The Mammoth Book of Nightmare Stories Read online

  In the tent, behind a table full of empty green bottles, exhausted musicians pulled off boots and sweaty shirts. Heyman searched the faces of those around the fringes. The photo in the envelope had been taken with a telephoto lens but it was clear enough. He had it memorized.

  At the next round of pyro, a man in butter-soft Italian leather waved the headliners toward the scaffold. The crowd began to stomp, then erupted into thunderous cheers as the band ran up the shaky steps. The phone in Heyman’s pocket rang. He covered one ear.

  “Dude!” said a frantic voice.

  “Perry?”

  “He’s not here …” The voice broke up. “Where are you? We gotta jam!”

  “I’m on my way.”

  Heyman snapped the phone shut and came up behind the man in the leather jacket. He had rings in his ears and the back of his neck was tattooed like a Samoan chief’s.

  “Brent Jacobson?”

  The man glanced over his shoulder.

  “Yeah?”

  “Those your boys up there?”

  He looked Heyman over dismissively, the black sportcoat, the plain white shirt, and tie. “Exclusive,” he said.

  “I have something for you.”

  “No demos.”

  “From a Mr. Leyman.”

  The man squinted. “Never heard of him.”

  Heyman had his hand in the towel. He felt his fingers close around metal. His thumb released the safety.

  “Sure you have. The record company, on Beverly. You signed a contract. Remember?”

  At that moment there was another explosion and a bright burst of sparks in the darkness, as the band up above started slashing away.

  He made a U-turn and braked in front of the main gate. The German band was unbelievably loud and the older folks were on their way out. Heyman spotted two of the kids. Sean’s knees were scraped raw, Jason’s jeans were torn, and both their shirts were wet and stained. Under the mercury vapor lights the stains looked black. He rolled the window down.

  “Where’s Perry?” he asked as they fumbled the back door open.

  “Go!”

  “Where?”

  Now Perry came out, walking calmly through the crowd with his designer backpack, one arm around Juno to support her. His shirt was clean but the front of hers was drenched.

  Heyman got out and shoved the girl into the back seat, then opened the front passenger door for Perry. He rolled up the tinted windows, made another U, and fell into line with the other limos.

  “Who’s hurt?”

  “Nobody.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yih,” said Perry. His silk shirt was missing a couple of buttons but unspattered.

  Heyman flicked on the dome light and twisted around. The letters on the girl’s shirt were still white but Sean’s and Jason’s were smeared with red. So were their hands and arms. Heyman tossed them the towel.

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing,” said Perry.

  “What’s all the blood?”

  “Some dudes started a fight,” said Jason.

  “Not us,” Sean said.

  The girl laughed wildly.

  Heyman took the side streets for several blocks before he merged onto the boulevard. Ahead was the mall with the fast-food restaurant. He pulled in.

  “You can wash up here,” he told them.

  “Carl’s Jr. sucks,” said Juno.

  “Dude,” said Jason frantically, as if it mattered, “she likes McDonald’s.”

  Heyman said, “The head’s in back.”

  While they were gone, he called Willy.

  “They stopped for some chow.”

  “McDonald’s?” Willy chuckled. “Got to have their McCrap.”

  “I’ll call the house when we hit LA.”

  “Don’t bother. The dad’s out of town.”

  “I figured.”

  “And the mother’s never there.” A pause on the line. “How did it go?”

  “Done.”

  “Just like that?”

  “No problem.”

  “Pretty slick,” said Willy. “Now you’re the man.”

  “No, you are. Take it easy.”

  Jason came out of the restroom without his T-shirt and motioned for Heyman to lower the window.

  “She wants to eat. Is that okay?”

  Heyman waited while they sat at a round table and dipped fries and sipped Cokes. He folded the towel and wiped the back seat, then wrapped it around the gun and dropped it into a dumpster full of grease and flies. When they were finished they came back to the car.

  On the freeway, in the dark, each of them took out a cell phone and made nervous calls to friends and family, three silhouettes waving their antennae like alien insects. The boys in the back talked to their mothers with the voices of sweet, dutiful sons while the girl giggled and slurred her words. When the calls were over she put her feet up.

  “Whoo!”

  “How much did you take?” asked Jason.

  “All gone.” She opened her mouth, pointed down her throat, lifted the bottom of her belly shirt and rubbed her tummy. “See?”

  “Yih.”

  “You really did it,” she said.

  The boys said nothing.

  “The bitch was all ready to sing. But you cut her good. Didn’t you.”

  “It’s done,” said Perry. “Forget about it.”

  “You see her face? Sean takes out his lockback and her eyes are all—”

  “It’s over, Juno.”

  Sean and Jason looked out the windows, their eyes large and white in the headlights, their sunburned skin a washed-out red in the passing taillights. The girl took her feet down and sprawled across them, about to pass out. In the mirror Heyman saw her head in their laps, first one and then the other, as they continued to stare with blank, stark expressions. After a while she began to snore.

  “You like Bush?” said Perry.

  It took a few seconds for Heyman to realize that Perry was talking to him.

  “I think I’ve heard of them. They made that video, what was it called?”

  “Not the band. George W. The leader of our country.”

  Heyman considered. “Do you?”

  “My dad does. He says he’s a patriot.”

  There was no percentage in lying. “As a matter of fact,” Heyman said, “I don’t.”

  “Good.” Perry gazed out at the lights as though trying to find a pattern, his eyes empty. “Then I guess that means you can.”

  “Can what?”

  “Be one of us.”

  He drove on. They carried Juno to a porch and used her key to open the door. Then they went to Perry’s house.

  “Thank you for waiting,” said Sean politely.

  “Thanks a lot,” added Jason, “sir.”

  As the others went up the driveway, Perry lingered by the driver’s side. He reached into his backpack. It was stuffed with bills now. He handed some over.

  “Here’s your tip.”

  “That’s okay,” said Heyman. “I’m covered.”

  “You sure?”

  “One question, though. What did they do with the knife?”

  “Why?”

  “Knives are messy. I hope they wiped it before they threw it away. You have to watch those things. The details.”

  Perry looked off into the darkness, the trees and the bushes inside and outside the security gate, as if listening for something, the movement of unseen creatures that crawled the canyon at night.

  “How’d you like to be my driver next time?”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Where are you going?”

  Perry thought about it. “The mountains.”

  “With Juno?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Angeles Crest is good. Nobody ever goes there.”

  Perry nodded. “I have your number.”

  “If you’re serious.”

  “How much?”

  “Same as Willy.”
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  “I can get it.”

  “I know.”

  Heyman waited to see that they were all in safely before he started backing down.

  At the side of the house, Perry turned and waved.

  “Say hello to Slick Willy for me.”

  “You got it.”

  Perry grinned, his teeth small and straight and sharp in the moonlight.

  Heyman put a jazz tape on as he came to the freeway, ready to take the car back to Willy’s. It was Workin’, another famous set with Miles. A classic.

  “Slick Paulie,” he said to himself in the dark, trying out the sound of it. He liked it. “You the man, dude.”

  He looked into the mirror, adjusting his collar and tie. If he wanted to be a regular driver from now on he would need business cards, an Italian suit, black and shiny, and a big car of his own, a Lincoln or a Caddy, at least, with low mileage. Willy could help him find one. No problem. “The man,” he said again and smiled, as taillights streamed past him like blood cells rushing in or out through the arteries of the city. “Yih.”

  IS THERE ANYBODY THERE?

  KIM NEWMAN

  Kim Newman is a novelist, critic, and broadcaster. He is the author of The Night Mayor, Bad Dreams, Jago, The Quorum, The Original Dr. Shade and Other Stories, Famous Monsters, Seven Stars, Unforgivable Stories, Dead Travel Fast, Life’s Lottery, Back in the USSA (with Eugene Byrne), Where the Bodies Are Buried, Doctor Who: Time and Relative, The Man from the Diogenes Club, Secret Files of the Diogenes Club, Mysteries of the Diogenes Club, Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D’Urbervilles, An English Ghost Story, The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School, and Angels of Music under his own name, and The Vampire Genevieve and Orgy of the Blood Parasites as “Jack Yeovil.”

  Newman’s acclaimed Anno Dracula vampire series comprises Anno Dracula, The Bloody Red Baron, Dracula Cha Cha Cha, and Johnny Alucard, while Anno Dracula 1895: Seven Days in Mayhem was a recent five-issue graphic serial. His most recent collection is Anno Dracula 1899 and Other Stories, and his short story “Week Woman” was adapted for the Canadian TV series The Hunger.

  The author’s nonfiction titles include Ghastly Beyond Belief (with Neil Gaiman); Horror: 100 Best Books and Horror: Another 100 Best Books (both with Stephen Jones); and Wild West Movies, The BFI Companion to Horror, Millennium Movies, Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen Since the 1960s, Kim Newman’s Video Dungeon: The Collected Reviews, and BFI Classics studies of Cat People, Doctor Who, and Quatermass and the Pit.

  He has won the Bram Stoker Award, the International Horror Critics Award, the British Science Fiction Award, the British Fantasy Award, The Children of the Night Award, and the Annual Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Award.

  “The similarities between the spiritualist table-rapping craze of the early twentieth century and the Internet obsessions of today are fairly obvious,” observes Newman. “Except, at least spiritualists sat around holding hands as opposed to sitting alone in a room staring at a screen.”

  “IS THERE A presence?” asked Irene.

  The parlor was darker and chillier than it had been moments ago. At the bottoms of the heavy curtains, tassels stirred like the fronds of a deep-sea plant. Irene Dobson—Madame Irena, to her sitters—was alert to tiny changes in a room that might preface the arrival of a visitor from beyond the veil. The fizzing and dimming of still-untrusted electric lamps, so much less impressive than the shrinking and bluing of gaslight flames she remembered from her earliest seances. A clamminess in the draught, as fog-like cold rose from the carpeted floor. The minute crackle of static electricity, making hair lift and pores prickle. The tart taste of pennies in her mouth.

  “Is there a traveler from afar?” she asked, opening her inner eye.

  The planchette twitched. Miss Walter-David’s fingers withdrew in a flinch; she had felt the definite movement. Irene glanced at the no-longer-young woman in the chair beside hers, shrinking away for the moment. The fear-light in the sitter’s eyes was the beginning of true belief. To Irene, it was like a tug on a fishing line, the satisfying twinge of the hook going in. This was a familiar stage on the typical sitter’s journey from skepticism to fanaticism. This woman was wealthy; soon, Irene would taste not copper but silver, eventually gold.

  Wordlessly, she encouraged Miss Walter-David to place her fingertips on the planchette again, to restore balance. Open on the round table before them was a thin sheet of wood, hinged like an oversized chessboard. Upon the board’s smoothly papered and polished surface was a circle, the letters of the alphabet picked out in curlicue. Corners were marked for yes—“oui,” “ja”—and no. The planchette, a pointer on marble castors, was a triangular arrowhead-shape. Irene and Miss Walter-David lightly touched fingers to the lower points of the planchette, and the tip quivered.

  “Is there anybody there?” Miss Walter-David asked.

  This sitter was bereft of a fiancé, an officer who had come through the trenches but succumbed to influenza upon return to civilian life. Miss Walter-David was searching for balm to soothe her sense of hideous unfairness and had come at last to Madame Irena’s parlor.

  “Is there—”

  The planchette moved, sharply. Miss Walter-David hissed in surprise. Irene felt the presence, stronger than usual, and knew it could be tamed. She was no fraud, relying on conjuring tricks, but her understanding of the world beyond the veil was very different than that which she wished her sitters to have. All spirits could be made to do what she wished them to do. If they thought themselves grown beyond hurt, they were sorely in error. The planchette, genuinely independent of the light touches of medium and sitter, stabbed toward a corner of the board, but stopped surprisingly short.

  Y

  Not YES, but the Y of the circular alphabet. The spirits often used initials to express themselves, but Madame had never encountered one who neglected the convenience of the YES and NO corners. She did not let Miss Walter-David see her surprise.

  “Have you a name?”

  Y again. Not YES. Was Y the beginning of a name: Youngman, Yoko-Hama, Ysrael?

  “What is it?” she was almost impatient.

  The planchette began a circular movement, darting at letters, using the lower tips of the planchette as well as the pointer. That also was unusual and took an instant or two to digest.

  M S T R M N D

  “Msstrrmnnd,” said Miss Walter-David.

  Irene understood. “Have you a message for anyone here, Master Mind?”

  Y

  “For whom?”

  U

  “For Ursula?” Miss Walter-David’s Christian name was Ursula.

  N U

  “U?”

  “You,” said Miss Walter-David. “You.”

  This was not a development Irene liked a bit.

  There were two prospects in his Chat Room. Women, or at least they said they were. Boyd didn’t necessarily believe them. Some users thought they were clever.

  Boyd was primarily MstrMnd but had other log-in names, some male, some female, some neutral. For each ISDN line, he had a different code name and e-address, none traceable to his physical address. He lived online, really; this flat in Highgate was just a place to store the meat. There was nothing he couldn’t get by playing the web, which responded to his touch like a harpsichord to a master’s fingers. There were always backdoors.

  His major female ident was Caress, aggressively sexual; he imagined her as a porn-site Cleopatra Jones, a black model with dom tendencies. He kept a more puritanical, shockable ident—SchlGrl—as back-up, to cut in when Caress became too outrageous.

  These two users weren’t tricky, though. They were clear. Virgins, just the way he liked them. He guessed they were showing themselves nakedly to the Room, with no deception.

  IRENE D.

  URSULA W-D.

  Their messages typed out laboriously, appearing on his master monitor a word at a time. He initiated searches, to cough up more on their handles. His system was smart enough to come up with a birth name, a
physical address, financial details, and, more often than not, a JPEG image from even the most casually assumed one-use log-on name. Virgins never realized that their presences always left ripples. Boyd knew how to piggyback any one of a dozen official and unofficial trackers, and routinely pulled up information on anyone with whom he had even the most casual, wary dealings.

  IRENE D: Have you a message for anyone here, Master Mind?

  Boyd stabbed a key.

  Y

  IRENE D: For whom?

  U

  IRENE D: For Ursula?

  N U

  IRENE D: U?

  URSULA W-D: You.

  At least one of them got it. IRENE D—why didn’t she tag herself ID or I-D?—was just slow. That didn’t matter. She was the one Boyd had spotted as a natural. Something about her blank words gave her away. She had confidence and ignorance, while her friend—they were in contact, maybe even in the same physical room—at least understood she knew nothing, that she had stepped into deep space and all the rules were changed. IRENE D—her log-on was probably a variant on the poor girl’s real name—thought she was in control. She would unravel very easily, almost no challenge at all.

  A MESSAGE FOR U I-D, he typed.

  He sat on a reinforced swivel chair with optimum back support and buttock-spread, surveying a semicircle of keyboards and monitors all hooked up to separate lines and accounts, all feeding into the master-monitor. When using two or more idents, he could swivel or roll from board to board, taking seconds to chameleon-shift. He could be five or six people in any given minute, dazzle a solo into thinking she—and it almost always was a she—was in a buzzing Chat Room with a lively crowd when she was actually alone with him, growing more vulnerable with each stroke and line, more open to his hooks and grapples, her backdoors flapping in the wind.

  I KNOW WHO U ARE

  Always a classic. Always went to the heart.

  He glanced at the leftmost screen. Still searching. No details yet. His system was usually much faster than this. Nothing on either of them, on IRENE or URSULA. They couldn’t be smart enough to cover their traces in the web, not if they were really as newbie as they seemed. Even a netshark ace would have been caught by now. And these girls were fighting nowhere near his weight. Must be a glitch. It didn’t matter.