The Best New Horror 3 Page 17

  Finally, the gates were opened, and a thin, smiling man in a tropical suit led Welles to the house. The driveway was apparently unending, Xanadu growing larger with each step. Welles had heard of Dr John Montague before, had read his published account of his investigation into the notoriously haunted Hill House in Connecticut. That had ended in tragedy for one of Montague’s researchers, but the scientist took care elaborately to exonerate himself in his book. Junior had commissioned the parapsychologist to look into his own family’s haunted mansion. perhaps to prescribe a rite of exorcism. Welles wondered why Junior hadn’t simply had Xanadu burned to the ground, and its ruins seeded with salt.

  Montague chatted as they walked to Xanadu, mainly about magic and trickery. Welles was known as an expert, having once sawn Rita Hayworth in half and capped the trick by marrying the girl. He had hoaxed the world that the Martians were coming. Montague assumed that the master magician would recognize a trick if he saw one. Welles realized there was something lacking in Montague, a failure to understand that magic was what you could not explain. That was its beauty, its trick. Probing the works, finding the concealed mirrors and strings, was the most effective method of exorcism.

  The K above the door was weathered, most of its circle fallen away, leaving only a rind between the toppermost arms of the letter. It looked like an R.

  “Rosebud,” Welles whispered.

  Rosebud had proved the most overexplored false trail in American biography. The News on the March team had never found an explanation for Kane’s last word, and neither had the would-be makers of American. Joe Mankiewicz, drunk, had suggested it was the mogul’s private nickname for the private parts of his second wife, the former street corner diva Susan Alexander. That had been as good a solution as any.

  Welles saw Montague’s team in the grounds, blending in with the overgrowth like camouflaged birds, prodding directional mikes and anemometers into various apertures. Montague talked about cold spots and ectoplasm and resonances. In the parapsychology texts, Xanadu had overtaken Borley Rectory, the Loren Home, the Frieburg Tanz Akademie, the Overlook Hotel and the Belasco Mansion as the world’s most haunted house. Although Welles realized none of the rumours and reports that had filtered back to him had ever specified exactly how Xanadu was haunted.

  Some excitement was caused among the psychic researchers by the sighting of a large bird flapping lazily out of the eaves of the West Wing. The thing Welles had heard earlier, it looked like a vast, leathery bat with a horned swordfish’s head. Montague explained the creature was a living fossil, but that no-one had got close enough to one to classify it. Welles remembered recreating some shots of Xanadu in miniature at RKO, reusing some of the back projection plates from King Kong. He wondered how the painted pterodactyl had migrated from Hollywood to Florida.

  While Xanadu was decaying, the Kane Empire had been reshaping itself—Junior taking only a capricious interest, but capable men springing up from inside the business—and preparing for a war which, ultimately, would take it from the verge of bankruptcy to corporate heights to which Kane had never even aspired. Riding the tide of national purpose, Kane papers and magazines had reestablished themselves as essentials in any American living room. In the ‘50s, Kane interests diversified: while Junior reached for the sky, his corporation crept into television, stealing a march on the competition as the new medium took hold on American life. Organization Men in gray flannel prowled the executive suites, as the name of Kane came to mean a many-headed but single-minded beast, almost independent of Junior, infiltrating America’s living rooms. Kane papers backed and then denounced Joseph McCarthy, as if the old man’s ghost were still influencing editorial policies. Kane and Korea, Kane and Nixon, Kane and Kennedy, Kane and the astronauts. The old man would have loved the second half of the century more even than he had the first.

  Montague listed the accomplishments of his team: trance mediums, physical mediums, psychometrists, psychotronics, psychokinetics. Ghost breakers in grey flannel, punching a time-clock and tuning in to the beyond just as his old audience had tuned in to the Mercury Theatre of the Air.

  Even in his lightweight suit, Welles was perspiring uncomfortably. He was surprised, then, when Montague, on a doorstep as wide as an interstate highway, handed him a parka. The scientist pulled on a thick coat himself, and flipped the fur-lined hood up over his head. He looked ready to strike for the South Pole. Perplexed, Welles followed suit, wrapping the cumbersome garment around himself. He waited for the punchline, but none came.

  Montague threw open the great doors of Xanadu, and stepped in, Welles followed, and was embraced by an invisible blizzard. As the doors slammed to behind them, he felt as if he had left the valley of Shangri-La and returned to Tibetan wastes. The scientist looked smug, and Welles tried to conceal his astonishment. Outside, was tropical heat. Here, within the walls of Xanadu, an arctic frost lay over everything. Welles asked if there was any scientific explanation. Montague didn’t answer, but provided the information that Charles Foster Kane, born in 1864, spent his first years in a Colorado boarding house, coping with the fierce winters.

  The statues and paintings were gone, but in their place were shaped blocks of ice. One of Montague’s team was taking photographs of a swirling column that turned into a perfect Floradora Girl. The ice shifted and cracked as the girl performed a dance step with the grave dignity of a glacier.

  The thick frost on the walls was shaped into dioramas. Welles was drawn to a screen-sized patch of sparkling ice. Street scenes turned into stage sets. The view crept up over houses and in through roofs. Welles wished he had a film crew with him. The ice pictures were the images he had dreamed of when he first conceived American. They melted and reformed in different configurations.

  Montague stood back, and let Welles wander through the halls of Xanadu, constantly amazed, delighted and intrigued by the ice sculptures. The scientist was cool and cautious, not expressing an opinion. A lifelong measurer and tabulator, Montague was probably not even qualified to have an opinion.

  Now Welles understood why the Kane people had sent for him. It was not that he could explain the ice sculptures, any more than he could explain “Rosebud.” It was that he was the only one who could appreciate what was here.

  The great staircase of Xanadu was thick with snow that came from nowhere and smoothed away the steps, fanning out around Welles’ feet as it blanketed the parquet. The staircase was a slope suitable for skiing, for sledding. For an instant, as if a diamond bullet had pierced his brain, Welles thought he had an answer to the unanswerable. Then, like ice in the sun, it melted away.

  EDWARD BRYANT

  Colder Than Hell

  ALMOST AS traditional as a Mediterranean story in each Best New Horror is a tale set during a snow storm. In this volume it’s Edward Bryant’s “Colder Than Hell”.

  Bryant first met writer Harlan Ellison, who assisted his early career, at the Clarion Writer’s Workshop in 1968 and 1969, and the following year he sold his first short story, “They Come Only in Dreams”, to Adam.

  Since then his superior short fiction has appeared in a wide variety of anthologies and magazines, and the author’s collections include Among the Dead and Other Events Leading Up to the Apocalypse, Particle Theory, one-third of Night Visions 4 and Neon Twilight. He also collaborated with Ellison on the short novel Phoenix Without Ashes and has edited the original anthology, 2076: The American Tricentennial.

  Bryant is currently expanding his 1991 horror novella Fetish to full length and preparing a new reprint-and-original collection for Roadkill Press, entitled Save the Last Death for Me. His shopping mall paranoia story, “While She Was Out”, was recently shown on Lifetime Cable TV and, as he explains, “I continue to irritate a variety of worthies with my book review columns in Locus and elsewhere.”

  Bryant has twice won the Nebula Award for his short fiction, and we are sure you’ll find the following story a real chiller . . .

  THE NORWEGIAN, AMUNDSEN, HAD REACHED THE S
outh Pole on the fourteenth of December. For some reason, Logan McHenry found the lengthy newspaper account fascinating. He had reread it many times since purchasing the latest issue of the Laramie Daily Boomerang when Opal and he had picked up supplies in Medicine Bow. The date on the paper was now nearly three months out of currency. The crease along the edges of the folded newsprint had begun to split.

  “Damned Scandehoovians,” said Logan. “They know cold up there, but they don’t know real cold,” he added vehemently.

  He got up from the straight-back chair by the fire and walked stiffly over to the small kitchen window. With his thumbnail he scraped a silver cartwheel-sized patch free of ice. Logan could see nothing. Just the endless, blinding white of wind-whipped snow. “Don’t look like it’s gonna let up,” he said.

  “Hasn’t looked like it was going to let up for six days now,” his wife commented. She slowly and expertly carved the peel away from a fist-sized potato. Opal was thin, whip-tough, taller than her husband. He had never much liked that.

  Logan continued staring out at the unvarying blizzard. “Maybe I better lay in some more wood.” He gestured vaguely at the pile of quarter-splits piled against the wall to her side. “We got maybe enough to last until night.”

  “Mighty cold out there,” said his wife.

  “Ain’t gonna get no warmer.”

  “How cold do you figure?”

  Logan shrugged. “Last time I checked, it was somethin’ like eighteen below. And then the wind cuts it pretty fierce.”

  “Want to take that out when you go?” Opal gestured at the full bucket of peels, scraps, and trash.

  “No, I don’t want.” He wasn’t sure why he said it. Just to be contrary. “All right,” he contradicted himself. “I’ll set it out. Wind’ll blow it clean to Nebraska.”

  She stared at him a moment. “Thank you kindly,” she said.

  Logan pulled on his heavy cloth coat. He tugged the worn old Stetson down tight over his ears and wrapped the long woolen muffler over the crown, down under his chin, and then looped back around his neck. He slipped on the sheepskin-lined work gloves. “I’m ready,” he said. “Help me with the door?”

  Something tickled the inside of one nostril. He couldn’t help himself—Logan emitted an enormous sneeze. He winced. It was painful. The dry skin at the bottom of his nose was cracking.

  “Company’s coming,” said Opal automatically. It was how she always answered when he sneezed. Logan’s usual response to a sneeze—when he said anything at all—was the standard “Gesundheit.” Opal’s “Company’s coming” was, she said, something her family had said for as long as she could remember.

  It was strange—whenever Logan heard the phrase, he usually thought also of his mother’s saying that one of those unexplainable, wracking shivers was because “Someone’s walking over your grave.” Different thing entirely, he knew, but somehow the situations seemed the same, at least on the surface. Walking over your grave.

  He picked up the handle of the trash bucket. Logan could already feel the knives of the Wyoming wind jamming into his joints; piercing and then twisting with icy blades. But it was worse when he opened the door.

  The cold sucked at him, tried to pull him bodily out of the house. Logan braced himself, his free hand locked on the jamb. Opal had the strong fingers of both slender hands wound around the doorknob. “Be back in five minutes,” he shouted. He knew his wife could not hear him in the blizzard din.

  Logan let loose of the jamb and let the wind pull him forward to the edge of the porch. Behind him he felt the heat vanish as Opal tugged the back door shut. He was alone with the wind and the snow. And the cold.

  He staggered forward and wrapped his free arm around the corner post. Then he ran his hand down to waist level. Three ropes were tied to the post. The one angling off to the left led a hundred yards to the barn. The other end of the center rope was nailed to the door of the outhouse. The right-hand rope stretched tautly between porch and the root cellar, perhaps ten yards distant.

  The man couldn’t see any of the three destinations. In every case, the ropes fuzzed indistinctly and vanished a few feet into the snow. That same snow sawed past him like sand, moving nearly horizontally. He knew the drifts on the other side of the house must be right up to the eaves.

  First things first. Logan shook out the contents of the bucket. They vanished instantly into the blizzard’s maw. He would use the bucket to carry wood back from the barn. He’d need one hand to hold the rope.

  Without the rope’s guidance, he’d be confused in a foot, lost in a yard. Probably dead in the length of his own body. Maybe not immediately, but in short order. He was under no illusion how long he could last in this storm.

  Before starting for the wood, he squinted at the thermometer nailed to the corner post. Getting colder. Thirty below. The gauge only went to forty. Logan shook his head.

  According to his daddy’s old railroad watch—he’d checked it before abandoning the shelter of the kitchen—it was high noon.

  The snow.

  It felt like thousands of tiny mouths, lined with needle teeth, all sucking the heat from his skin. He had to admit to himself that it was frightening, once he was away from the porch, to be surrounded completely by the blizzard. With the handle of the bucket still clutched firmly, he moved hand over hand toward the barn. For perhaps the hundredth time, he chewed himself out for not hauling in nearly enough wood when the first flakes of the storm had drifted down.

  But who knew? Wyoming blizzards, even in the dead of winter in the middle of the Shirley Basin, usually blew themselves out in a day, two at the most. Logan had never seen anything like this storm. He’d heard stories of the big one in 1899—the tellers never tired of listing the stock that had died, and there had been plenty—but Opal and he had still been in Pennsylvania then.

  The dark plank wall of the barn loomed out of the storm like a cliff. Logan staggered into the lee side and luxuriated for a moment at being given a respite from the wind. Then the wind’s direction changed and the icy nails raked at his face.

  Logan took hold of the peg that lifted the latching bar and opened the door. It was dark inside. That didn’t matter; he knew exactly where the wood was stacked.

  He heard a hoof stamping and an anxious whicker.

  “You need some more hay?”

  The horse whinnied.

  “All right, boy. Hold your— ” He laughed at himself and did not finish the line. Logan set down the pail, then picked up a few bats of powdery alfalfa and dropped them over the side of the stall. The big bay, Indian, brushed Logan’s arm with his muzzle, then leaned down toward the hay. The man turned, bent, and broke off a chunk of crusted snow from the drift that extended from the door into the barn. Double-handed, he dropped it into Indian’s water pan.

  “Better than nothing, boy.”

  Logan found the wood in the dark, wedged as many splits as he could into the bucket, set another three pieces under his left arm, and shoved open the door against the wind. He slid his right hand along the rope to the house.

  Three times, the wind almost broke his grip. Each time he recoiled against the blast, then hunched over the rope and kept pushing his way toward the porch. One of the sticks of firewood slipped out from beneath his free arm. He did not try to retrieve it. The wood disappeared into the snow as though it had never existed at all.

  In this storm, Logan thought, anything could as easily vanish—a horse, a cow, a human being. A wife. Why had he thought that? he wondered.

  And then he wondered that he wondered.

  They had married when she was sixteen and he was twenty. That had been in the year this god-forsaken territory of Wyoming became the forty-fourth state of the Union. Neither of them had even dreamed they would find themselves here two decades later.

  1890—a year of unbounded promise for all. Almost all, he amended the thought. There had been the killing of the hundreds of Sioux redmen at Wounded Knee. There had been stories of massacre in D
ahomey, a faroff African kingdom. Other accounts in the newspapers of death in Madagascar, Angola, other distant places.

  Logan had always been fond of reading the papers, although he wasn’t all that enamored of regular books. When Opal and he had married, her mother had given them a copy of Hedda Gabler, a play by another of those Scandehoovians. It was brand spanking new, but he had never read it. He didn’t even know where it was now.

  The farmstead in Pennsylvania had failed and the bank had assumed control. At the end, the McHenrys had been given a generous three days to vacate. They had gone west.

  Wyoming—and the Shirley Basin—had welcomed them in the spring. Summer had been moderate, the autumn bounty generous. Then winter had come.

  Somehow they had stayed on for eight years. Both of them were stubborn.

  They lived by themselves.

  At first, it was not by choice. Logan blamed himself for their marriage being barren of progeny. He knew Opal blamed herself equally. So many days they stared at each other silently, accusations against self unvoiced. So many nights they lay silently in their narrow bed. Sometimes Logan would turn on his side and look at Opal. In the dim moonlight he would see her staring at the low ceiling. Opal would sense his look, then meet his eyes. At least he thought she was looking at him. With her deep-set eyes lying in shadow, it was difficult to tell.