The Best New Horror 3 Page 27

  “Saw your letter the other day. Sal pointed it out. Didn’t know you felt so strongly about it.”

  “About lots of things.” The boy.

  Terry didn’t seem to think beyond the letter. “Sure. Some things need saying.” The boy, tell him!

  “They certainly do.” But Terry had turned away. Girls entered, gaudy as parrots. The boys who had tired of being rifled for drinks moved to the bar. “What’s become of Daniel, I wonder,” Terry said. Like smoke shifting between the standing room, Whittle saw grey faces and hair, fastening his tongue to the roof of his mouth. It was glossy, tablelegs, not unshaven skin, that shifted through the others. Maybe they truly were nothing but smoke he was fashioning himself.

  “I can’t imagine,” he lied. He drank so as not to speak further, but he needn’t worry. Terry had simply been timing his moment.

  “I’ve heard from him already, Darren, don’t worry. I just want to know what you were thinking of.”

  Whittle’s face felt sprinkled with embers. The jukebox began to sing. Pop music, he thought. The kind that sounds so much like the needle has stuck. “I don’t understand. He’s called you?”

  “He said you led him to that subway in East Marsh Street. You used to get spooked over it even as a kid, didn’t you? It was lucky that he knew what to expect in it. I don’t suppose it even occurred to you he might have fallen.”

  Whittle let himself become angry, now that he knew the boy was safe. “I did no such thing. He just followed me, being abusive, if you must know. If he’s telling tales already, I’m not surprised. I told you what to expect from him. He wants to pry us apart.”

  Terry gaped, but it was enough time to tell him about the phone call he’d had, and how it was occurring to Whittle who it had been. “A random, anonymous attack would be a child’s style. He’s lucky I never involved the police, Terry.”

  But after that, Terry had walked out, leaving Whittle to wonder if the boy had yet won. He must make Terry listen, no matter how traumatic it was for them both. Yet once outside, with all the smoke he had breathed in blowing out as steam, the streets were empty. Singing louts cascaded into him in the doorway. Then he had only to go home.

  This time it took longer to determine exactly who it was behind him. Deserted roads amplified and multiplied his footsteps, which made him feel oddly lonelier. Alleys repeated his noises for a while after each passing, until it was clear he wasn’t just being followed. They had succeeded in unnerving him too, with each flinch and angry turn. It was either light clinging to misty windows, or a cautious drunk, but nothing he was expecting. A gathering of bin-liners by a restaurant door quivered lazily in the glow. They had looked nothing like the raincoats that came to mind.

  Was this the way Terry had taken? Yes, he thought he saw him slink jaggedly around the far corner as Whittle entered. Not again! Phone calls, pursuits, petty squabbles: he was in danger of being overwhelmed by the childish! Did he hope to haunt Whittle by repeating the Daniel episode; if so, then he would be disappointed. He’d not be cowed twice.

  He would feel less nervous within sight of Terry again, but couldn’t easily manage it until they were in sight of the subway. Whittle ducked into the darkest alley he dared, and let Terry pass. That made him infinitely relieved, particularly when his partner looked so anxious. Presumably, he hoped to catch Whittle to apologise, or something less civilized.

  He saw him go down into the subway. He heard the structure turning down Terry’s sounds. He tried to pick out a path bare of gravel. Even so, nearer the rectangular mouth, he felt less able to disguise his trepidation. Was he so desperate to scare himself!

  He leant over the railings without touching them, until his face felt pinched with blood. Snatched himself back when he was dizzy enough to reel. In the silence, he hadn’t heard Terry’s footsteps emerge from over the railtracks. But neither did he answer Whittle’s calls. Had he drunk so much beforehand that he had slipped in the litter, too drowsy to reply? He had walked right enough, but a sober man could just as easily fall. Of course, Whittle must strive to help, then Terry would be obliged to speak.

  It took five minutes that seemed considerably longer to find his way around to the other exit. There had been something unlucky in the prospect of descending the way his friend had: possibly in that he too may slip. Past the cottage on stilts that passed for a signal-box, into East Marsh Street. If he hurried, he may still see Terry turning off at the junction, and so abandon the search. He was disappointed. Robinson Street was bare; litter settled down for the night in bins.

  He shouldn’t try to gather nerve, for fear of second thoughts. He could feel how the slope tried to pitch him forward into the shadows. The lamp filament glowed, suffocated by dust. Even the walls it lit looked as uncertain as packed dirt. All but the brightest graffiti had sunk back into the recess. Turning onto the main tunnel saved him a journey. It was empty, except where it was cut short by shadows. So Terry had gone on, if Terry it had been. He preferred to doubt that, but was swivelling softly to flee when he kicked the thing out of the darkness. Not a rat, he flinched. No, a shoe. And lying just within his recovering sight, the raincoat Terry had been wearing, collars curled like leaves—no, hold on! In the vague light he shouldn’t be so sure. How could he hope to stop surmise now—any of the darker stains on the walls could be more than paint. Beneath the huddled coat, which he half-expected to turn over and curse him drunkenly, there was a smaller rag, like a sock. He picked out the arms of the baby-jacket and gagged his thoughts with a gasp. It felt chewed damp. Though armed with suspicions, he still did not know how to account for it, except that it must have been enough of a reason to leave.

  Standing so sharply had him teetering: which way had he come? Why should it matter, echoes tracked him along both routes, water pattering. It struck him from where, when the central pool was long dry. The sewers? They pattered like feet too large to scamper. He had to go back for the coat and shoe. Some tramp might steal them, if they weren’t already his.

  When he knew that what he heard was growing near, he was already frozen by the sight of it. More than one pair of feet, that was what had escaped him, and moving the clothes had been very like vibrating a spider-web. He turned to the sounds.

  The shadow was worse, a draped and spidery hand. It was coupled up with a crowd of bodies, a sluggish scrum. He could see no separate head. Smell rather than sight told him they were soiled and naked, and how quickly they moved for all their clumsy linking. The women? He saw that the fifth and sixth were male, even down to the one’s tattoo. Good God, were they all drunk?

  Incensed, he shoved out at their collective body with his hands and fell. He mustn’t! Plastic flew up at his sides, greased his elbows and heels from under him. Something fell on him—no, it was their shadow, and then themselves. He had to move, not touch them, not panic. Screaming he could not stop, seeing the ring of dusty eyes and single, sinking mouth: a circuit of teeth.

  THOMAS LIGOTTI

  The Medusa

  “THE MOST STARTLING and unexpected discovery since Clive Barker” is how The Washington Post described the fiction of Thomas Ligotti. A regular toiler in the small presses for many years, he has recently been turning up in such anthologies as The Best Horror from Fantasy Tales, Prime Evil, Fine Frights, A Whisper of Blood, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and the previous two volumes of Best New Horror.

  He has been a featured author in Weird Tales, and his recent short fiction has been collected in Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe: His Lives and Works. “The Medusa” is yet another example of Ligotti’s oblique and haunting prose . . .

  I

  BEFORE LEAVING HIS ROOM FOR THE first time in nobody knows how long, Lucian Dregler transcribed a few stray thoughts into his notebook.

  The sinister, the terrible never deceive: the state in which they leave us is always one of enlightenment. And only this condition of vicious insight enables us a full grasp of the world, all things considered, just as a frigid melanchol
y grants us full possession of ourselves.

  We may hide from horror only in the heart of horror.

  Could I be so unique among dreamers, having courted the Medusa—my first and oldest companion—to the exclusion of all others? Would I have her respond to this sweet talk?

  Relieved to have these fragments safely on the page rather than in some precarious mental notebook, where they were likely to become smudged or completely effaced, Dregler slipped into a relatively old overcoat, locked the door of his room behind him, and exited down innumerable staircases at the back of his apartment building. A winding series of seldomly travelled streets was his established route to a certain place he now and then frequented, though for time’s sake—in order to waste it, that is—he chose even more uncommon and chaotic avenues. He was meeting an acquaintance he had not seen in quite a while.

  The place was very dark, though no more than in past memory, and much more populated than it first appeared to Dregler’s eyes. He paused at the doorway, slowly but unsystematically removing his gloves, while his vision, still exceptional, worked with the faint halos of illumination offered by lamps of tarnished metal, which were spaced so widely along the walls that the light of one lamp seemed barely to link up and propagate that of its neighbour. Gradually, then, the darkness sifted away, revealing the shapes beneath it: a beaming forehead with the glitter of wire-rimmed eyeglasses below, cigarette-holding and beringed fingers lying asleep on a table, shoes of shining leather which ticked lightly against Dregler’s own as he now passed cautiously through the room. At the back stood a column of stairs coiling up to another level, which was more an appended platform, a little brow of balcony or a puny pulpit, than what one might call a sub-section of the establishment proper. This level was caged in at its brink with a railing constructed of the same rather wiry and fragile material as the stairway, giving this area the appearance of a makeshift scaffolding. Rather slowly, Dregler ascended the stairs.

  “Good evening, Joseph,” Dregler said to the man seated at the table beside an unusually tall and narrow window. Joseph Gleer stared for a moment at the old gloves Dregler had tossed onto the table.

  “You still have those same old gloves,” he replied to the greeting, then lifted his gaze, grinning: “And that overcoat!”

  Gleer stood up and the two men shook hands. Then they both sat down and Gleer, indicating the empty glass between them on the table, asked Dregler if he still drank brandy. Dregler nodded, and Gleer said “Coming up” before leaning over the rail a little way and holding out two fingers in view of someone in the shadows below.

  “Is this just a sentimental symposium, Joseph?” inquired the now uncoated Dregler.

  “In part. Wait until we’ve got our drinks, so you can properly congratulate me.” Dregler nodded again, scanning Gleer’s face without any observable upsurge in curiosity. A former colleague from Dregler’s teaching days, Gleer had always possessed an open zest for minor intrigues, academic or otherwise, and an addiction to the details of ritual and protocol, anything preformulated and with precedent. He also had a liking for petty secrets, as long as he was among those privy to them. For instance, in discussions—no matter if the subject was philosophy or old films—Gleer took an obvious delight in revealing, usually at some advanced stage of the dispute, that he had quite knowingly supported some treacherously absurd school of thought. His perversity confessed, he would then assist, and even surpass, his opponent in demolishing what was left of his old position, supposedly for the greater glory of disinterested intellects everywhere. But at the same time, Dregler saw perfectly well what Gleer was up to. And though it was not always easy to play into Gleer’s hands, it was this secret counter-knowledge that provided Dregler’s sole amusement in these mental contests, for

  Nothing that asks for your arguments is worth arguing, just as nothing that solicits your belief is worth believing. The real and the unreal lovingly cohabit in our terror, the only “sphere” that matters.

  Perhaps secretiveness, then, was the basis of the two men’s relationship, a flawed secretiveness in Gleer’s case, a consummate one in Dregler’s.

  Now here he was, Gleer, keeping Dregler in so-called suspense. His eyes, Dregler’s, were aimed at the tall narrow window, beyond which were the bare upper branches of an elm that twisted with spectral movements under one of the floodlights fixed high upon the outside walls. But every few moments Dregler glanced at Gleer, whose babylike features were so remarkably unchanged: the cupid’s bow lips, the cookie-dough cheeks, the tiny grey eyes now almost buried within the flesh of a face too often screwed up with laughter.

  A woman with two glasses on a cork-bottomed tray was standing over the table. While Gleer paid for the drinks, Dregler lifted his and held it in the position of a lazy salute. The woman who had brought the drinks looked briefly and without expression at toastmaster Dregler. Then she went away and Dregler, with false ignorance, said: “To your upcoming or recently passed event, whatever it may be or have been.”

  “I hope it will be for life this time, thank you, Lucian.”

  “What is this, quintus?”

  “Quartus, if you don’t mind.”

  “Of course, my memory is as bad as my powers of observation. Actually I was looking for something shining on your finger, when I should have seen the shine of your eyes. No ring, though, from the bride?”

  Gleer reached into his open shirt and pulled out a length of neck-chain, dangling at the end of which was a tiny rose-coloured diamond in a plain silver setting.

  “Modern innovations,” he said neutrally, replacing the chain and stone. “The moderns must have them, I suppose, but marriage is still marriage.”

  “Here’s to the Middle Ages,” Dregler said with unashamed weariness.

  “And the middle-aged,” refrained Gleer.

  The men sat in silence for some moments. Dregler’s eyes moved once more around that shadowy loft, where a few tables shared the light of a single lamp. Most of its dim glow backfired onto the wall, revealing the concentric coils of the wood’s knotty surface. Taking a calm sip of his drink, Dregler waited.

  “Lucian,” Gleer finally began in a voice so quiet that it was nearly inaudible.

  “I’m listening,” Dregler assured him.

  “I didn’t ask you here just to commemorate my marriage. It’s been almost a year, you know. Not that that would make any difference to you.”

  Dregler said nothing, encouraging Gleer with receptive silence.

  “Since that time,” Gleer continued, “my wife and I have both taken leaves from the university and have been traveling, mostly in Europe and the Mediterranean. We’ve just returned a few days ago. Would you like another drink? You went through that one rather quickly.”

  “No, thank you. Please go on,” Dregler requested very politely.

  After drinking the last of his brandy, Gleer continued. “Lucian, I’ve never understood your fascination with what you call the Medusa. I’m not sure I care to, though I’ve never told you that. But through no deliberate efforts of my own, let me emphasize, I think I can further your, I guess you could say, pursuit. You are still interested in the matter, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, but I’m too poor to affort Peloponnesian jaunts like the one you and your wife have just returned from. Was that what you had in mind?”

  “Not at all. You needn’t even leave town, which is the strange part, the real beauty of it. It’s very complicated how I know what I know. Wait a second. Here, take this.”

  Gleer now produced an object he had earlier stowed away somewhere in the darkness, laying it on the table. Dregler stared at the book. It was bound in a rust-coloured cloth and the gold lettering across its spine was flaking away. From what Dregler could make out of the remaining fragments of the letters, the title of the book seemed to be: Electro-Dynamics for the Beginner.

  “What is this supposed to be?” he asked Gleer.

  “Only a kind of passport, meaningless in itself. This is going to sound ridicu
lous—how I know it!—but you want to bring the book to this establishment,” said Gleer, placing a business card upon the book’s front cover, “and ask the owner how much he’ll give you for it. I know you go to these shops all the time. Are you familiar with it?”

  “Only vaguely,” replied Dregler.

  The establishment in question, as the business card read, was Brother’s Books: Dealers in Rare and Antiquarian Books, Libraries and Collections Purchased, Large Stock of Esoteric Sciences and Civil War, No Appointment Needed, Member of Manhattan Society of Philosophical Bookdealers, Benjamin Brothers, Founder and Owner.

  “I’m told that the proprietor of this place knows you by your writings,” said Gleer, adding in an ambiguous monotone: “He thinks you’re a real philosopher.”

  Dregler gazed at length at Gleer, his long fingers abstractedly fiddling with the little card. “Are you telling me that the Medusa is supposed to be a book?” he said.

  Gleer stared down at the table-top and then looked up. “I’m not telling you anything I do not know for certain, which is not a great deal. As far as I know, it could still be anything you can imagine, and perhaps already have. Of course you can take this imperfect information however you like, as I’m sure you will. If you want to know more than I do, then pay a visit to this bookstore.”

  “Who told you to tell me this?” Dregler calmly asked.

  “You can’t ask that, Lucian. Everything falls apart if you do.”

  “Very well,” said Dregler, pulling out his wallet and inserting the business card into it. He stood up and began putting on his coat. “Is that all, then? I don’t mean to be rude but— ”