The Best New Horror 6 Read online

Night after night, Raphael listened to his son weeping.

  He listened to the wind weeping.

  He listened to La Llorona’s cries as she walked the dirt streets of C-Town. Each night she came closer, her sobs louder in the tiny room. One night Raphael felt her breath on his face, her tears on his cheeks, and then he heard Paulo take his last breath.

  Raphael awoke to the sound of a plane overhead. It came in low and shook the shanty. He ran outside, naked, and watched it fly over the dead grove.

  It flew on, releasing no spray, silver wings gleaming in the morning sunlight. The roar of its engines became a hum, then the sound of an insect, then faded away to silence.

  Raphael dressed, grabbed his machete and the letter he had written the night before, and headed for the chapel, where there was a mailbox.

  He walked through the empty streets, listening to the silence. Everyone but Raphael was gone now. Many left when the sickness started. More left after Epifanio and Rosita encountered La Llorona. The rest abandoned their homes after the lawyers came.

  One of the lawyers had talked to Raphael. He was a polite man, but he had bad ideas in his head, and Raphael had refused to sign the papers that so many of his neighbors had signed.

  “Mr Baca,” the lawyer said, “I know money cannot replace the loss of your children, and I know that appearing in a courtroom can be a frightening thing. But the people that did this to you will do the same thing to other people, as well.”

  Raphael didn’t know how to explain it to the man. C-Town had been a good colonios before La Llorona came. The fruit was delicious and the water was plentiful, and his family had made the most of both resources. They had worked in C-Town every season for the past ten years, and they had never fallen ill before.

  C-Town was not the real name of the place, of course. That was the name the lawyers used – Cancer Town, the place that killed little children by poisoning their blood.

  Raphael tried to explain that La Llorona was taking the children, but the lawyer could not understand. He was too intent on explaining things to Raphael. He said that the corporation that owned the land was attempting to declare bankruptcy to avoid his lawsuit. He said that there would be no more work in C-Town, and that Raphael should not stay, because C-Town was a very dangerous place to live, even for adults.

  Raphael agreed. C-Town was dangerous because La Llorona was there. But he would not leave. He had nowhere else to go.

  One day, long after Raphael’s neighbors had moved on, a man came from the corporation that owned the land. The man told Raphael that he would have to move. Raphael tried to tell him about La Llorona, but the man was just like the lawyer and wouldn’t listen.

  Raphael asked if the man knew of anyone who would listen to his story. The man thought about it for a long time. Finally, he gave Raphael the address of the Department of Agriculture. Raphael thanked him very sincerely. The man must have been pleased with that, because his smile became very broad, indeed.

  Raphael wrote many letters to the Department of Agriculture. He never received an answer. He thought that it must be his fault. He was a good reader, but he had trouble writing. His printing was not nearly as neat as that of his teacher, Paulo, and sometimes he did not know the right words to use.

  Still, he thought that his latest letter was the best yet. In it, he told the Department people not to listen to any lawyers. He promised that he would tell them all about La Llorona and the dead children if they would only come to C-Town.

  The afternoon was cloudy, the sky the color of a wet stone.

  Raphael cut across the grove, hurrying to mail his letter before a summer shower hit. It was very still among the trees. Raphael’s boots crunched over dead twigs. His steps came faster and faster, and he found that his throat had gone very dry.

  “Thirsty, Raphael? My fruit is so goooood. Sweet and juicy, Raphael. Come and taaaste . . .”

  The bruja seemed to be standing next to him. Raphael’s gaze darted through the grove. He saw nothing, but heard everything. A ripping sound, flesh being rended from bone. A scream. And then another sound, a moan of pleasure as La Llorona sucked at the horrid fruit.

  Raphael ran. The sky was darker now. Above him, dead branches creaked against a rising wind. One broke loose and crashed to the ground in front of him. He tripped and fell, his hands skidding over wood that was pitted and hollow with the efforts of many insects.

  The weeping sounds washed over him as he lay there. Not just the cries of La Llorona. A dozen tiny sobs rang in his ears, each choking with pain and fear. Raphael rolled away, eyes closed.

  He felt something grabbing him, holding him still.

  The branches. The grove was coming alive . . .

  He opened his eyes. The fruit loomed above him, suspended from a dead branch by a net of shadows. Its pink lips moved around white teeth.

  “Raphael . . .” it said. “Raphael Baca . . .”

  Raphael lashed out with his machete, severing the fruit. It dropped and rolled against a tree trunk, and a great shard of bark came loose and fell on it. Raphael ran to the shanty, hands over his ears, but he could not escape the ghostly weeping or the anguished cries that poured from his own lips.

  Morning brought the sun, and silence.

  Raphael went outside, into the light.

  A truck was parked in front of the shanty.

  There were words on the door of the truck. Big gold letters. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. But there was no one inside the truck, and no one on the streets of C-Town.

  Raphael walked to the edge of the grove. Nothing moved there. No fruit hung from the naked branches. No sounds drifted on the warming breeze. Not the weeping of La Llorona. Not the cries of the dead children.

  Raphael knelt down. He prayed that the person from the Department of Agriculture had not entered La Llorona’s grove.

  He waited for someone to appear, thinking how best to explain things.

  He waited a long time.

  When no one came, he got his machete and went into the grove, searching for another orange.

  CHARLES GRANT

  Sometimes, in the Rain

  CHARLES GRANT lives with his wife, novelist and editor Kathryn Ptacek, in a century-old haunted house in Sussex County, New Jersey. He is a prolific novelist, editor and short-story writer, with more than 100 books and 200 stories to his credit, and is a three-time winner of the World Fantasy Award, as well as the recipient of two Nebula Awards and the British Fantasy Society’s Life Achievement Award.

  After publishing a few science fiction novels, he began developing his unique brand of “quiet” horror in such books as The Hour of the Oxrun Dead, The Nestling, The Pet, The Tea Party, In a Dark Dream, Something Stirs, Raven, Jackals and The Black Carousel. More recently he has written the bestsellers The X Files: Goblins and Whirlwind, based on the cult TV series.

  Grant’s short fiction has been collected in Tales from the Nightside, A Glow of Candles and Nightmare Seasons, and he has edited numerous anthologies, including the acclaimed “Shadows” and “Greystone Bay” series. He has also written humorous fantasy and teenage fiction under a number of pseudonyms.

  The following story, set in London, Ontario, was nominated for The Horror Writers Association’s Bram Stoker Award . . .

  THERE WAS RAIN that day in London, in the last month of the year. A soft rain, not much to it, and most of the noise it made came from falling off the leaves, the eaves, from the tips of people’s umbrellas and the brims of their hats as they hurried past the house and never saw me in the chair. I didn’t mind. I wasn’t after company. And I suppose, if they had looked, they wouldn’t have seen me anyway. When it rains in December, you don’t expect to see someone sitting on a porch.

  So they passed me by and let me watch them until the soft rain became hard rain and the tires spit instead of hissed, and the leaves bowed instead of trembled, and the eaves filled with a harsh rushing sound that slammed against thin metal as the water sped down the spouts and gushed onto the grass
at all the house’s corners.

  I shivered a little, pulled my overcoat closer to my throat, and kind of tucked my chin a little closer to my chest.

  Though it wasn’t really cold, the snow we’ve had gone and churned to mud, it wasn’t exactly spring either, and the tips of my fingers tingled a little, and the lobes of my ears protested by slightly burning until I rubbed them and made them burn for a different reason. Then I huddled again, and watched the rain.

  Sometimes, but only sometimes, you can see things out there.

  When everything, and everyone, has been washed of color, when edges blur and perspective distorts and light catches a raindrop and makes it flare silver, you can see things.

  I waited.

  The footstep a few minutes later didn’t startle me, nor did the creak of the railing when she sat on it, one foot firm on the floorboard, the other swinging ever so slightly in time to the breeze that had decided to sweep down the tarmac and drag the rain with it. I watched her without moving my head, didn’t say anything, finally let my gaze drift back to the sidewalk, the street, the houses across the way that had no lights yet in any of the windows.

  “If you catch pneumonia out here,” she said at last, not looking at me, “I’m not going to be responsible.”

  I shrugged.

  I didn’t much care one way or the other about her feelings of responsibility.

  “I mean it, Len. I’m tired of it. I’ve had enough.”

  The dangling foot kicked lightly at the rail spindles.

  A man walked by, hunched over in a pea coat, baseball cap yanked down to his Clark Gable ears. He had an old pipe in his mouth, the kind whose stem curves down and away, and up again to the bowl. He stopped at the foot of the walk and squinted at the house.

  “Oh, swell,” she said. The foot stabbed now. “Just what I need.”

  I sniffed, loudly.

  She wore a cardigan over what they used to call a spinster blouse, and she tucked her hands into its pockets, bulging them as she pushed her fists together for warmth. Her profile was half shadow, half rainlight, enough magic there to take away most of the wrinkles and most of the years. With her short hair and the fact that she’d been lean since the first day out of the womb, she could have been any age from thirty to sixty.

  In half shadow.

  In the rainlight.

  It was the voice that gave her away; it had been used for too many years for too many things that seldom made her laugh.

  The man with the pipe saw me, nodded a greeting, and trudged up the walk.

  She rolled her eyes, stared at the roof to search for the strength to keep her from killing him before he reached the steps. Me, too, probably; me, too.

  “Afternoon, Gracie,” Youngman Stevens said politely. His right hand made a tipping-his-cap gesture which she acknowledged by nodding, just barely. He grinned. “Len, you trying to kill yourself or what?”

  “I like the rain,” I said flatly, still watching the street.

  “Well,” Gracie said, angry that I’d spoken to an old man like Youngman and not to my own sister. But she didn’t move except to kick the spindles again.

  The breeze finally reached me, fussed with my hair until I slapped at it to keep it down. Youngman grinned again; hell, he was always grinning. He grinned at the funerals of our enemies and our friends; he grinned when we took our table up at the Aberdeen; he grinned when his wife died in his arms three summers ago, down at the river, in Labatt Park.

  He leaned against the post and pulled off his cap, slapped the rain off it, and jammed it on again. Then he took the pipe from his mouth and dropped it into his coat pocket. Shadow or no shadow, there was no mistaking his age – he wore it like a mask he intended to take off any day now, to reveal that, by damn, he was only seventeen. His cheeks used to be chipmunk puffed, his nose round instead of a bulb, his eyes deepset instead of sinking into his skull. He had a habit of pulling at the corner of his upper lip, as if he were pulling at the mustache he used to have. He pulled it now. It drove Gracie crazy.

  “So listen,” he said to me. “You thirsty or what?”

  I almost laughed. “It’s pouring, you old fart, or hadn’t you noticed? How the hell can I be thirsty?”

  Youngman stared at the rain from around the post. “You ain’t drinking it, are you?”

  I shook my head.

  “So?” He lifted a hand. “You thirsty?”

  Gracie stood, foot stamping hard, sounding loud in spite of the damp. “Why the hell don’t you just leave him be?” She stomped to the door, yanked it open, and stood there. “You’re going to kill him, and he’s too stupid to know it.”

  The door slammed behind her.

  Youngman and I exchanged looks.

  The rain eased its roaring; it was back to soft again, back to quiet.

  “Y’know,” he said, staring at the door, “when we was married, me and that woman, she wasn’t nearly this cranky. What the hell’d you do to her?”

  “I lived,” I answered simply.

  He understood and looked away.

  And I stood. Slowly. As if, after all these years, I still had to get used to just how tall I was. I had never stooped, and when the years came that suggested gravity take over and give me a rest, I refused the invitation. Some claim it makes me look younger, or that they can tell when I’m not doing so well because I look somehow shorter; and every time I go to the States, they always, dammit, ask if I ever played basketball.

  I pushed my coat into place around various places on my body. My left leg was a little stiff, and I sure didn’t feel like racing, but all in all, I felt pretty good. I leaned over and plucked my hat from the floor, smoothed the brim, and said, “If we hurry, we can stay just long enough that it’ll be too late to come back for supper. Then we’ll have to eat there.”

  He laughed. He and Gracie had been married for just about four years before she got fed up and left him and moved, of all places, out to Vancouver. Four years of Youngman doing most of the cooking; and when she returned to move in with me, if I didn’t feel like cooking, we ate out. I never let her in the kitchen, and she didn’t mind. There were lots of things she was stubborn about, my younger sister by a dozen years, but she knew she couldn’t boil water without burning the bottom out of the pan. Never thought it necessary to learn the culinary arts, and so she hadn’t, with a vengeance.

  As he turned to lead us down the steps, I took his shoulder and held him. “What?” I asked.

  He didn’t look back.

  “C’mon, what?”

  He shook my hand off, lowered his head, and stepped into the rain.

  I frowned, called something hasty over my shoulder in case Gracie was eavesdropping from the living room window, and hurried after him.

  The rain was cold.

  By nightfall, less than an hour or so away, it would freeze on the streets and pavement, and coat the dead grass white. Maybe snow by midnight, though it didn’t feel like it yet; but it would make coming home a treacherous trip. I almost changed my mind. I knew what happened when folks like me fell. We look healthy, maybe; we look like we’ll live forever. But bones bust too easily and healing isn’t ever easy again, if we ever heal at all. The only thing that kept me moving was the thought of Gracie nagging at me to cook. Weather like this, she wouldn’t go out on a bet. Then I’d have to listen to her all night.

  By the time I caught up to him he was already on Dundas Street, heading west. A few cars on the road, the streetlamps already on, and the rain. Across the street a woman hurried up a walk with grocery bags hugged in her arms, a small dog racing up the steps ahead of her.

  Youngman hesitated when he saw her.

  Then I knew.

  “Thought you saw her, right?” I said softly.

  He didn’t nod; it didn’t matter.

  We walked on.

  Funny how it was, back when we thought we knew it all even when we suspected we didn’t know a damn thing – funny, I guess, how this little old man was once a li
ttle young guy with not much going for him but good hands with wood, and how this woman came along to take Gracie’s sting away. Funny how it happens, just when you think you’ve used it all up and there’s nothing left but empty, and having drinks with your friends.

  Funny.

  A drop exploded on the back of my neck, like being stabbed with melting ice, and I shuddered, twisted my shoulders, and knew that when I got back, my sister would give me hell about not taking an umbrella.

  “She was at the park,” Youngman said as we reached a corner and habit forced us to check for traffic that was seldom there.

  I made a sound, neither believing nor disbelieving.

  “Not very clear,” he went on, taking his time stepping up the next curb. His right hip was bad, but not as bad as his heart. Or mine. “I don’t know if she saw me.”

  “You go up to her?”

  He looked at me, astonished. “You kidding? Scared the hell out of me, Len.”

  “You’ve seen her before.”

  “Scared the hell out of me then, too.”

  We walked on.

  Finally I couldn’t stop the asking: “What do you think she wants?”

  He didn’t know, didn’t have a clue, and we debated the possibilities over a couple of drinks, over supper, over a couple of drinks more; we talked about it to Maggie McClure – theoretically, of course – and the Aberdeen’s owner had no opinion one way or the other except that she was getting tired of hearing Youngman asking everybody in creation about seeing his wife, what the meaning was, or if he was really crazy.

  “Christ, Youngman,” she said, “don’t you ever watch hockey or anything? Give it a rest, for God’s sake. Ask me about the weather.”

  We didn’t have to.

  The rain did what it was supposed to for the rest of the night, and Youngman left before he was too drunk to walk. I sat alone for a while. I wasn’t worried about ice or snow or finding my way back if I went over my limit. And I didn’t laugh, as the others did, telling each other a new Youngman story.

  Because sometimes, but only sometimes, you can see things in the rain.