Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (47 page)

    Stopping by one of the silent pumps, Chloe bathes in the bright light, willing herself to cut it out. Beyond her father, the cornstalks, barely visible, wiggle their leafy antennae in the not-breeze, rattle their bulgy, distended husks. By tomorrow - maybe by the next time she wakes - her family will be at their new house. By tomorrow afternoon, she will be on Grumpy's boat, the rubber boots on the red kid-skis gripping her ankles and the Donald Duck lifejacket wrapping her in its sloppy, damp embrace.

    Inside the station, she spots her mother crouching by the peanut butter cheese crackers. She is in profile, but the scarf hides just enough so that Chloe can't see her eyes.

    "Going to the bathroom," she says. Her mother doesn't turn.

    She dawdles a moment in the candy aisle, running a finger across the silvery
Chunky
wrappers, the boxes of ten-cent Kisses along the bottom shelf. She has almost reached the bathroom when her mother says, "Need help, sweetie?"

    Chloe wants to dance, turn around and race at her mother and jump into her arms. Then she does turn, and something prickly and
old-cold
rolls over under her ribs.

    Her mother's face, smiling softly down. Tears streaming from her blue eyes.

    "No, thank you," Chloe whispers, and shuts herself in.

    The toilet has poop in it, and a mound of tissue. Chloe doesn't actually have to go. Sinking into a huddle by the door in the ugly yellow light, she tries to hold her breath, but her chest prickles and she bursts out coughing. Crying again.

    She can't stay here, the smell is too much. But she doesn't want to go back out. She's terrified to think what else might have changed by the time she opens the door. Each new breath of putrid air triggers a cough, each blink fresh tears.

    
Run,
she thinks.
Sneak past the Kisses, bolt out the door, find a way to Grumpy's.

    Except that the only place to run is into the corn. In the dark. Chloe can't imagine doing that.

    And then she realizes she doesn't want to. She already knows the safest place. The only place that hasn't changed, that's still hers. She needs to get back to the way-back, where the Miracle is.

    She has just gotten the heavy door partway open when she hears them. Bumpy-voiced Mom, growly Dad, whispering just out of sight in the next aisle.

    "You see?" her father is saying. Halfway snarling.

    Her mother sobs.

    "I told you."

    "You did. It's true."

    "You dreamed it, Carol. And no wonder. I mean, those nights. When we both really thought we were going to lose him…"

    "But we didn't," Chloe's mother whispers, her voice seeming to twitch back and forth now. Chloe's mother/changed mother/Chloe's mother.

    "Because of you," her father whispers. "Because of your unshakable hope."

    "Because of
him.
Because he came. Because he-"

    "Because of
you.
You saved him, Carol. You saved your son. You do see that now. Right?"

    Soft sob. Silence.

    Then footsteps. Chloe pushes hard at the door, but by the time she gets out and hurries down the candy aisle after them, they are already at the pumps, arms around each other, halfway to the car. Her father goes straight to the driver's side, dropping his cigarette to the tarmac. It is her mother who waits by the way-back doors and touches Chloe's hair as she climbs in beside her brother.

    "Is it my birthday yet?" Chloe asks, not quite looking at her mother's eyes. She doesn't want to see anymore. Doesn't want to think.

    She hears her mother gasp, glance at her watch. "Not yet," she whispers. "Oh, shit, not yet."

    The door drops down, and the car starts, and up front her parents are snarling and whispering again. Chloe crouches low, curls into a ball with her knees just touching her brother's back. If he wakes and feels that, he'll be furious. But if she's sleeping when he does, he won't mind.
Sleep,
she commands herself. Pleads with herself.
Sleep.

    She dreams cold. Old-cold. Green eyes. Bird-feet hands that aren't her hands - weren't - aren't - reaching for the beating-wing bird. Straw into gold, hillsides of stone. Old stone. Grasshopper-cornstalk squeezing in the window, slithering through it, crouching over her in the empty dark with its antennae brushing her face, and its husks, its dozens of husks hard and bumping against her chest, her legs. Those hands prying into the cage, reaching through the bars. Ribs. Towards the red and beating thing.

    Chloe wakes to a silent car, bright sunlight. She is flat on her back, but she can feel the Miracle's heat against her forearm. He is moving now, stretching. Out the window, there are trees overflowing with green, shading her from the brilliant blue overhead. Minnesota lake trees. Somewhere close, there's a hum. Motorboat hum. Chloe is halfway sitting up when she hears them.

    "You'll see," says her father, sounding tired. But only tired. And happy, almost. Sure, in the way he somehow still hasn't learned not to be, that the worst is behind him.

    He pulls open the back door, arms wide, and it's him, her CatDad with his whisker face, and she sits all the way up - just to revel in it, just to watch it all land - and he staggers back. Staring.

    
Revel?
That's what
it's
doing, anyway, Chloe knows. The cold one inside her. The one moving her arms, blinking her eyes. Making her watch.

    Vaguely, glancing towards her brother, Chloe wonders whether she really did figure it all out, or if the knowledge just came with the intruder. The cold one with the bird-feet hands, practically dancing down her ribs under her skin in his glee. Now she really does know. She knows how this happened. She knows when the cold one first appeared in her mother's hospital room. Her mother, whose eyes have always been blue, it's this
other's
mother that confused her.

    Anyway, she knows what the cold one promised. She knows what he got her mother to offer in exchange.

    "Where is she?" Chloe's father is murmuring, hovering right outside the way-back door and waving his hands as though trying to clear a fogged windshield, while out the side window, her mother stands rooted, hands over her mouth, shuddering and weeping. There is something almost comforting about it, about both her parents' reaction. At least they can tell. At least she really was
her.
There really was a something named Chloe.

    
I'm right here,
she wants to scream.
Right here.
But of course, the cold one won't let her. He's having way too much fun.

    Her father is on his knees, now, just the way the cold one likes him. Murmuring through his tears. Through his disbelief, which isn't really disbelief anymore.
So delicious when they understand,
the cold one tells her, in his inside ice-voice.
When they can't stop denying. Can't stop pleading. Even when they already know.

    So pathetic, her father looks down there. Hands going still. Head flung back in desperation. Or resignation. "Please," he says. "What have you done with my daughter?"

20 - Joe R. Lansdale - Deadman's Road

    The evening sun had rolled down and blown out in a bloody wad, and the white, full moon had rolled up like an enormous ball of tightly wrapped twine. As he rode, the Reverend Jubil Rains watched it glow above the tall pines. All about it stars were sprinkled white-hot in the dead-black heavens.

    The trail he rode on was a thin one, and the trees on either side of it crept towards the path as if they might block the way, and close up behind him. The weary horse on which he was riding moved forward with its head down, and Jubil, too weak to fight it, let his mount droop and take its lead. Jubil was too tired to know much at that moment, but he knew one thing. He was a man of the Lord and he hated God, hated the sonofabitch with all his heart.

    And he knew God knew and didn't care, because he knew Jubil was his messenger. Not one of the New Testament, but one of the Old Testament, harsh and mean and certain, vengeful and without compromise; a man who would have shot a leg out from under Moses and spat in the face of the Holy Ghost and scalped him, tossing his celestial hair to the wild four winds.

    It was not a legacy Jubil would have preferred, being the bad man messenger of God, but it was his, and he had earned it through sin, and no matter how hard he tried to lay it down and leave it be, he could not. He knew that to give in and abandon his God-given curse, was to burn in Hell forever, and to continue was to do as the Lord prescribed, no matter what his feelings towards his mean master might be. His Lord was not a forgiving Lord, nor was he one who cared for your love. All he cared for was obedience, servitude and humiliation. It was why God had invented the human race. Amusement.

    As he thought on these matters, the trail turned and widened, and off to one side, amongst tree stumps, was a fairly large clearing, and in its centre was a small log house, and out to the side a somewhat larger log barn. In the curtained window of the cabin was a light that burned orange behind the flour-sack curtains. Jubil, feeling tired, and hungry and thirsty and weary of soul, made for it.

    Stopping a short distance from the cabin, Jubil leaned forward on his horse and called out, "Hello, the cabin."

    He waited for a time, called again, and was halfway through calling when the door opened, and a man about five foot two with a large droopy hat, holding a rifle, stuck himself part of the way out of the cabin, said, "Who is it calling? You got a voice like a bullfrog."

    "Reverend Jubil Rains."

    "You ain't come to preach none, have you?"

    "No, sir. I find it does no good. I'm here to beg for a place in your barn, a night under its roof. Something for my horse, something for myself if it's available. Most anything, as long as water is involved."

    "Well," said the man, "this seems to be the gathering place tonight. Done got two others, and we just sat asses down to eat. I got enough you want it, some hot beans and some old bread."

    "I would be most obliged, sir," Jubil said.

    "Oblige all you want. In the meantime, climb down from that nag, put it in the barn and come in and chow. They call me Old Timer, but I ain't that old. It's 'cause most of my teeth are gone and I'm crippled in a foot a horse stepped on. There's a lantern just inside the barn door. Light that up, and put it out when you finish, come on back to the house."

    When Jubil finished grooming and feeding his horse with grain in the barn, watering him, he came into the cabin, made a show of pushing his long black coat back so that it revealed his ivory-handled.44 cartridge-converted revolvers. They were set so that they leaned forward in their holsters, strapped close to the hips, not draped low like punks wore them. Jubil liked to wear them close to the natural swing of his hands. When he pulled them it was a movement quick as the flick of a hummingbird's wings, the hammers clicking from the cock of his thumb, the guns barking, spewing lead with amazing accuracy. He had practised enough to drive a cork into a bottle at about a hundred paces, and he could do it in bad light. He chose to reveal his guns that way to show he was ready for any attempted ambush. He reached up and pushed his wide-brimmed black hat back on his head, showing black hair gone grey-tipped. He thought having his hat tipped made him look casual. It did not. His eyes always seemed aflame in an angry face.

    Inside, the cabin was bright with kerosene lamplight, and the kerosene smelled, and there were curls of black smoke twisting about, mixing with grey smoke from the pipe of Old Timer, and the cigarette of a young man with a badge pinned to his shirt. Beside him, sitting on a chopping log by the fireplace, which was too hot for the time of year, but was being used to heat up a pot of beans, was a middle-aged man with a slight paunch and a face that looked like it attracted thrown objects. He had his hat pushed up a bit, and a shock of wheat-coloured, sweaty hair hung on his forehead. There was a cigarette in his mouth, half of it ash. He twisted on the chopping log, and Jubil saw that his hands were manacled together.

    "I heard you say you was a preacher," said the manacled man, as he tossed the last of his smoke into the fireplace. "This here sure ain't God's country."

    "Worse thing is," said Jubil, "it's exactly God's country."

    The manacled man gave out with a snort, and grinned.

    "Preacher," said the younger man, "my name is Jim Taylor. I'm a deputy for Sheriff Spradley, out of Nacogdoches. I'm taking this man there for a trial, and most likely a hanging. He killed a fella for a rifle and a horse. I see you tote guns, old style guns, but good ones. Way you tote them, I'm suspecting you know how to use them."

    "I've been known to hit what I aim at," Jubil said, and sat in a rickety chair at an equally rickety table. Old Timer put some tin plates on the table, scratched his ass with a long wooden spoon, then grabbed a rag and used it as a pot-holder, lifted the hot bean pot to the table. He popped the lid of the pot, used the ass-scratching spoon to scoop a heap of beans onto plates. He brought over some wooden cups and poured them full from a pitcher of water.