The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 22 Read online

  He chuckled. “Can you imagine that? Afterward he became a good servant. He helped me get ashore. Water’s really become his element . . . Aren’t you going to answer the door, Ms Genève?”

  A barrage of knocks sounded, making the old door jump against its frame. Corman shook his head. “Poor devil. Always afraid the rain might end. Quite a phobia with him . . . Well?”

  She sat holding her pictures, the physical embodiment of her soul. At least, when she was gone, they would last. Wouldn’t they?

  “If you won’t open it,” said Corman, “then I’ll have to,” and he rose, tall and shadowy, set down the cup, and shambled to the door.

  BRIAN HODGE

  Just Outside Our Windows,

  Deep Inside Our Walls

  BRIAN HODGE LIVES IN Boulder, Colorado, once again ranked by the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index as the #1 Happiest City in America, no thanks to his own efforts.

  He also dabbles in music, sound design and photography, loves everything about organic gardening except the thieving squirrels, and thrice weekly trains in Krav Maga and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, which are of no use at all against the squirrels.

  Hodge is the author of ten novels, around 100 short stories, novelettes and novellas, and four book-length collections. His first collection, The Convulsion Factory, was chosen by critic Stanley Wiater as one of the 113 best books of modern horror. The capstone of his second collection, the novella “As Above, So Below”, was selected for inclusion in the massive Century’s Best Horror anthology.

  His most recent title is his latest collection, Picking the Bones, from Cemetery Dance Publications. Another recent big project has been converting his back-list titles into various e-book formats.

  “I hardly ever write extended fragments of things and then leave them indefinitely,” the author reveals, “but that’s how ‘Just Outside Our Windows, Deep Inside Our Walls’ got started.

  “I first wrote the part about the fantasised magic show, plus the earliest bit about Roni moving in, after rereading a Thomas Ligotti collection. It may not be apparent to anyone else, but some flavour of his lingered in me for a little while and wanted to come out, and the magic show was the result.

  “Then it sat idle for three years or so before I knew what more to do with it. Maybe because I had to forget about how it had begun and get back to being myself again.”

  SOMEWHERE IN OUR EARLY teen years it’s inevitable that our parents become sources of great embarrassment to us, held accountable for everything they are and aren’t, could’ve been or should never be.

  Before things can get to that stage, though, it sometimes goes the other direction. We realise, even if we can’t articulate it with the same sharpness with which we sense it, that once the bloom is off the earliest years of childhood, we stand revealed as something our parents are mortified to have created.

  I always knew a lot more about the latter than the former.

  It was spring when she moved into the house next door. It must have been spring, because my window was open, and, directly across from it, so was hers, and had been for at least a day, as though the neighbours were expecting her and had to flush the stale winter air out of the room or maybe the entire uppermost floor.

  Everything there was to know about life on the third floor, I understood it inside and out by this point, and had for over two years.

  I knew she was there to stay because she sang. Not at first, though. At first there was just bumping and thudding, the sounds of luggage and boxes, and three voices, their words too faint to make out, but only two were familiar. I knew the sounds of my neighbours. This new female voice sounded higher and younger than the other, entirely unfamiliar, although for all that, it seemed to me that she sounded just as tired.

  She only sang later, when she thought she was alone.

  Whatever the words were, it wasn’t a happy-sounding song, not the kind of song you might hear sung by a group of people crowded around my parents’ grand piano downstairs and someone who knew how to play it. I listened awhile, then dropped to the floor and crept like a spy toward the window until I was underneath it, careful not to make any noise because she still had no way to know I was there, and I didn’t want her to until I’d had a chance for a closer listen and to figure out what she was up to. In the way her voice started and stopped and started again, as though she were pausing between each line or two, the song seemed to require effort. It made me think of a song sung in tribute of someone who has died, only not in a way that sounded, in my word at the time, churchy.

  I popped up into the window only when she seemed to have quit, not so much finishing the song as abandoning it, and called to her across the space between our houses: “What’s that you were singing?”

  Until now, all I’d seen of her was a silhouette, a thin shape moving around in a room and beyond the reach of the sun. But now she came to the window and smacked her elbows down onto the sill and scowled across at me. Her straight brown hair swept past both wrists as if to whisk her agitation at me, and one hand darted up to grab the bottom of the window and flexed as though she were going to slam it down, but then she kept looking at me and stopped herself, although when she spoke she sounded no less furious.

  “Have you been there the whole time?”

  “I was here first,” I said. “I’ve always been here first.”

  “Well . . . you should announce yourself, is what you should do.” She told me this as if she suspected she might be speaking to an idiot. She looked very much older to me, twelve or maybe as old as thirteen, and this hurt deeply, because it meant she must have been very worldly and knowledgeable when it came to idiots. “It’s the polite thing to do.”

  I told her I was sorry, then asked about the song again.

  “I’m sure it wouldn’t mean anything to you. I’m sure you don’t speak the language.”

  “What language?”

  “The language the song’s in.” Now she sounded convinced beyond all doubt of my idiocy. Then her scowl lifted and she appeared to relent in her harsher appraisals. “It’s not from here.” After another moment, “It’s not for here.”

  “Oh,” I said, as if this made sense to me. “Then what are you doing here?”

  She seemed not to have heard me even though I knew she had, and I started to feel bad for asking it at all. While at first I’d found her not very nice to look at, I began to wonder if I wasn’t wrong, because now it seemed I’d only been misled by a trick of light and her annoyance. I wondered, too, if she might jump from the window, or lean forward and let herself fall. In that other world three floors down, the neighbours’ house was ringed with square slabs of stone to walk on. Nobody could survive a fall like that.

  “I draw,” I told her, volunteering a distraction to save her life. “Want to see?”

  I’d sneaked up some old ones, at least, even if I couldn’t make new ones.

  “Later, maybe,” she said, and pulled away. Like before, her hand went to the bottom of the window, lingering a few moments, but as she moved back into the room she again left it open.

  That night after the lights were out I lay in my bed and imagined her doing the same. I fought to stay awake as long as I could in case there were other songs to hear, or a repeat performance of the first one. Barring that, it seemed possible that she might cry instead, because that’s what I’d done the first night they’d moved me up here, but just before I fell asleep I wondered if the reason I hadn’t heard anything from her was because she was lying in the dark listening for some sound out of me.

  The distant future I imagined for myself must have been inspired by something I’d seen on TV, which helped assure me that it was possible to turn my fascinations into a life that could take me far away, where I would be loved by thousands. For what will become obvious reasons, I wanted to be a magician.

  I would spend many hours planning what my stage show would be like, and soon grew bored with the idea that I would merely escape from deadly traps and make elephan
ts disappear. This admission seemed to unlock something deep inside, an openness to possibilities that would be mine alone to explore.

  While I don’t believe they came while I was asleep, they were more than just flights of imagination. I began to experience long afternoons of waking dreams in which I would take stage assistants, full of smiles and trust and with no thought of doing anything other than surrendering to my will, and I would lock them into cabinets. The blades would come next, whirring and rasping through the cabinets and cutting them into four, five, even six sections, which I would separate with a flourish before moving on to the next. It would take a while, because my audience and I could never be satisfied with my rendering just one assistant into pieces. That would only be the same old trick.

  Once the assistants were in pieces and scattered around the stage, smiling and waving and tapping their feet from the separate remnants of the cabinets, I would begin to reassemble them, although never the same way they’d been. They were meant for better things. I would start simply, swapping an assistant’s arms for his legs, and vice versa, or grafting her grinning head onto the middle of her body. Then, after I had basked in the applause for that trick, I would combine the parts of one assistant with those of another, and finally give one or two several more parts than they’d started with, creating human spiders, which would leave others armless and legless, to wriggle across the stage like caterpillar prey.

  But the waking dreams of my performance would always end with the assistants dancing like puppets on the stage to prove to the audience how happy they were with their new bodies, and that whatever dramas had played out a few minutes earlier were just theatrics. And so everyone could go home safe and secure in the knowledge that sometimes harm was nothing more than an illusion.

  Her name was Roni, I found out a couple days later, which was short for Veronica, and by now short for Ronnie, too. She claimed that there had been a time, lasting for years, when she wanted to be a boy, and so Ronnie was how she had insisted on signing her name, writing it over and over when she was alone, just her and a pen and a piece of paper, and she didn’t have to tell me why.

  But while I understood the business with the paper, I didn’t understand why she would need to in the first place. Why would she want to be a boy? I had to ask her this many times before she gave me any kind of an answer.

  “You’re a boy,” she said from her window. “What have you killed?”

  Bugs, I told her. And fish, because I remembered catching some once with a grandfather, and we hadn’t thrown them back, so I supposed that had to count. And a couple of birds, when I had gotten to play with the pellet rifle a friend had been given for his birthday. Those were all I could remember. Except for the other times. But it seemed like those shouldn’t count, because to really do something like that you have to mean it.

  Roni seemed to be hoping for more, but before I could make up anything else, some stupid meaningless thing that wouldn’t scare her away from the window forever, she asked me another question. “Wasn’t it easier to do it because you’re a boy than it would’ve been if you weren’t?”

  “I don’t know,” I told her, because I had no experience being a girl. Although, yes, I could imagine them being more squeamish about murderous activities. “I guess so. Probably.”

  “Well, there you go.”

  I was glad then that I wasn’t a girl, because it seemed that they talked in riddles. Then again, if I were a girl, maybe I would have understood everything she was telling me by not coming right out and saying it.

  “I heard about something in school,” she said.

  I nodded, and sort of remembered what that was like.

  She pointed to her right, beyond the front of the houses and toward the park that our block faced. It was bright green in there now, and people were finally going there again the way they used to, little specks of colour on the paths and between the trees, and every so often, when the air was just right, a laugh would carry over, and wished I knew what was so funny.

  “What I heard was that back in the winter, after Thanksgiving, three different people, on three different days, were found with their heads off,” Roni said. “It wasn’t any girl who did that. She wouldn’t even think to do it.”

  “She wouldn’t?” By now I was just comfortable enough with Roni to think I might be able to get away with challenging her a little. “Who says?”

  “Well, she might think it. But she’d never do it.”

  “Why not?”

  “We don’t have the hands for it, for one thing.” She craned her neck forward, angling to see as much of the room behind me as she could. “You’ve got windows in there, don’t you, that look out the front? And you don’t go to my school and you never seem to leave. So . . . did you see anything?”

  For a moment I was suspicious. Maybe the police had sent her, and the next-door neighbours weren’t really her aunt and uncle. Maybe she hadn’t really come to stay with them until further notice because of . . . well, she hadn’t actually said anything about why. But I didn’t believe this. If the police had sent her, they would have sent her with a better lie that she could actually tell. I knew that much from TV.

  “If I did see something,” I said, “what would you want to know about it?”

  She turned serious, thinking, as if she hadn’t planned this far. Then she knew. “Most people would want to know why there wasn’t any blood. But what I’d rather know is if the person who did it ran away, or just walked, like it was any other day.”

  This was very weird to me. “What would that matter?”

  Her face became a riddle then, and she knew it, and seemed to like it that way.

  “Maybe he didn’t do either,” I said. “Walk or run.”

  She burst out laughing. “Well, he didn’t fly!”

  I realised then how much more I liked her when she laughed. I never got to see anyone laugh any more, only hear it, and not very often, only when I was lucky. After three days this was the first time she’d laughed, too, but it didn’t seem likely to happen again any time soon. I remembered school, and how it could be bad enough at the start of the year, and she was getting here toward the end of a school year, and that couldn’t have been easy.

  So I told her maybe she wouldn’t have to go to the new school if she didn’t want to, that I had a governess who came most days and, if Roni wanted, she could listen at the window. The idea met with instant disdain – not because it was a bad idea, just that the offer was meaningless.

  “What’s she going to teach you that I don’t already know?”

  I began to wish the spring away . . . that summer would hurry up and arrive, so the schools would lock their doors and I wouldn’t have to wait for late afternoons. While the waiting didn’t get any easier, at least as spring went on the days got longer, with more light filling the space between the houses. Even though we could lean in the windows and talk to each other any time of the night, it was better when I could see her, because otherwise she wouldn’t seem as real. She’d tell me what they were trying to teach her at school, and I’d tell her what the governess was trying to teach me, and there didn’t ever seem to be much in common, and eventually I realised something was missing.

  “What about art class?” I asked. “Don’t you ever go to art?”

  “Of course not. It’s middle school.”

  The way she said this made it sound horrible.

  “Don’t you miss it? Art class?”

  “I guess. I don’t know.” She sounded as if nobody had ever told her that she could miss it.

  “Could you do me a favour anyway? Could you bring back some paper for me? And pencils or something?” Crayons or coloured markers seemed too much to ask for at this stage, but if this first part went well, I could get to those later.

  “What kind of kid doesn’t have paper and pencils of his own? Everybody has those.” Roni appeared not to believe me, and who could blame her. “You say you have a governess. How do you do your lessons, then
? How do you do your math problems?”

  “I do them in front of her. I just don’t get to keep the paper and pencils. They make her take everything away when she leaves.”

  Roni realised I was serious, and froze for a moment with her mouth half open and one eye half shut. No one would ever make up a thing like this. “Why?” she said, as if she’d never heard of anything so ridiculous.

  “Because I draw.”

  “Only you and a billion other grade school lower life-forms. So?”

  I shut my eyes for a moment and sighed, and when I opened them, I think maybe, just for an instant, she saw someone else she’d never realised lived here.

  “Are you going to help me or not?”

  “I never said I wouldn’t, did I?” She blinked a few times, startled. “I’ve already got all the pencils I can ever use in this lifetime. You can have a couple of those.” She briefly disappeared from the window. “Knock yourself out.”

  She took aim and sent them flipping end-over-end, across the space and through my window. Two bright yellow pencils lying on the rug, with no one to take them away. At first I didn’t dare touch them. I just wanted to look at them.

  “Are you okay?” she called. “I didn’t sink one in your eye, did I?”

  I turned back around and remembered to thank her. Saying thank you is very important, especially when you’re a prisoner.

  “I’ve got a notebook here you can have, too. Just let me rip a few pages out first.”

  It was tempting. But no.

  “I’d rather have blank paper. Totally blank.” I’d waited this long. I could wait another day. “I hate lines.”

  “And speaking of lines, did you ever hear the one about beggars and choosers? That’s a good one.”

  “I still hate lines.”

  She nodded, getting it. “They really don’t let you have paper and writing utensils of your own. They really don’t.”