The Best New Horror 6 Page 11

  I sat there and held the empty glass until Maggie suggested, very gently, it was time to go home.

  I sat there, you know. I sat there out at that damn, goddamn hospital, and held Dad’s swollen, darkening hand until the nurse told me twice visiting hours were over. But I couldn’t let go. He was thin, he was pale, his lips moved and made no sound, his body shook once in a while, his eyelids bulged whenever he saw something in the dark where he lived. I sat there, thinking that I was damn near fifty, for God’s sake, and it was right that Dad should be afraid and should need someone, even me, to hold his hand while he left. He wasn’t going to last forever.

  I had dozed.

  I woke up.

  Father didn’t.

  That was that.

  “Len?”

  I kind of snorted, shook my head, and grinned at Maggie. “Thinking,” I said.

  “About what? Winning a lottery?”

  A shrug, a few bills on the table without counting, and I stepped outside, flipped up my collar, adjusted my hat, and started for home.

  Cold; it was cold that night.

  Raindrops caught the bare branches and froze into clear hanging flowers glittering in the streetlamp light; cars moved more slowly, a bus sounded huge and warm, and a pickup backfired softly in the distance; no people but me, and I wondered what the hell I thought I was doing when, instead of heading back to the house, I moved down the street, past the museums, the courthouse, and took the long sloping block down to the park.

  The Thames is dark in winter daylight, rushing ebony at night, and the city above and behind, the houses across the way, didn’t provide much light, only gave birth to shifting shadows. Especially under the trees that line the tarmac path following the river. I shivered a little and called myself too many kinds of fool to count, and decided, with a sigh that puffed a ghost in front of my face, that maybe it was time Youngman saw a doctor.

  A moment later I thought maybe I should see one too.

  Because she was there.

  She wore a camel’s hair coat, a small black hat on her auburn hair, and carried a white purse over one arm.

  I would have known her anywhere: Edith Stevens, dead three years and looking no different than the last time I saw her when she was alive.

  She was across the water, at the base of the concrete wall that kept the Thames from taking the homes above it. Barely seen in mist and shadow, but it was her, no question about it, and as my left hand reached out to grab the nearest bole to keep me standing, the rain came back and washed her away.

  Just like that.

  I stood there; I waited; I looked around slowly when someone touched my arm, and Gracie took my elbow, tugged a little, and led me away. She didn’t say a word until we were nearly home, but I could feel it and it bothered me – my sister was afraid.

  She asked me if I was drunk, and I told her I didn’t think so, and told her what I’d seen. A little moan, a disgusted sigh, and we were finally inside, coat and hat hung in the closet, shoes off, socks off, me in my living room chair while she fussed in the kitchen.

  Tea, a tray of cookies, napkins, sugar, and spoons.

  She set them on a coffee table that separated our chairs, sat, and looked at me.

  I smiled; I couldn’t help it.

  When we were young – or at least younger than we were – I was round and she was angles, but age had swapped our features. And for her age, though I’d never told her, she wasn’t at all bad looking. It was the bile that made her ugly.

  The front window was at my right shoulder, and as I sipped I looked out. Not much to see when the inside lights are on, only my reflection floating beneath black glass, and a faint cloud of white from the streetlamp down the block.

  “What do you think she wants?” Gracie asked.

  I couldn’t believe it. No scolding, no sarcasm, no verbal whipping for the bad boy who walked around in the middle of a January night, courting pneumonia when he ought to damn well know better. It took me a while to find an answer.

  “Gracie, I’ve had a few drinks, you know, and not a hell of a lot to eat. Edith is dead. She wasn’t there, it was just the stories, you know how Youngman is.”

  She glanced out the window.

  The rain had turned to sleet and was scraping at the pane.

  For a minute there, I didn’t think she was breathing.

  “Gracie?”

  Two breaths; two slow breaths.

  “Do you know why I came back?”

  I grinned. “Sure. To devil me into my grave.”

  Still looking out the window: “Because I thought you might need me. I don’t know why. It wasn’t much fun out there. You had Dad, and I had a couple of husbands after . . . him. But when they were all gone, I thought maybe you’d need me.”

  It wasn’t in her face – that was as expressionless as one could get without wearing a mask; it was in the tone beneath the monotone, and I nearly choked.

  I think she hated me.

  She put her cup down, brushed some crumbs from her lap, and left the room. I didn’t say anything because I couldn’t think of anything to say. I suppose I could have protested that I did in fact need her, despite her carping and belligerence, if only because it was nice to have another person in the house to keep away the hours when the hours were all empty. She wouldn’t have believed me, though.

  I sat there for another hour, staring blindly out the window, and when I tried the tea again, it was cold enough to make me shudder. So I cleaned up, went to bed, and barely slept.

  When I did, it was frightening.

  Which not surprisingly left me cranky as hell the next morning, especially when I looked out and saw the goddamn rain.

  Gracie and I fought over what to have for breakfast, what to wear to go to the market once the rain had let up enough to let us out of the house, what to watch on TV . . . name it, we snapped and bit and snarled about it. At one point, it got so ludicrous I started to laugh, and that only made it worse. By lunchtime, we couldn’t stand to be in the same room together; by midafternoon, I had jammed myself into my chair with a book I didn’t want to read and pointedly ignored her every time she stomped through; by dinner, I had had it. I grabbed my coat and hat from the hall closet, marched into the kitchen and said, “I’m going to the Aberdeen. There’s frozen dinners in the freezer.”

  She was at the table, doing a crossword puzzle in the paper. She looked at me without raising her head. “We had an affair, you know.”

  I looked at the ceiling for deliverance. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Youngman and I,” she answered. And she smiled. “You never knew, did you.”

  “Oh sure,” I said, buttoning my coat. “You flew in from Vancouver while I wasn’t looking, hit the hay with him, flew back, and never said a word.”

  She shrugged. “A couple of times he flew out. A business trip, you know?” She touched the pencil point to her tongue, marked a square in the puzzle.

  “Sure you did,” I said, and walked out.

  No; I slammed out.

  The rain had eased, the cold had returned, and it took me forever to get to the pub because the sidewalk had turned to thin ice, the kind you can’t really see until you’re parked on your ass, wondering what the hell had happened. All the time, I fumed. I knew what she was trying to do--she wanted me and Youngman apart so she could have me to herself. It would, she’d be thinking, be fitting. I had had Dad; she would have me.

  Jesus.

  What I wanted then was a couple of stiff drinks, and Youngman’s ear to bend until he slapped me a couple of times to bring me to my senses. But I had no sooner stepped inside, when Maggie grabbed my arm and turned me around.

  “What?” I said, not believing I’d be thrown out before I’d even gotten in.

  “That idiot,” she said, nodding sharply toward the door. “He comes running in, says he’s seen his damn wife again, shouts a hail and farewell and scares half my customers to death, and runs out again.”

/>   I tried to think, but Maggie wouldn’t let me. She opened the door and gently nudged me to the sidewalk.

  “Go get him, Len, before he kills himself, eh? He said he was going to Labatt.”

  I must have looked my age then, standing at the curb, the rain an evening mist. I was confused, I was unnerved, and I was more than a little frightened that Youngman would do something really stupid. And how was I supposed to stop him?

  I hurried to the park as fast as my legs and the weather would let me, still half-burning over Gracie, and half-weeping over Stevens. I had seen it before, and kicked myself for not seeing it now – others my age, the age we all reach when we never think we will, finding not much left of the future and so go sneaking off to the past for something to hold on to when it was time for no future at all.

  Like Dad had done with me.

  Like Gracie wanted me to do with her.

  I stumbled and grabbed a fencepost to keep from falling; I tripped over a curb and went down on one knee, crying out and not caring if anyone could hear; I hurried down the slope, under the overpass, and saw him on the wide grassy bank, not a foot from the water.

  Rushing out of the night above, and into the night below.

  No light on it at all.

  “Hey!” I called weakly, out of breath, sagging against a tree, feeling the cold work up my arms. “Hey, you old fart, I need a drink, you coming?”

  His cap was over his ears, his pipe in his left hand, his pea coat glittering as if it had been sewn with stars. He grinned at me, waved the pipe over his shoulder.

  “Gotta go, Len,” he said.

  I shook my head. “Youngman, this is crazy. Please. Just get your sorry ass over here and we’ll go have something to eat. Gracie’s pissed at me, and I could use the company.”

  He laughed without a sound, and something dark moved behind him. “Sorry, Len.”

  “Stevens, dammit!”

  A car slashed by, somewhere above us.

  Youngman tucked his pipe into his pocket. “I finally figured it out,” he said as the dark form met the light. “She’s going to show me the way.” A tilt of his head. “Gonna miss you, old friend.”

  I couldn’t say it; I felt as if I were strangling.

  Edith, camel hair coat and white purse, slipped her hand around his arm, and he pressed it lovingly to his side.

  He grinned.

  He waved quickly, and they turned their backs to me.

  God, no, I thought; please, God, no.

  Onto the river, then, and down; into the dark.

  I stood there for a while, a couple of seconds, a couple of minutes, before I pushed myself away from the tree, too weary to be angry, too saddened to be scared.

  I walked.

  That’s all; I just walked, and wondered about the funeral. No one would believe me, least of all Gracie, and I hoped that someone, and I knew it would me, would arrange a memorial service for that stupid idiot in that stupid cap.

  A siren exploded somewhere, not very far away, and for a moment my heart and lungs stopped because it sounded like Youngman.

  And he was screaming.

  I even looked back, mouth open, eyes wide, until I saw flashing lights streak around the corner at the top of the tarmac slope.

  But the siren kept on screaming, and it sounded just like him, and I did my best to run, not getting very far because the heart, the lungs, and the legs just couldn’t take it. I managed to get up to Dundas Street without stopping, managed to get three blocks more before I realized there were no sirens anymore, but the lights were still spinning, up there by the Aberdeen. I squinted, and counted two patrol cars parked nose in at the curb, and an ambulance swept by me, making me jump away from the curb.

  Maggie, I thought, finally shot a deadbeat customer.

  I was wrong.

  I went up there, and I was wrong.

  When I hadn’t come back, she had gone looking for me again. Maggie told me later she had been furious, nearly spitting, when I wasn’t at my table. So mad she’d stepped off the curb without looking, and the truck hadn’t stopped in time, braking and skidding on the rainmist ice-slick street.

  I don’t know if I actually passed out or just slid into a stupor, but the next thing I knew there was a funeral, there were people, there was Maggie McClure, there was silence. A day, a week, I don’t know how long it was, but the rain stopped, and I spent most of my time packing her clothes to give to charity, or a church, I hadn’t made up my mind.

  That’s when I found the letter – she and Youngman, years after their divorce, carrying on, practically coast to coast.

  “Son of a bitch,” I said in her empty bedroom. “Son of a bitch.”

  That, more than anything, made me remember the night they had died.

  That, more than anything, made me remember the siren, made me wonder if that first wailing really had been Youngman screaming, because Edith knew.

  I don’t know.

  But there’s rain now, never snow, almost every day. It slips from the eaves and rushes along the gutters and no one ever looks while I sit on the porch and watch.

  Funny how things are; I used to think it would be Dad who would come to show me the way when the way was open for me to take it.

  Not now.

  Sometimes, in the rain, I can see her across the street, standing beneath a pine tree, waiting for me to leave.

  She isn’t smiling, my Gracie.

  She isn’t smiling at all.

  RICHARD CHRISTIAN MATHESON

  Ménage à Trois

  THE SON OF famed science fiction writer Richard Matheson, Richard Christian Matheson has been an advertising copywriter, parapsychologist, rock ’n’ roll drummer, songwriter, and is currently one of Hollywood’s most successful producer/scriptwriters.

  He recently sold his twelfth original spec screenplay in five years, entitled Hooky, to Interscope. New Line is developing his feature project The Glow, and he is currently creating a dark comedy TV show for the Carsey Werner company. He also wrote and executive-produced the 1994 werewolf movie Full Eclipse, which became HBO’s highest rated film of the year and their biggest video-cassette release to date.

  New fiction has recently appeared in such anthologies as Dark Terrors, Little Deaths and Douglas E. Winter’s Millennium, and White Wolf Publishing has collected together fifty of the author’s short-short stories. Leading Man is the title of his new novel, the follow-up to his acclaimed 1993 début, Created By, which has now been published in ten countries.

  12:38 a.m.

  Heat.

  Midnight fingers.

  They wipe warm metal. She reaches with needful tears. He gently takes her in his arms. Her back arches. Nipples lift. He stabs her. She shudders, clutching air.

  “Yes,” she moans, crying; helpless.

  2:15 a.m.

  She awakens, gently kisses his fingers.

  He opens eyes. Feels it cut his chest. Feels wetness slither down ribs as it opens strands of perfect muscle.

  “Deeper,” a groaning whisper.

  She pushes it, harder, placing her ear to his skin. Listening to it tear open, more. They hold hands. Smile softly.

  The two bodies braid, sleep.

  Bleed.

  3:40 a.m.

  He wants to watch. Just the two, doing it for him. She lowers eyes, lips a vulgar bow. He waits, fixed. She spreads, runs the bevel along her inner thigh; makes ghastly red licorice.

  Again. Illegible. Running onto sheet. Legs an obscene note written with private ink.

  He kneels, gripping himself. Breath speeding. Her teeth part, tongue reaching. His eyes close in soundless convulsion. He collapses.

  She strokes his hair. Holds him close. Cuts his face open. ‘I love you.’

  He clings like a baby, soaking her breasts red.

  4:14 a.m.

  They hold each other in candlelight. Sweet body oils; their personal sea, seeped into sheets.

  The knife rests, between them.

  They take i
t together, run lips over it, faces touching. Lick mirror sharpness, kiss thick stem; ecstatic slowness.

  Their tongues spread open and bleed.

  They giggle.

  6:35

  The candle burns.

  They moan. Turn to face each other. Both want more.

  He begs with sounds; eyes. She sits on his chest, raises it over him and his eyes close, letting it happen.

  Hot-red freckles them and he smiles up at her, as she slices him.

  6:50

  They sleep. Huddled. Bloody blade nestled between his stomach, her back.

  She stirs. Can’t sleep. Something is wrong. A feeling. She begins to resent them as three.

  The rivalry. It’s become ugly. Obscene.

  She quietly turns, takes the knife lover, moves it to his throat.

  JOEL LANE

  Like Shattered Stone

  JOEL LANE WAS born in 1963 in Exeter. He was raised in Birmingham, where he currently lives and works in educational publishing as a freelance editor and writer. A winner of the 1993 Eric Gregory Awards for poetry, his stories have appeared in a wide range of magazines and anthologies over the past decade, including Ambit, Panurge, Exuberance, Darklands, The Science of Sadness, Little Deaths, Best New Horror and Karl Edward Wagner’s The Year’s Best Horror Stories. His first collection of short fiction, entitled The Earth Wire and Other Stories, was published by Egerton Press in 1994.

  According to the author, “ ‘Like Shattered Stone’ takes its title from a line in a Scott Walker song. It’s key incident (the pub/street violence episode) is based on something that actually happened when author Graham Joyce gave a talk to the Birmingham Science Fiction Group. He was talking about his novel, Dark Sister, when he was interrupted by the sound of screaming.

  “The juxtaposition of fictional and actual horror struck me forcibly at the time, and I wanted to write something about how creativity functions in a destructive environment . . .”

  IT HAPPENED IN the early hours of the morning. After he’d gone to bed. He’d spent a frustrating evening in his studio, chiselling nervously at a new block of granite. The shape he wanted was fairly well-defined in his head, but the stone wouldn’t listen to him. And it was too expensive to waste; so as usual he’d chipped away without committing himself. When his hands had begun to seem as strange and difficult as the stone, he’d given up and gone through to the next room, his bedsit. It was nearly midnight. Two or three hours later, he’d woken up in the dark. He was naked, and shivering with cold. There was a hammer in one of his hands, and a chisel in the other. His elbows were resting on the table in his studio. A vague light from the street outlined the curtained window on the far side of the room.