The Best new Horror 4

by Stephen Jones

  The man behind the counter seemed too old for the long silver chain dangling from his left ear. His eyes were greasy. He gazed past Jeff out the front window. “Your little girl sick?” he asked, with minimal movement of his lips.

  For some reason the very idea that the clerk had noticed his daughter in the car, had used the words “your little girl,” alarmed Jeff. He found himself searching the man’s face for a lascivious wink or tongue across the lips. In the high chrome polish of the cash register, shelves, and counter trim, Jeff could feel a thousand fragments of the clerk’s slick eyes, watching him, sliding closer.

  Jeff turned and found himself looking at his daughter directly, without the protection of reflection. She sat like an elderly doll slumped with a heavy weight of medication, her forehead pressing the car window, staring at him. The red and yellow neon of the store’s sign washed her face, made it seem thinner, the shadows darker. She was his beautiful doll, his Auschwitz doll. He turned and almost desperately his gaze latched on to the clerk’s greasy eyes. “It’s just the reflection from your sign. That damned garish neon. That’s what makes her look so ill.” He said it inviting argument, but there was none. The clerk cast his subhuman eyes down and waited for Jeff’s order.

  When he got into the car he handed the sack of food back to her without looking. He held his breath a beat, anticipating some sort of terrible breakage—the car windows, the store beyond, perhaps even the tight sheen of skin stretched over his skull, but after a moment a hand took the bag from him. “I couldn’t remember what you liked.” He forced a laugh and it sounded oddly falsetto. “So I bought enough for six . . . six daughters, six little girls.”

  He was embarrassing himself. She said nothing in reply; he thought she must be terribly angry with him now. He was glad Liz wasn’t there to point out how badly he was handling things. It was obviously much too trying a trip for a little girl. He had given her coffee and donuts, cupcakes and a nut bar and two colas in the bag, brands he had never heard of, Rhode Island brands he supposed. He thought she was too young for coffee but he couldn’t remember. He couldn’t remember any of the things she liked to eat. Suddenly he didn’t know her at all. She had grown up much too fast and soon she would be dead. They all would be dead. Everyone had told him that all his life but he hadn’t believed it until now.

  She didn’t say anything. But he thought he could hear her eating now. Not loudly, but slowly consuming everything he had given her. Good.

  He didn’t recognize any of the streets around Brown. They were all torn up, decades of asphalt pulled up like geologic strata, detours leading him around the gaping excavations floored with oily liquid to oddly-shaped parking spaces overlooked by black ruins. He thought he recognized the Rockefeller Library but he couldn’t be sure. He finally pulled the car into what may or may not have been a parking space, opened Susan’s door, and reached into the shadows there. Her hand caught his timidly. “We’re late,” he barked nervously, turning his head as he dragged her from the car and started racing up the steps. Her tread grew lighter the harder he pulled. He had a vision of his beautiful daughter entering the reception hand-in-hand with proud papa. He whispered back into the cool wind blowing off the damp pavement, “You’re beautiful.” He knew her shyness would not permit her to reply to that, and she didn’t.

  The night air in Providence seemed a far more substantial thing than he remembered, but it had been a very long time since he had done more than drive through the city during daylight hours. He supposed there was much more pollution these days, more dust from all the reconstruction. Shadows underwent a congealing process; black spaces solidified. At times it was like walking through veils. The air had a feeling of age, as in a room long kept shut. Try as he might, he couldn’t imagine how as a student here he had ever tolerated such Lovecraftian gloom.

  The printed sign on the door said that the City Works department had ruled this particular classroom building “unsafe.” Another hastily-scrawled red note on blue paper—Professor Lawrence’s old stationery?—explained that the reunion had been moved to the Biltmore hotel.

  Rather than trying to maneuver those torn and reshuffled streets again, Jeff decided they would walk. He wouldn’t worry about getting lost; everyone knew where the Biltmore was.

  After several blocks he had to remove his coat. He could not believe the heat. His shirt stuck to his skin like layers of molt—he suspected it was ruined. Liz would be unhappy—she had given it to him last birthday, although it was the only present he could remember receiving. Perhaps an ugly tie from Susan with her child’s taste. He vaguely remembered looking into the mirror and seeing a line of distortion hanging from his neck, squeezing it so tightly he couldn’t breathe. Susan kept slipping from his grasp; he regripped her hand so tightly he was surprised when she didn’t cry out. In the dark puddles spotting the pavement his reflection looked bodiless, his head screaming as it flew through the night air.

  Store windows strangely refused to give up all of his reflection. In passing he would see a cheek and an eye, downward slash of a mouth, an outthrust leg, one hand trailing back, desperately clutching at a daughter who seemed to have lost her bright image in their flight across town. He tried to attribute the gaps in his own image and his daughter’s complete absence to dust and grease on the glass.

  Now and then he lost track of the Biltmore’s direction in the tangle of disrupted streets and gutted buildings. He stopped and gave a dark passerby his best “lost” look—the man’s shambling made it impossible to ask him directly. He wasn’t surprised that the man ignored him. He tried this tack again and again, finally working up the courage to at least touch the shoulder of one or two. Some of those citizens obviously didn’t take kindly to his touching them so—some looked as if they might have killed him had there been no witnesses. All his life, he had met people who seemed somehow too cold, too cruel to be human; they behaved in ways Jeff believed no human should behave.

  A man turned suddenly and gestured awkwardly toward a narrow side street. Jeff was struck by the mouth, which seemed too wide, as if he had undergone one of those mouth surgeries movie stars had had, but in this case the incision had gone much too far. Jeff stared, but the man’s eyes refused to blink, collecting more and more water which caught the dim light and magnified it, making them look heavy with ground glass. Jeff finally turned away.

  The gathering at the Biltmore was sedate, and no one seemed to recognize him. The hotel itself was under reconstruction, tall scaffolding leaning precariously against the walls where workers in white coveralls labored overtime at replastering the cracked and stained surfaces. Or perhaps they themselves were applying the cracks and stains. Jeff drank until the workers and scaffolding disappeared, and then he had a vision of the hotel’s more elegant future firmly in mind.

  “Bill, is that you?” Someone clutched his shoulder, as if desperately seeking directions.

  “No,” Jeff replied to the staggering fat man in front of him. “Tonight I’m not me at all.”

  Now and then a stranger would smile and slap Jeff on the back, chant a few endearments and then leave again. Jeff thought that in another time and world they might have been his friends. Everyone had always liked him, but he had no talent for friendship.

  Some time near midnight Jeff discovered Professor Lawrence chatting with some men and women Jeff’s own age whom he vaguely remembered as having been in his classes in graduate school. He watched the elderly man for some time before he could muster enough courage to speak to him. He wore glasses still, but a different, squarer shape. His speech, his entire presentation seemed a bit more hesitant, his former students interrupting frequently to take command of the conversation and discuss their own researches.

  “Professor Lawrence?” he said, pushing himself right up to the old man’s glasses. “Jeff Reynolds. It’s great to see you again!”

  The old man nodded absently, then raised an eyebrow slightly. “Oh, I remember,” he said, sounding tired. “You did some work
on the nativists, as I recall. Most peculiar. Those old bigots. Most peculiar,” he said again, as if describing Jeff himself, and Jeff watched as his reflected face in his imagined father’s glasses turned dark, broad, lizard-like.

  “Here,” Jeff said suddenly, rocking forward and spilling his drink on Lawrence, who blanched and stepped back. “I have a family now! Me! A wife and a beautiful . . . beautiful daughter. Susan!” He called, looking around, and suddenly realizing in a panic he had no idea where she was. “Susan!” He tried to grab Lawrence’s hands in both of his but Lawrence stumbled and jerked away from him. As if Jeff’s touch might contaminate the old fraud. “Susan!” He stared at Lawrence in horror. “You have to believe me!” he cried. “You were important to me. I do have a daughter!” But the hotel shimmered so loudly Jeff had no idea if Professor Lawrence heard him at all.

  After a few hours Jeff stopped calling out the name of his beautiful daughter, wondering—helpless not to—whether that was truly her name. If she was alive, if she even existed anymore, he felt she would find him. If only he could cover enough ground in time. The sky had lightened somewhat—dawn would be there soon—but as yet there were only night people out on the Providence streets.

  He did not know what he could tell Elizabeth, if there was ever an Elizabeth to tell. He didn’t think he would ever be able to tell her anything if he could not find Susan.

  The pale light falling between the buildings into the narrow streets had its own kind of solidity, as if there were a clear line between this light and what lay beyond and the ordinary morning this side of it. Like a curtain, or a sheet of glass. He stepped through.

  In the expanding light Providence tried to reveal its secrets to him. Where store fronts had been torn open metal armature was revealed, a multitude of electrical cable and the complex network of plumbing added to and subtracted from so often over the years that he doubted anyone could trace it all. Posters had been rubbed away unevenly from the exterior walls of shops so that the portions of words remaining spelled out bizarre phrases which nonetheless seemed vaguely familiar to him. Ornate architectural decoration had been weathered so that even more ornate subsurfaces showed through. Disparate building styles had been jammed together to create new styles. The city appeared unfinished, and yet already renewing itself.

  Two of the men with too-broad mouths rode huge street cleaning machines, running over the same spots again and again.

  From broken window panes fragments of many eyes reflected down. At the bronzed edges of buildings mishappen limbs attempted to stir from the reflective surfaces. In the finish of a shiny red car he saw his body beginning to warp and catch fire. In the polished tile of a pedestrian plaza he caught a glimpse of his true eyes. In the curve of a broken bottle he watched himself striking again and again at the child he loved so much, whom he could not find in all these mirrors.

  “This is the way it begins,” he thought, as world rubbed against world, and his own skin grew veined and layered. “This is the way it ends,” he thought, as stink and dark erupted from every crack in the pavement, every opening in the walls, and the raw edges of his reality. “This is simply one of those moments,” he thought, when suddenly and just for the moment you forget that you are a human being in the company of human beings, and you find that you are capable of doing something truly terrible. Just for that moment there seems no reason not to do the worst thing you can think of. There seems to be no one to judge you, and for that moment you are incapable of guilt. A life is defined by the choices made during moments like these.

  He found Susan’s body somewhere between the world he had always dreamed he lived in and the dark impulses beyond. Her body had been taken apart beyond all hope of reassembly. In the dull mirror of her eye he could see the lizard he had become, and the goat, a lone member of that dark mysterious race that would forever corrupt the lives of the human animal.

  SARAH ASH

  Mothmusic

  SARAH ASH trained as a musician and studied composition at Cambridge. Since then she has taught music and collaborated on several theatre pieces for young performers, the most recent being Spaced Out!, a 1960s space opera based on the legend of Psyche.

  “Mothmusic” marked her debut in Interzone and was only the second of her short stories to be published (the first appeared in Far Point 4 in 1992). It is a baroque tale of creeping metamorphosis reminiscent of the best work of Clark Ashton Smith.

  Her first novel, Moths to a Flame (which she reveals “develops some of the themes first started in ‘Mothmusic’ ”) will be published in Britain by Orion’s Millennium imprint in 1994.

  OBSERVATIONS OF ASTAR TAZIEL (personal physician to the House of Memizhon) on the symtoms of boskh-addiction.

  Boskh: The Aelahim Moonmoth was indigenous to the remote Island of Ael Lahi until this year when a spice merchant brought back live specimens, claiming that the dust from their wings is used extensively by the islanders both as a hallucinogen and a medicinal remedy. This merchant made extensive claims as to its healing properties which the Arkhan commanded me to investigate. The results of my findings are recorded below.

  Medicinal Uses: When administered in minuscule quantities, boskh has proved to be most efficacious in curing mortal fevers and aiding the healing of infected, gangrenous wounds. A miraculous substance without any like in all Ar-Khendy. One to five grains is usually enough and in the case of a large area of suppurating tissue, a light dusting—no more.

  Addiction—warning signs: Repeated use of boskh creates dependency. Visual disturbances are the first signs—sore, watering eyes, intolerance of light, etc. When I tried boskh for myself, the sense-enhancement was—magical; quite beyond my wildest imaginings. But as the drug wore off I experienced nausea, agonizing stomach cramps, aching eyes—and the oddest intuition that if I were to take more boskh, the symptoms would be instantly relieved. However, I held firm to my resolve and recovered within a day’s span.

  Journal of the Plague Year

  Called at dawn to the house of Torella Sarillë, favoured mistress of X –. There found all the house-hold in darkness and disorder, Sarillë herself, her hair down, half-dressed, wandering the upper corridors like one distracted. When I had calmed her with an infusion of powdered horn-poppy, I examined her. I have never seen anything like this before. Her eyes appear to be swelling within their sockets; the pupil has grown so large has grown so large that there is little iris still visible. The pain caused by the swelling—and by any light—is so excruciating that the patient screams aloud.

  When asked, Sarillë admitted to ingesting boskh in large quantities. Now I learn that at Myn-Dhiel all the courtiers have been taking boskh—by mouth and by incising the veins and sprinkling the powder into the bloodstream. Apparently it leads to a greatly enhanced sexual prowess and stamina. They call this “Yskhysse,” a word in the Old Tongue that defies accurate translation. She described several erotic practices to me which made even this old physician blush; I will not record them here but mention only that the boskh appears to facilitate some kind of hallucinatory mind-merging and that these exquisites at Myn-Dhiel have devised some bizarre concepts of using the various bodily orifices in ways that the All-Seeing certainly did not intend!

  Called again to Sarillë. All shutters closed, no lights. Sarillë supine upon her bed, the brocade curtains drawn. Blind. Crazed. Crying out for more boskh. And everywhere, in the moonlit garden, in the streets, the shrill fluting of these creatures and the sweet stench from their iridescent wings. When I left the house, the night air was filled with moths, swirling like snow. Girls played weirdflutes to them, sang, to entice them into their chambers.

  Sarillë. I have never seen the like before. This . . . corruption of the skin. Puncture marks on her arms and legs; I thought at first they were scars from gross intravenous boskh-abuse but they look more like the bite of some insect or leech.

  More cases to attend to. Three courtesans of the House of Red Khassia, a house of ill-repute much frequented by young bl
oods from the Palace. And the boy Khal, the paramour of the Tarrakhan, a Tarkmyn of some seventeen years, famed for his great personal beauty, a uniquely exquisite blending of white-fair hair with soft black eyes, deep enough to drown a man—But I digress. Those famed dark eyes have lost their lustre and become filmed and dull. Khal is going blind—yet he screams with pain if anyone approaches with a lantern or candle. The Tarrakhan is beside himself with grief. He has offered me gold by the bushel if I can but find a cure for the lad.

  When I arrived at the Tarkhas House at dusk, the air was filled with the beat of the moths’ soft wings, their lirruping songs. The very air—glittered. I tied a scarf over my mouth and nostrils so that I should not inhale the noxious substance. In Khal’s room, the windows were wide open and a flock of the creatures fluttered about the room. The boy lay motionless on the bed—they were crawling all over him, a heaving coverlet of white down. I went to drive them off but the Tarrakhan stopped me. “Look,” he said, “their presence has calmed him—surely this proves the healing properties of this boskhdust!”

  Outside in the courtyard dead moths fluttered to the cobbles like dead leaves. Soon a carpet of pale husks covered the ground.

  “They are dying!” cried the Tarrakhan, grabbing my arm. “They are dropping by the thousand—there will be no boskh left to cure Khal. Can’t you do something?”