor was flooded with dead fluorescent light. They had seen an EXIT sign pointing this way, but the corridor ended in a steel door marked NO ADMITTANCE. Should anyone find this message ambiguous, a heavy chain had been looped through the door handle and snapped shut with a padlock as large as a good-sized fist.

  The fair boy turned around in a complete circle, lifted his head and flared his nostrils. His pale blue eyes slipped halfway shut, the lids fluttering. His friend watched him warily. After a minute he came out of it, shook himself a little, still nervous. “I don’t like it here, Steve. I can’t find my way anywhere.”

  Steve didn’t like it either, wished they could have avoided the terminal altogether. They’d planned to drive up, but Steve’s old T-bird had developed an alarming engine knock which threatened to become a death rattle if not dealt with kindly. The trip was all planned; they were booked to play at a club in the East Village—but they also meant to embark on a cross-country road trip next month. Steve left the car with his mechanic, telling him to fix it or scrap the motherfucker, Steve didn’t care which. Ghost stood by half-smiling, listening to this exchange. Then, while Steve was still bitching, he had walked up the street to the Farmers’ Hardware store that doubled as Missing Mile’s bus station and charged two round-trip tickets to his credit card. He hated using that card, hated the feel of the thing in his pocket, but this surely counted as an emergency. That same night they were New York bound.

  “It’s just the damn bus station,” Steve said. “You ever know a town that could be judged by its bus station?” But as usual, there was no use arguing with Ghost’s intuition. The place set Steve’s teeth on edge too.

  Ghost hitched his backpack up on his shoulder. They turned away from the padlocked door and tried to retrace their steps, but every corridor seemed to lead further into the bowels of the place. The soft sound of Ghost’s sneakers and the sharp clatter of Steve’s bootheels echoed back at them: shush-clo
p, shush-clop. Through Ghost’s thin T-shirt Steve saw the sharp winglike jut of his shoulderblades, the shadowed knobs of his spine. The strap of the backpack pulled Ghost’s shirt askew; his pale hair straggled silkily over his bare, sweaty neck. Steve carried only a guitar case, the instrument inside padded with a spare shirt and a few extra pairs of socks.

  They came to another dead end, then to the motionless hulk of an escalator with a chain strung across its railings. A KEEP OUT sign hung from the chain, swinging lazily as if someone had given it a push and then ducked out of sight just before Steve and Ghost came around the corner. Steve began to feel like a stupid hick, to feel like the place was playing tricks on them. Came to the Big City and couldn’t even find our way out of the bus station. We ought to sit down right here and wait for the next bus headed south, and when it comes, we ought to hop on it and go right back home. Fuck New York, fuck the big club date. I don’t like it here either.

  But that was stupid. The city was out there somewhere, and it had to get better than this.

  Port Authority, Ghost decided, was about the worst place he had ever been in. Everything about it looked wrong, smelled wrong, leaned wrong. There were patterns on the floor made by the grime of a thousand soles; there was a bloody handprint on the tile wall. Looking at it, Ghost tried to close off his mind: he didn’t want to know how it had gotten there. He managed to block out all but a faint impression of dirty knuckles plowing into a soft toothless mouth.

  All at once the corridors shook and shuddered. The floor vibrated beneath his feet, throwing Ghost off balance. He had no way of knowing that this loss of equilibrium was caused by the subways constantly passing through; it made him feel as if the place were trying to digest him.

  How did you ever get here? he thought. How did you get from the green mountains, from the kudzu traintracks and the lazy hot summers, all the way to this city that could chew you up and spit you out like a wad of gum that’s lost its flavor? How did you get to this place where you can never belong?

  Immersed in his thoughts, he had let Steve get a little ahead of him. He looked up an instant before the apparition of death reeled around the corner; he heard Steve’s curse, the sharp “Fuck!” that was nearly a gag, as the apparition lurched into Steve.