The Best New Horror 3 Page 20

  Raymond cringed as his father bore down on him.

  “Raymond—Where the hell’s yore gloves, boy? You know what I told you bout them gloves!” Mr Fleuris lifted a meaty arm, his sausage-sized fingers closing into a fist.

  Raymond whimpered in anticipation of the blow that was certain to land on his upturned face.

  Before Horace Fleuris had a chance to strike his son, Colonel Reynard grabbed the big man’s wrist. In the dim light it looked as if the Colonel’s third finger was longer than the others. I heard Mr Fleuris grunt in surprise and saw his upraised fist tremble.

  “You will not touch this child, understand?”

  “Dammit, leggo!” Fleuris’ voice was pinched, as if he was both in pain and afraid.

  “I said ‘understand?’ ”

  “I heared you the first time, damn you!”

  The Colonel let Fleuris’ arm drop. “You are the child’s father?”

  Fleuris nodded sullenly, massaging his wrist.

  “I should kill you for what you’ve done.”

  “Here, now! Don’t go blamin’ me for it!” Fleuris blustered. “It was them doctors up at the State Hospital! They said it’d cure him! I tried to tell ’em what the boy’s problem was, but you can’t tell them big-city doctors squat, far as they’re concerned! But what could I do? We was gettin’ tired of movin’ ever time the boy got into th’ neighbor’s chicken coop . . .”

  “Now he’ll never learn how to control it!” Reynard stroked Raymond’s forehead. “He’s stuck in-between the natures, incapable of fitting into your world . . . or ours. He is an abomination in the eyes of Nature. Even animals can see he has no place in the Scheme!”

  “You like the boy, don’t you?” There was something about how Fleuris asked the question that made my stomach knot. “I’m a reasonable man. When it comes to business.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Mr Fleuris was standing there, talking about selling his son to a complete stranger like he was a prize coon dog!

  “Get out of here.”

  “Now hold on just a second! I ain’t askin’ for nothin’ that ain’t rightfully mine, and you know it! I’m the boy’s pa and I reckon that calls for some kind of restitution, seeing how’s he’s my only male kin . . .”

  “Now!” Colonel Reynard’s voice sounded like a growl.

  Horace Fleuris turned and fled, his fleshy face slack with fear. I never dreamed a man his size could move that fast.

  I glanced at where Reynard stood, one hand resting on Raymond’s shoulder. Colonel Reynard’s face was no longer human, his mouth fixed in a deceptive smile. He fixed me with his murder-green eyes and wrinkled his snout. “That goes for you too, man-cub.”

  To this day I wonder why he let me go unharmed. I guess it’s because he knew that no one was going to listen to any crazy stories about fox-headed men told by a pissant kid. No one wanted to believe crap like that. Not even the pissant kid.

  Needless to say, I ran like a rabbit with a hound on my tail. Later I was plagued by recurring nightmares of a fox-headed animal-tamer dressed in jodhpurs that went around sticking his head in human mouths, and of a huge orangutan in overalls that looked like Mr Fleuris.

  By the time Christmas break came around everyone had lost interest in Raymond’s disappearance. The Fleuris family had moved sometime during the last night of October to parts unknown. No one missed them. It was like Raymond Fleuris had never existed.

  I spent a lot of time trying not to think about what I’d seen and heard that night. I had other things to fret about. Like Kitty Killigrew going steady with Rafe.

  Several years passed before I returned to the Choctaw County Fair. By then I was a freshman at the University of Arkansas at Monticello, over in Drew County. I’d landed a scholarship and spent my week-days studying in a bare-ass dorm room while coming home on weekends to help my daddy with the farm. I had long since talked myself into believing what I’d seen that night was a particularly vivid nightmare brought on by a bad corndog. Nothing more.

  The midway didn’t have a kootchie show that year, but I’d heard rumors that they had something even better. Or worse, depending on how you look at it.

  According to the grapevine, the carnival had a glommin’ geek. Since geek shows are technically illegal and roundly condemned as immoral, degrading, and sinful, naturally it played to capacity crowds.

  The barker packed as many people as he could into a cramped, foul-smelling tent situated behind the freak show. There was a canvas pit in the middle of the tent, and at its bottom crouched the geek.

  He was on the scrawny side and furry as a monkey. The hair on his head was long and coarse, hanging past his waist, as did a scraggly beard. His long forearms and bowed legs were equally shaggy, coated with dark fur that resembled the pelt of a wild goat. It was hard to tell, but I’m certain he was buck naked. There was something wrong with the geek’s fingers, though that might have been on account of his four-inch long nails.

  As the barker did his spiel about the geek being the last survivor of a race of wild men from the jungles of Borneo, I continued to stare at the snarling, capering creature. I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something familiar about the geek.

  The barker finished his bit and produced a live chicken from a gunny sack. The geek lifted his head and sniffed the air, his nostrils flaring as he caught the scent of the bird. An idiot’s grin split his hairy face and a long thread of drool dripped from his open jaws. His teeth were surprisingly white and strong.

  The barker tossed the chicken into the pit. It fluttered downward, squawking as it frantically beat the air with its wings. The geek giggled like a delighted child and pounced on the hapless bird. His movements were as graceful and sure as those of a champion mouser dispatching a rat. The geek bit the struggling chicken’s head off, obviously relishing every minute of it.

  As the crowd moaned in disgust and turned their faces away from what was happening in the pit, I continued to watch, even though it made my stomach churn.

  Why? Because I had glimpsed the pale finger of scar tissue traversing the geek’s right temple.

  I stood and stared down at Raymond Fleuris crouched at the bottom of the geek pit, his grinning face wreathed in blood and feathers.

  Happy at last.

  CHARLES L. GRANT

  One Life, in an Hourglass

  CHARLES L. GRANT is the undisputed master of “quiet” horror. He made his fiction debut in 1968 with the story “The House of Evil” in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and, after producing a number of science fiction novels, he began to develop his unique brand of dark fantasy in such books as The Hour of the Oxrun Dead, The Nestling, The Pet, For Fear of the Night, In a Dark Dream, Dialing the Wind, Stunts, Fire Mask and Something Stirs.

  His short fiction has been collected in Tales from the Nightside, A Glow of Candles and Nightmare Seasons, and he was the editor of the acclaimed Shadows (twelve volumes), Midnight and Greystone Bay anthologies.

  Grant also publishes a number of fantasy adventures and spoofs under the pseudonyms “Geoffrey Marsh” and “Lionel Fenn”, however he is best known for his series of stories set in Oxrun Station, a fictional western Connecticut town where all manner of strange things happen.

  Not unlike Ray Bradbury’s Green Town, Illinois—the setting for “One Life, in an Hourglass”. It was visited late one October night many years ago by Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show (as told in Bradbury’s classic novel Something Wicked This Way Comes). Now Grant takes us back to Green Town, where childhood fears still hold sway, and the influence of the evil Mr Dark is not forgotten . . .

  DEMONS WALKED THE HALLS IN THE long hour past sunset, and gargoyles leered through the bedroom windows, moving with the branches of the deep maple outside. The carpet had been woven from human hair, still growing at the edges. The mirror over the dresser had been forged from cold flame that continued to escape from a crack in the lower corner. Dust turned grey along the baseboards.
Water dripped in the kitchen. In the closet, behind the clothes, eyes that were slanted, swaying, each a different color, all of them staring.

  In the milk-glass scalloped cover of the ceiling light, the dark shadows of corpses. Spiders, moths, a horse-fly, gnats; cleaned out once a month and there once again by the end of the week.

  The lingering stench of dried blood.

  Cora put the book down beside her on the mattress, adjusted the two pillows behind her back, and rubbed her eyes until the pain forced her to stop. When her vision cleared, sparks and flares faded, everything was gone but the dead insects; when her vision cleared, she was alone.

  A small, second-floor apartment in a large house on Parleroad Lane. Front room, kitchen, bedroom, bathroom. Old wallpaper, old furniture, old sounds when the floorboards were trod upon in the silence.

  She stretched her legs out, making them rigid, relaxing them, wiggling her toes. Not bad legs, she decided, examining them by the light of the dime store lamp on the nightstand. A little fleshy around the thighs, not as taut as she’d like, but not bad legs for a woman a zillion years older than she wanted to be. The rest of her wasn’t all that bad, either. Her arms, when she lifted them, had no discernible flab; her breasts, when she peered down at them, were too small to develop much sag; her tummy had just the slightest bulge in spite of the garbage she usually ate for dinner. What the hell. All in all, not at all bad.

  It just wasn’t great.

  Her palm itched; she scratched it lightly so it wouldn’t tickle.

  Then she scratched hard along her scalp, hair once in a while snagging on a nail, finished by clasping her hands behind her head, blowing out a breath as warm as the air around her, lifting her knees and looking between them to the dresser, the mirror, the flowers she had taped around the thin wood frame. Most of them were dead. A few brittle petals scattered among the bottles of perfume and nail polish, the tray that held bobby pins and paper clips and a single-garnet necklace and whatever else she couldn’t be bothered to put away.

  A slip hung halfway out of a half open drawer.

  She couldn’t see it, but she knew that the pleated skirt she had worn that day lay on the floor, huddled where it had been dropped.

  Pigsty, she thought without a moment’s concern.

  It didn’t matter; she wouldn’t be here that long.

  She swung her legs over the side of the bed and sat up, stared at her feet, sniffed, stared at the wall, and listened to the hushed voice of the street creeping in through the open window—the trees whispering to each other, someone walking a dog and talking to it loudly, music from down the block, cars up on Main Street.

  She listened.

  She reached up under her t-shirt and scratched at her ribs.

  For crying out loud, Cora, make up your mind.

  Something in her throat, then—a sob, maybe, or a laugh. Whatever it was, it marked her indecision. Her apprehension. Her belief that this was the year it would happen. All the waiting was over. All her nightmares turned to dreams. Never before, not since the first time she had returned to Green Town, in autumn, in October, had she felt this way. The other times were only wishes; this time, she was certain.

  It frightened her.

  What if . . .? she wondered, and wouldn’t let herself wonder anymore.

  Hello, child, he had said

  I’m not a child, I’m sixteen.

  She stood and stretched her arms toward the ceiling, spread her fingers, and waited until she felt the muscles edge toward the lip of a cramp. A sigh when she heard whispering in the front room. She stood with a shake of her head and walked into the front room, dropped onto the overstuffed couch, crossed her legs.

  “Okay,” she said. “What do you think?”

  An overstuffed armchair to the left of the couch, both facing a console television Keith had given her as a surprise. A copper-and-glass coffee table cluttered with magazines, opened mail, old catalogues, several cut-glass tumblers with hardened milk on the bottom. The table had been Johnny’s gift—to force, he had said with a sailor’s rolling laugh, this crazy room back into the twentieth century. It hadn’t. The standing lamps were fringed, the walls papered with twining daisies and stalwart ivy, the sideboard by the window Victorian ornate. The seashell ashtray on the table next to the couch had been carried back from Maine by the ever-anxious Rex. He had thought it cute; she had never used it.

  “Well?”

  On the wall beside the television, the fireplace. Pure ornament now, because it had been plugged up by the landlord before she’d returned the third or fourth time, she couldn’t really remember. On the mantel were several framed pictures—Johnny and her, Keith and her, Rex and her, Drake and her, and one of her alone, down in the back garden the day she’d turned sixteen.

  And on the mantel as well, four hourglasses. Faceted crystal. Round walnut top, square walnut base. The first three were full of grey at the bottom, their tops long since empty; the last one had nearly run out, running slowly.

  So very slowly.

  Well, Miss Sixteen, he had said, I would say you’re about the most beautiful creature I have ever seen in my life.

  Liar, she had answered with a giggle.

  He smiled.

  She shivered, out there in the meadow, Mother’s shawl around her shoulders. Shivered again when he brushed a tender thumb across her cheek.

  Miss Sixteen, he had whispered.

  Cora, she had answered, half closing her eyes, lips opening just a little. Cora Fallman.

  Ah, he said, and you can call me Mr Dark.

  Her foot tapped the air impatiently. “Well?”

  Pewter everywhere—mugs and bowls and vases and trays and small pitchers and a creamer she had discovered in a Quebec shop last summer.

  No one spoke.

  Her foot stilled.

  “Helpless,” she muttered, slapping the cushions, pushing herself to her feet. “What good are you?”

  Not much, she answered for them, the ghosts and memories of her past, and returned to the bedroom where she posed in front of the dresser mirror, pouting, pursing her lips, a sideways coy glance, chin tucked against her shoulder, chest out and elbows back, finally standing back and ordering someone, for God’s sake, to make up their mind before she lost hers.

  It isn’t mind, it’s nerve, something said into her ear.

  She nodded.

  Nerve is right, but nervous is better.

  Yet, if she didn’t leave now, didn’t go out there as she’d done a hundred times in thirty years, he might leave without her.

  Quickly, before she could change her mind, she pulled herself into a sweater, a fresh pair of jeans, low boots, and a down jacket. A check to be sure all the windows were locked, a furtive glance at the last hourglass and a faint shudder of fear, and she hurried down two flights of stairs, paused in the vestibule to check her pockets for the house key, then out to the sidewalk, into the night.

  She didn’t run, but the streets passed her by; she didn’t look around, but she knew the houses just the same—the big ones, the old ones, the here and there new ones that somehow instantly fit, as if Green Town wouldn’t permit even a single shingle to clash. Pumpkins on the porches. Ears of maize tied to the doors. Witches and black cats in cardboard in the windows.

  It had always been that way. Always. It was what she liked about the place—the world went to the moon, the world went to Mars, the world sometimes went to war, but Green Town never changed. It had found what it needed and threw out all the rest; it found what it liked and somehow made it adapt.

  Sometimes, though, it was disconcerting.

  Once, she had arrived from New York City, and the change nearly terrified her; once, she had driven in from Dallas and had nearly driven right back out again.

  But she had stayed nonetheless.

  Each time, she had stayed.

  Until Halloween was over, and she was still alone, and had to go.

  Come with me, Cora Fallman.

  I will.
God, yes, I will.

  Rolfe’s moon meadow was empty.

  She stood there, the town far behind her, and watched the sky for a while. Too soon, of course. She knew that. Yet she couldn’t take a chance that he might come early, look around, not like what he saw, and leave again on the wind. So she waited, stamping her feet, rubbing her hands, cursing herself for forgetting her gloves. She walked a little to get the blood going, wandered over to the railroad tracks and knelt beside the northbound rail. A palm on cold iron. No vibration. Nothing there.

  “Okay,” she said to the black tree-wall on the other side. “No big deal, I’ll come back tomorrow.”

  No big deal, she thought as she trudged across the crumbling furrows, kicking at stunted stalks of corn long since gone to harvest; the hell it isn’t.

  Sleep came with dreams.

  The hourglass ran.

  When she woke up, the dreams were still there, scuttling away into the corners as she rubbed her eyes and realized her lips were pulled back in a grin.

  Tonight.

  She knew it.

  Good Lord, it was tonight.

  She laughed in the shower, swallowing water and sputtering laughter. She laughed downstairs at breakfast, for the first time in ages not angry that her home had been turned into a boarding-house by a family she didn’t know, the only rule of sale being that they save her an apartment in the attic. She dressed as gaily as possible for a walk downtown, intending to say goodbye at last and not at all feeling sorry.

  Tonight. Good Lord, tonight.

  But when she reached Main Street, her mood was tempered by dark clouds creeping around the edge of town. No, not rain. Not today. It wouldn’t dare. By contrast, the circle of blue above the shops, the bars, the First National Bank, was almost too bright to look at, the air like thin ice, the breeze that teased her around each corner a chilly caress she didn’t mind.

  “Hey, Cora!”

  Amazingly, perhaps miraculously, the United Cigar Store was still there. The wooden Cherokee Indian, however, had been taken inside; protection against vandals who had painted it orange five Halloweens before.