The Best New Horror 2 (20 page)

Well I had to go back to the store after a while. I hated to go but, well, John is a good boy, married now of course, but in those days his head was full of girls and it didn’t do to leave him alone in a busy shop for too long.

And so the long hot day drew slowly to a close. I kept the store open till eight, when the light began to turn and the square emptied out with all the tourists going away to write postcards and see if we didn’t have even just a
little
McDonalds hidden away someplace. I guess Mary had troubles enough at home, realized where the boy would be and figured he was safer there than anywhere else, and I guess she was right.

Tom and Billy finished up drawing and then Tom sat and talked to him for some time. Then they got up and the kid walked slowly off to the corner of the square, looking back to wave at Tom a couple times. Tom stood and watched him go and when Billy had gone he stayed there a while, head down, looking like a huge black statue in the gathering dark. He looked kind of creepy out there and I don’t mind telling you I was glad when he finally moved and started walking over towards Jack’s. I ran out to catch up with him and drew level just as we passed the drawing. And then I had to stop. I just couldn’t look at that and move at the same time.

Finished, the drawing was like nothing on earth, and I suppose that’s exactly what it was. I can’t hope to describe it to you, although I’ve seen it in my dreams many times in the last ten years. You had to be there, on that heavy summer night, had to know what was going on. Otherwise it’s going to sound like it was just a drawing. That tiger was out and out terrifying. It looked so mean and hungry Christ I don’t know what: it just looked like the darkest parts of your own mind, the pain and the fury and the vengeful hate nailed down in front of you for you to see, and I just stood there and shivered in the humid evening air.

“We did him a picture,” Tom said quietly.

“Yeah,” I said, and nodded. Like I said, I know what catharsis means and I thought I understood what he was saying. But I really didn’t want to look at it much longer. “Let’s go have a beer, yeah?”

The storm in Tom wasn’t past, I could tell, and he still seemed to thrum with crackling emotions looking for an earth, but I thought the clouds might be breaking and I was glad.

And so we walked slowly over to Jack’s and had a few beers and watched some pool being played. Tom seemed pretty tired, but still alert, and I relaxed a little. Come eleven most of the guys started going on their way and I was surprised to see Tom get another beer. Pete, Ned and I stayed on, and Jack of course, though we knew our loving wives would have something to say about that. It just didn’t seem time to go. Outside it had gotten pretty dark, though the moon was keeping the square in a kind of twilight and the lights in the bar threw a pool of warmth out of the front window.

Then, about twelve o’clock, it happened, and I don’t suppose any of us will ever see the same world we grew up in again. I’ve told this whole thing like it was just me who was there, but we all were, and we remember it together.

Because suddenly there was a wailing sound outside, a thin cutting cry, getting closer. Tom immediately snapped to his feet and stared out the window like he’d been waiting for it. As we looked out across the square we saw little Billy come running and we could see the blood on his face from there. Some of us got to get up but Tom snarled at us to stay there and so I guess we just stayed there, sitting back down like we’d been pushed. He strode out the door and into the square and the boy saw him and ran to him and Tom folded him in his cloak and held him close and warm. But he didn’t come back in. He just stood there, and he was waiting for something.

Now there’s a lot of crap talked about silences. I read novels when I’ve the time and you read things like “Time stood still” and so on and you just think bullshit it did. So I’ll just say I don’t think anyone in the world breathed in that next minute. There was no wind, no movement. The stillness and silence were there like you could touch them, but more than that: they were like that’s all there was and all there ever had been.

We felt the slow red throb of violence from right across the square before we could even see the man. Then Sam came staggering into the square waving a bottle like a flag and cursing his head off. At first he couldn’t see Tom and the boy because they were the opposite side of the fountain, and he ground to a wavering halt, but then he started shouting, rough jags of sound that seemed to strike against the silence and die instead of breaking it, and he started charging across the square and if ever there was a man with murder in his thoughts then it was Sam McNeill. He was like a man possessed, a man who’d given his soul the evening off. I wanted to shout to Tom to get the hell out of the way, to come inside, but the words wouldn’t come out of my throat and we all just stood there, knuckles whitening as we clutched the bar and stared, our mouths open like we’d made a pact never to use them again. And Tom just stood there, watching Sam come towards him, getting
closer, almost as far as the spot where Tom usually painted. And it felt like we were looking out of the window at a picture of something that happened long ago in another place and time and the closer Sam got the more I began to feel very very afraid for him.

It was at that moment that Sam stopped dead in his tracks, skidding forward like in some kid’s cartoon, his shout dying off in his ragged throat. He was staring at the ground in front of him, his eyes wide and his mouth a stupid circle. And then he began to scream.

It was a high shrill noise like a woman and coming out of that bull of a man it sent fear racking down my spine. He started making thrashing movements like he was trying to move backwards but he just stayed where he was. His movements became unmistakable at about the same time his screams turned from terror to agony. He was trying to get his leg away from something.

Suddenly he seemed to fall forward on one knee, his other leg stuck out behind him and he raised his head and shrieked at the dark skies and we saw his face then and I’m not going to forget that face so long as I live. It was a face from before there were any words, the face behind our oldest fears and earliest nightmares, the face we’re terrified of seeing on ourselves one night when we’re alone in the dark and It finally comes out from under the bed to get us.

Then Sam fell on his face, his leg buckled up and still he thrashed and screamed and clawed at the ground with his hands, blood running from his broken fingernails as he twitched and struggled. Maybe the light was playing tricks, and my eyes were sparkling anyway on account of being too paralysed with fear to even blink, but as he thrashed less and less it became harder and harder to see him at all, and as the breeze whipped up stronger his screams began to sound a lot like the wind. But still he writhed and moaned and then suddenly there was the most godawful crunching sound and then there was no movement or sound anymore.

Like they were on a string our heads all turned together and we saw Tom still standing there, his coat flapping in the wind. He had a hand on Billy’s shoulder and as we looked we could see that Mary was there too now and he had one arm round her as she sobbed into his coat.

I don’t know how long we just sat there staring but then with one mind we were ejected off our seats and out of the bar. Pete and Ned ran to Tom but Jack and I went to where Sam had fallen and we stood and stared down and I tell you the rest of my life now seems like a build-up to and a climb-down from that moment.

We were standing in front of a chalk drawing of a tiger. Even now my scalp seems to tighten when I think of it, and my chest feels like someone punched a hole in it and tipped a gallon of iced water inside.
I’ll just tell you the facts: Jack was there and he knows what we saw and what we didn’t see.

What we didn’t see was Sam McNeill. He just wasn’t there, you know? We saw a drawing of a tiger in purples and greens, a little bit scuffed, and there was a lot more red round the mouth of that tiger than there had been that afternoon and I’m sure that if either of us could have dreamed of reaching out and touching it it would have been warm too.

And the hardest part to tell is this. I’d seen that drawing in the afternoon, and Jack had too, and we knew that when it was done it was lean and thin. And I swear to God that tiger wasn’t thin anymore. What Jack and I were looking down at was one fat tiger.

After a while I looked up and across at Tom. He was still standing with Mary and Billy, but they weren’t crying any more. Mary was hugging Billy so tight he squawked and Tom’s face looked calm and alive and creased with a smile. And as we stood there the skies opened for the first time in months and a cool rain hammered down. At my feet colours began to run and lines became less distinct. Jack and I stood and watched till there was just pools of meaningless colours and then we walked slowly over to the others not even looking at the bottle lying on the ground and we all stood there a long time in the rain, facing each other, not saying a word.

Well that was ten years ago, near enough. After a while Mary took Billy home and they turned to give us a little wave before they turned the corner. The cuts on Billy’s face healed real quick, and he’s a good looking boy now: he looks a lot like his dad and he’s already fooling about in cars. Helps me in the store sometimes. His mom ain’t aged a day and looks wonderful. She never married again, but she looks real happy the way she is.

The rest of us just said a simple goodnight. Goodnight was all we could muster and maybe that’s all there was to say. Then we walked off home in the directions of our wives. Tom gave me a small smile before he turned and walked off alone. I almost followed him, I wanted to say something, but in the end I just stood and watched him go. And that’s how I’ll always remember him best, because for a moment there was a spark in his eyes and I knew that some pain had been lifted deep down inside there somewhere. Then he walked and no one has seen him since, and like I said it’s been about ten years now. He wasn’t there in the square the next morning and he didn’t come in for a beer. Like he’d never been, he just wasn’t there. Except for the hole in our hearts: it’s funny how much you can miss a quiet man.

We’re all still here, of course, Jack, Ned, Pete and the boys, and all the same, if even older and greyer. Pete lost his wife and Ned retired but things go on the same. The tourists come in the summer
and we sit on the stools and drink our cold beers and shoot the breeze about ballgames and families and how the world’s going to shit and sometimes we’ll draw close and talk about a night a long time ago and about paintings and cats and about the quietest man we ever knew, wondering where he is, and what he’s doing. And we’ve had a six-pack in the back of the fridge for ten years now, and the minute he walks through that door and pulls up a stool, that’s his.

M
ELANIE
T
EM
lives in a nineteenth-century Victorian House in Denver, Colorado, with her writer husband, Steve Rasnic Tem. Her short stories were first published in various small press and literary magazines, and more recently she has appeared in such anthologies as
Women of the West, Women of Darkness I
and
II, Skin of the Soul, Dark Voices 3, Cold Shocks
and
Final Shadows
.

Her first novel,
Prodigal
, was published by Dell’s new Abyss line in 1991, followed by
Blood Moon
from The Women’s Press.

Melanie Tem is a social worker who works with abused and neglected children and disabled adults; “The Co-Op” could be considered to reflect some of the real-life horrors she encounters every day.

T
HE DIN OF THE CHILDREN
in the basement rec room had been a white noise in the middle ground all afternoon, with occasional thunderous white-water surges like this one. Somebody was wailing, and two or three other piercing little voices were threatening to tell.

Outside was real water, rain in the streets, and more voices like water. A crowd was filling Cascadilla Street and, Julie supposed, the other streets of Ithaca, and flood waters were rising.

Steadying the baby against her body, where even in sleep she nuzzled for the breast, Julie started to get up to investigate the commotion in the basement. It was her house, and she’d noticed that up to a point everyone in the co-op parented everyone else’s children. She liked that sense of community; it was one of the things, along with a need to be with other mothers who knew what she was going through, that had made her join the babysitting co-op the minute there’d been an opening.

But Diane, swearing, beat her to the basement door. Diane was tall, broad-shouldered, and obese, yet somehow she seemed emaciated; the many cracks and crevices in her flesh looked deep and gray, and there was always a sour odor about her. Three of the kids downstairs were Diane’s, Julie thought, or four; unsuccessfully, she tried to remember their names or even which ones they were. Diane’s voice carried even when she was engaged in ordinary conversation, and just now she was shrieking at the kids, competing with their noise but not noticeably diminishing it.

Julie frowned. She didn’t like the way Diane talked to children, her own or anyone else’s. That wasn’t the way mothers should be. Mothers should be like Julie’s mother: loving their children, loving motherhood, tired and cranky only once in a while. That was the kind of mother Julie wanted desperately to be, but it wasn’t easy, in the middle of the night, when Megan wouldn’t stop crying no matter what Julie did, or when she bit her breast, Julie was sure on purpose.

Her mother had never felt about her the way she often felt about Megan. Her mother had never said awful things to her, or wanted to hurt her, or wished she had never been born. Julie would never be as good a mother as her own mother had been.

But when she looked around her, no one else was, either, and this town fairly teemed with mothers and children. Everywhere she went, especially since Megan had been born, she saw them, was pulled into the milling crowds they formed. On the streets, in the stores, in the wet green parks of this town, mothers screamed mindlessly at their children or mindlessly ignored them, and the children howled and played and scratched at windows. Julie and her sisters had never acted like that.