The Best New Horror 2 (34 page)

The model mewed gently and tried to raise itself up towards David.

This time he didn’t step back. “Come on,” he said. “We’re going back inside.”

David led the way, levelling the beam of the torch through the rain like a scaled-down searchlight, its yellow oval glistening on the muddy wet grass just ahead. The rain was getting worse; heavy drops rattling on David’s skull and plastering his hair down like a wet swimming cap. The model moved slowly, seeming to weaken with every arch of its rotting fuselage. David clenched his jaw and tried to urge it on, pouring his own strength into the wounded creature. Once, he looked up over the roofs of the houses. Above the chimneys and TV aerials cloud-heavy sky seemed to boil. Briefly, he thought he saw shapes form, ghosts swirling on the moaning wind. And the ghosts were not people, but simple inanimate things. Clocks and cars, china and jewelry, toys and trophies all tumbling uselessly through the night. But then he blinked and there was nothing to be seen but the rain, washing his face and filling his eyes like tears.

He was wet through by the time they reached the back door. The concrete step proved too much for the model and David had to stoop and quickly lift it onto the lino inside, trying not to think of the way it felt in his hands.

In the kitchen’s fluorescent light, he saw for the first time just how badly injured the creature was. Clumps of earth clung to its sticky, blistered wings and grey plastic oozed from gaping wounds along its fuselage. And the reek of it immediately filled the kitchen, easily overpowering the usual smell of fish fingers. It stank of glue and paint and plastic; but there was more. It also smelt like something dying.

It moved on, dragging its wings, whimpering in agony, growing weaker with every inch. Plainly, the creature was close to the end of its short existence.

“Come on,” David whispered, crouching down close beside it. “There’s not far to go now. Please try. Please . . . don’t die yet.”

Seeming to understand, the model made a final effort. David held the kitchen door open as it crawled into the hall, onwards toward the light and sound of the TV through the frosted lounge door.

“You made
that?
” An awed whisper came from half way up the stairs.

David looked up and saw little Victoria peering down at the limping model, her hands gripping the bannister like a prisoner behind bars. He nodded, feeling an odd sense of pride. It was, after all, his. But he knew you could take pride too far. The model belonged to the whole family as well. To Victoria sitting alone at night on the stairs, to Simon turning to mush and bones in his damp coffin—and to Mum and Dad. And that was why it was important to show them. David was old for a child; he knew that grownups were funny like that. If you didn’t show them things, they simply didn’t believe in them.

“Come on,” he said, holding out his hand.

Victoria scampered quickly down the stairs and along the hall, stepping carefully over the model and putting her cold little hand inside his slightly larger one.

The model struggled on, leaving a trail of slimy plastic behind on the carpet. When it reached the lounge door, David turned the handle and the three of them went in together.

K
ARL
E
DWARD
W
AGNER
has won both the British and World Fantasy Awards, and trained as a psychiatrist before becomming a full-time writer and editor.

His first book,
Darkness Weaves With Many Shades
, introduced readers to his offbeat heroic fantasy protagonist Kane, whose exploits he continued through three further novels and two collections.

More recently he has edited twelve volumes of
The Year’s Best Horror Stories
(currently being reprinted in multi-edition hardcovers as
Horrorstory), Intensive Scare
and three volumes of
Echoes of Valor
.

With artist Kent Williams he has collaborated on a major graphic novel,
Tell Me, Dark
, published by DC Comics, and his new novel
The Fourth Seal
is due from Bantam.

“Cedar Lane” could be called “psychological science fiction”, but however you want to describe it, it will leave you with a chill long after you’ve finished reading it.

Dream is a shadow of something real
.

—from the Peter Weir film
The Last Wave

H
E WAS BACK AT
C
EDAR
L
ANE
again, in the big house where he had spent his childhood, growing up there until time to go away to college. He was the youngest, and his parents had sold the house then, moving into something smaller and more convenient in a newer and nicer suburban development.

A rite of passage, but for Garrett Larkin it truly reinforced the reality that he could never go home again. Except in dream. And dreams are what the world is made of.

At times it puzzled him that while he nightly dreamed of his boyhood home on Cedar Lane, he never dreamed about any of the houses he had lived in since.

Sometimes the dreams were scary.

Sometimes more so than others.

It was a big two-story house plus basement, built just before the war, the war in which he was born. It was very solid, faced with thick stones of pink-hued Tennessee marble from the local quarries. There were three dormer windows thrusting out from the roof in front, and Garrett liked to call it the House of the Three Gables because he always thought the Hawthorne book had a neat spooky title. He and his two brothers each had his private hideout in the little dormer rooms—just big enough for shelves, boxes of toys, a tiny desk for making models or working jigsaw puzzles. Homework was not to intrude here, relegated instead to the big desk in Dad’s never-used study in the den downstairs.

Cedar Lane was an old country lane laid out probably at the beginning of the previous century along dirt farm roads. Now two narrow lanes of much-repaved blacktop twisted through a narrow gap curtained between rows of massive cedar trees. Garrett’s house stood well back upon four acres of lawn, orchards, and vegetable garden—portioned off from farmland as the neighborhood shifted from rural to suburban just before the war.

It had been a wonderful house to grow up in—three boys upstairs and a sissy older sister with her own bedroom downstairs across the hall from Mom and Dad. There were two flights of stairs to run down—the other leading to the cavernous basement where Dad parked the new car and had all his shop tools and gardening equipment, and where dwelt the Molochian coal furnace named Fear and its nether realm, the monster-haunted coal cellar. The yard was bigger than any of his friends had, and until he grew old enough to have to mow the grass and cuss, it was a limitless playground to run and romp with the dogs, for ball games and playing cowboy or soldier, for climbing trees and building secret clubhouses out of boxes and scrap lumber.

Garrett loved the house on Cedar Lane. But he wished that he wouldn’t dream about it
every
night. Sometimes he wondered if he might be haunted by the house. His shrink told him it was purely a fantasy-longing for his vanished childhood.

Only it wasn’t. Some of the dreams disturbed him. Like the elusive fragrance of autumn leaves burning, and the fragmentary remembrance of carbonizing flesh.

Garrett Larkin was a very successful landscape architect with his own offices and partnership in Chicago. He had kept the same marvelous wife for going on thirty years, was just now putting the youngest of their three wonderful children through Antioch, was looking forward to a comfortable and placid fifth decade of life, and had not slept in his bed at Cedar Lane since he was seventeen.

Garrett Larkin awoke in his bed in the house on Cedar Lane, feeling vaguely troubled. He groped over his head for the black metal cowboy-silhouette wall lamp mounted above his bed. He found the switch, but the lamp refused to come on. He slipped out from beneath the covers, moved through familiar darkness into the bathroom, thumbed the light switch there.

He was filling the drinking glass with water when he noticed that his hands were those of an old man.

An old man’s. Not his hands. Nor his the face in the bathroom mirror. Lined with too many years, too many cares. Hair gray and thinning. Nose bulbous and flecked with red blotches. Left eyebrow missing the thin scar from when he’d totaled the Volvo. Hands heavy with calluses from manual labor. No wedding ring. None-too-clean flannel pajamas, loose over a too-thin frame.

He swallowed the water slowly, studying the reflection. It
could
have been him. Just another disturbing dream. He waited for the awakening.

He walked down the hall to his brothers’ room. There were two young boys asleep there. Neither one was his brother. They were probably between nine and thirteen years in age, and somehow they minded him of his brothers—long ago, when they were all young together on Cedar Lane.

One of them stirred suddenly and opened his eyes. He looked up at the old man silhouetted by the distant bathroom light. He said sleepily, “What’s wrong, Uncle Gary?”

“Nothing. I thought I heard one of you cry out. Go back to sleep now, Josh.”

The voice was his, and the response came automatically. Garrett Larkin returned to his room and sat there on the edge of his bed, awaiting daylight.

Daylight came, and with the smell of coffee and frying bacon, and still the dream remained. Larkin found his clothes in the dimness, dragged on the familiar overalls, and made his way downstairs.

The carpet was new and much of the furniture was strange, but it was still the house on Cedar Lane. Only older.

His niece was bustling about the kitchen. She was pushing the limits of thirty and the seams of her housedress, and he had never seen her before in his life.

“Morning, Uncle Gary.” She poured coffee into his cup. “Boys up yet?”

Garrett sat down in his chair at the kitchen table, blew cautiously over the coffee. “Dead to the world.”

Lucille left the bacon for a moment and went around to the stairway. He could hear her voice echoing up the stairwell. “Dwayne! Josh! Rise and shine! Don’t forget to bring down your dirty clothes when you come! Shake a leg now!”

Martin, his niece’s husband, joined them in the kitchen, gave his wife a hug, and poured himself a cup of coffee. He stole a slice of bacon. “Morning, Gary. Sleep well?”

“I must have.” Garrett stared at his cup.

Martin munched overcrisp bacon. “Need to get those boys working on the leaves after school.”

Garrett thought of the smell of burning leaves and remembered the pain of vaporizing skin, and the coffee seared his throat like a rush of boiling blood, and he awoke.

Garrett Larkin gasped at the darkness and sat up in bed. He fumbled behind him for the cowboy-silhouette wall lamp, couldn’t find it. Then there was light. A lamp on the night-stand from the opposite side of the king-size bed. His wife was staring at him in concern.

“Gar, are you okay?”

Garrett tried to compose his memory. “It’s all right . . . Rachel. Just another bad dream is all.”

“Another bad dream?
Yet
another bad dream, you mean. You sure you’re telling your shrink about these?”

“He says it’s just a nostalgic longing for childhood as I cope with advancing maturity.”

“Must have been some happy childhood. Okay if I turn out the light now?”

And he was dreaming again, dreaming of Cedar Lane.

He was safe and snug in his own bed in his own room, burrowed beneath Mom’s heirloom quilts against the October chill that penetrated the unheated upper storey. Something pressed hard into his ribs, and he awoke to discover his Boy Scout flashlight was trapped beneath the covers—along with the forbidden E.C. horror comic books he’d
been secretly reading after bedtime.

Gary thumbed on the light, turning it about his room. Its beam was sickly yellow because he needed fresh batteries, but it zigzagged reassuringly across the bedroom walls—made familiar by their airplane posters, blotchy paint-by-numbers oil paintings, and (a seasonal addition) cutout Halloween decorations of jack-o’-lanterns and black cats, broom-riding witches, and dancing skeletons. The beam probed into the dormer, picking out the shelved books and treasures, the half-completed B-36 “Flying Cigar” nuclear bomber rising above a desk strewn with plastic parts and tubes of glue.

The flashlight’s fading beam shifted to the other side of his room and paused upon the face that looked down upon him from beside his bed. It was a grown-up’s face, someone he’d never seen before, ghastly in the yellow light. At first Gary thought it must be one of his brothers in a Halloween mask, and then he knew it was really a demented killer with a butcher knife like he’d read about in the comics, and then the flesh began to peel away in blackened strips from the spotlit face, and bare bone and teeth charred and cracked apart into evaporating dust, and Gary’s bladder exploded with a rush of steam.

Larkin muttered and stirred from drunken stupor, groping beneath the layers of tattered plastic for his crotch, thinking he had pissed himself in his sleep. He hadn’t, but it really wouldn’t have mattered to him if he had. Something was poking him in the ribs, and he retrieved the half-empty bottle of Thunderbird. He took a pull. The wine was warm with the heat of his body, and its fumes trickled up his nose.

Larkin scooted farther into his cardboard box, to where its back propped against the alley wall. It was cold this autumn night—another bad winter, for sure—and he wondered if he maybe ought to crawl out and join the others around the trash fire. He had another gulp of wine, letting it warm his throat and his guts.

When he could afford it, Larkin liked to drink Thunderbird. It was a link to his boyhood. “I learned to drive in my old man’s brand-new 1961 Thunderbird,” he often told whoever was crouched beside him. “White 1961 Thunderbird with turquoise-blue upholstery. Power everything and fast as shit. Girls back in high school would line up to date me for a ride in that brand-new Thunderbird. I was ass-deep in pussy!”