The Best New Horror 2 (67 page)

The jackal released the corpse it had dragged, coughed, and vomited, spewing carrion alive with worms. The Nebraskan picked up a stone fallen from one of the crumbling tombs, and flung it, striking the jackal just below the ear.

It rose upon its hind legs, and though its face remained that of a beast, its eyes were those of a man. “This is for you,” it said, and pointed toward the writhing mass. “Take it, and come to me.”

The Nebraskan knelt and plucked one of the worms from the reeking spew. It was pale, streaked and splotched with scarlet, and woke in him a longing never felt before. In his mouth, it brought peace, health, love, and hunger for something he could not name.

Old Hop Thacker’s voice floated across infinite distance: “Don’t never shoot anythin’ without you’re dead sure what ’tis, young feller.”

Another worm and another, and each as good as the last.

“We will teach you,” the worms said, speaking from his own mouth. “Have we not come from the stars? Your own desire for them has wakened, Man of Earth.”

Hop Thacker’s voice: “Grave worms, do you see?”

“
Come to me
.”

The Nebraskan took the key from the drawer. It was only necessary to open the nearest tomb. The jackal pointed to the lock.

“If it’s hungered, it’ll suck on a live person, an’ he’s bound to fight it or die.”

The end of the key scraped across the door, seeking the keyhole.

“
Come to me, Man of Earth. Come quickly
.”

Sarah’s voice had joined the old man’s, their words mingled and confused. She screamed, and the painted figures faded from the door of the tomb.

The key turned. Thacker stepped from the tomb. Behind him his father shouted, “Joe, boy! Joe!” And struck him with his cane. Blood streamed from Thacker’s torn scalp, but he did not look around.

“Fight him, young feller! You got to fight him!”

Someone switched on the light. The Nebraskan backed toward the bed.

“Pa,
don’t
!” Sarah had the huge butcher knife. She lifted it higher than her father’s head and brought it down. He caught her wrist, revealing a long raking cut down his back as he spun about. The knife, and Sarah, fell to the floor.

The Nebraskan grabbed Thacker’s arm. “What is this!”

“It is love,” Thacker told him. “That is your word, Man of Earth. It is love.” No tongue showed between his parted lips; worms writhed there instead, and among the worms gleamed stars.

With all his strength, the Nebraskan drove his right fist into those lips. Thacker’s head was slammed back by the blow; pain shot along the Nebraskan’s arm. He swung again, with his left this time, and his wrist was caught as Sarah’s had been. He tried to back away; struggled to pull free. The high, old-fashioned bed blocked his legs at the knees.

Thacker bent above him, his torn lips parted and bleeding, his eyes filled with such pain as the Nebraskan had never seen. The jackal spoke: “
Open to me
.”

“Yes,” the Nebraskan told it. “Yes, I will.” He had never known before that he possessed a soul, but he felt it rush into his throat.

Thacker’s eyes rolled upward. His mouth gaped, disclosing for an instant the slime-sheathed, tentacled thing within. Half falling, half rolling, he slumped upon the bed.

For a second that felt much longer, Thacker’s father stood over him with trembling hands. A step backward, and the older Mr Thacker fell as well—fell horribly and awkwardly, his head striking the floor with a distinct crack.

“Grandpa!” Sarah knelt beside him.

The Nebraskan rose. The worn brown handle of the butcher knife protruded from Thacker’s back. A little blood, less than the Nebraskan would have expected, trickled down the smooth old wood to form a crimson pool on the sheet.

“Help me with him, Mr Cooper. He’s got to go to bed.”

The Nebraskan nodded and lifted the only living Mr Thacker onto his feet. “How do you feel?”

“Shaky,” the old man admitted. “Real shaky.”

The Nebraskan put the old man’s right arm about his own neck and picked him up. “I can carry him,” he said. “You’ll have to show me his bedroom.”

“Most times Joe was just like always.” The old man’s voice was a whisper, as faint and far as it had been in the dream-city of the dead. “That’s what you got to understand. Near all the time, an’ when—when he did, they was dead, do you see? Dead or near to it. Didn’t do a lot of harm.”

The Nebraskan nodded.

Sarah, in a threadbare white nightgown that might have been her mother’s once, was already in the hall, stumbling and racked with sobs.

“Then you come. An’ Joe, he made us. Said I had to keep on talkin’ an’ she had to ask you fer supper.”

“You told me that story to warn me,” the Nebraskan said.

The old man nodded feebly as they entered his bedroom. “I thought I was bein’ slick. It was true, though, ’cept ’twasn’t Cooper, nor Creech neither.”

“I understand,” the Nebraskan said. He laid the old man on his bed and pulled up a blanket.

“I kilt him didn’t I? I kilt my boy Joe.”

“It wasn’t you, Grandpa.” Sarah had found a man’s bandana, no doubt in one of her grandfather’s drawers; she blew her nose into it.

“That’s what they’ll say.”

The Nebraskan turned on his heel. “We’ve got to find that thing and kill it. I should have done that first.” Before he had completed the thought, he was hurrying back toward the room that had been his.

He rolled Thacker over as far as the knife handle permitted and lifted his legs onto the bed. Thacker’s jaw hung slack; his tongue and palate were thinly coated with a clear, glutinous gel that carried a faint smell of ammonia; otherwise his mouth was perfectly normal.

“It’s a spirit,” Sarah told the Nebraskan from the doorway. “It’ll go into Grandpa now, ’cause he killed it. That’s what he always said.”

The Nebraskan straightened up, turning to face her. “It’s a living creature, something like a cuttlefish, and it came here from—” He waved the thought aside. “It doesn’t really matter. It landed in North Africa, or at least I think it must have, and if I’m right, it was eaten by a jackal. They’ll eat just about anything, from what I’ve read. It survived inside the jackal as a sort of intestinal parasite. Long ago, it transmitted itself to a man, somehow.”

Sarah was looking down at her father, no longer listening. “He’s restin’ now, Mr Cooper. He shot the old soulsucker in the woods one day. That’s what Grandpa tells, and he hasn’t had no rest since, but he’s peaceful now. I was only eight or ’bout that, and for a long
time Grandpa was ’fraid he’d get me, only he never did.” With both her thumbs, she drew down the lids of the dead man’s eyes.

“Either it’s crawled away—” the Nebraskan began.

Abruptly, Sarah dropped to her knees beside her dead parent and kissed him.

When at last the Nebraskan backed out of the room, the dead man and the living woman remained locked in that kiss, her face ecstatic, her fingers tangled in the dead man’s hair. Two full days later, after the Nebraskan had crossed the Mississippi, he still saw that kiss in shadows beside the road.

S
TEVE
R
ASNIC
T
EM
lives with his wife, the writer Melanie Tem, in a supposedly haunted Victorian house in Denver, Colorado.

A prolific author of short stories and poems for the small press field and numerous anthology markets, recent or upcoming appearances include
Fantasy Tales 4, Pulphouse 7, Psycho Paths 2, New Crimes 3, Stalkers 3
, and books without numbers on them such as
The Fantastic Robin Hood, Tales of the Wandering Jew, Dark At Heart
and
The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror
. A collection of stories,
Ombres sur la route
, was published in France by Denoel, and collaborations with Melanie appear in
The Ultimate Frankenstein
and
The Ultimate Dracula
.

Roadkill Press has published his chapbook
Fairytales
, and another is due from Haunted Library entitled
Absences: Charlie Goode’s Ghosts
.

We are pleased to welcome him back to
Best New Horror
with another fine example of his mastery of the short form . . .

I
N THE ORPHANAGE THEY’D HAD AN AQUARIUM
. A wooden model of the ancient, sprawling orphanage itself, open at the top, had served as a frame for the ordinary glass aquarium inside.

The orphanage was always receiving unusual gifts like that— giant gingerbread men, dolls with some president’s face, doll houses modeled after some famous building. There’d be an article in the paper each time with a picture of the donor and his gift, surrounded by dozens of children with practiced smiles.

Other benefactors hosted special events. The SeaHarp used to throw parties for the children of the orphanage every year, parties that sometimes lasted for days, with the children sleeping in the hotel. Michael knew he had attended several of them, but he had been so young at the time—not more than four or five—he really couldn’t remember them.

The aquarium had had a little brass plaque: “Gift of Martin O’Brien.” Michael had heard that the fellow had been some sort of fisherman, and himself an orphan. Many of the gifts were supposedly from former residents of the orphanage. But Michael never actually believed that there was such a thing as a former resident; the place marked you forever. Sometimes he would wonder what he would give to the orphanage when he got old and successful.

Sometimes the fish would swim up to the tiny model windows and look out. One of the older boys said that fish could barely see past their mouths, but they sure looked like they were peering out at you. As if you were a prospective parent and today was visitor’s day. That’s the way the children always looked on visitor’s day, Michael thought: staring wide-eyed out the windows and moving their gills in and out nervously. Trying to look like whoever these prospective parents expected you to look like. Trying to look like you’d fit right into their family. Sometimes when the light was right in the aquarium room you could see your own reflection in these windows, superimposed over the fish. Looking in, and looking out. Waiting.

In the orphanage Michael used to dream that he had no face. He was waiting for someone to choose a face for him. Until then, he had the open-mouthed, wide- and wet-eyed face of a fish.

Now, in Greystone Bay, Michael got into a green cab that said “Two Crazy Brothers Cab Co.” on the door. He wondered if that meant there were two identical cabs, a brother driving each one, or perhaps only one cab with which they alternated shifts—Greystone Bay was, after all, a relatively small place. Or perhaps there were dozens of such cabs, and the brothers didn’t drive anymore, being president and vice-president of the company, or perhaps co-vice-presidents, their mother or father taking the largely honorary presidential post. It was difficult to know exactly who his driver was, and what he expected from him.

“Not many go to the SeaHarp this time o’ year,” the driver said.

Michael glanced at the rear-view mirror and fixed on the driver’s eyes. Seeing just the slice of face holding the eyes bothered him. He’d never been able to tell much from eyes— people’s eyes had always seemed somewhat interchangeable. Seeing just that cut-out of someone’s eyes led him to imagine that they were his own eyes, transplanted somehow into someone else’s shadowy face. A social worker at the orphanage had once given him a toy that rearranged slices of faces like that, a chin, a mouth, a nose, eyes, hair, all from different characters mixed and matched. After a while the particular arrangement hadn’t seemed to matter. It was the very act of changing which had been important.

“You must like a quiet holiday,” the cab driver said.

Michael looked at the mirror eyes which might have been his own. He wondered what the driver’s mouth was like, whether it conveyed a message different from that of the eyes. “Why do you say that?”

“Like I said. Before. Nobody much comes to the SeaHarp this time of year. Thanksgiving through Christmas, right up ’til the party on New Year’s Eve. Then the whole town turns out. But up ’til then, that’s their dead season. People are home with their families, not in some hotel.”

“Well, I don’t have a family, I’m afraid.”

The driver was silent a moment. Then, “Didn’t think you did.”

Michael held himself stiff, eyes motionless. They always seem to know. How do they always know? Then he forced himself to relax, wondering what it was the cab driver might like to see. What kind of passenger he might like and admire. Just like a good orphan. He could feel the themes of independence and “good business” entering his relaxed facial muscles, his posture.

“Too busy building a career, I guess.” He let slip a self-amused chuckle. “A fellow my age, his career takes up most of his time.”

“Your age?”

“Twenty-five.” He’d lied by twelve years, but he could see in the mirror eyes that the driver believed him, apparently not seeing all the age signs that made that unlikely. People believed a good orphan. “I’m an architect.”

A sudden, new respect in those mirror eyes. “Really? They planning to expand up there at the SeaHarp? Maybe they know some things about money coming into the Bay us regular working folk don’t?”

“I really couldn’t say . . .”

“Or maybe they’re going to remodel. You gonna give that old lady a facelift?”

“Really. I couldn’t.”

“Hey, I get ya. I understand.” One of the mirror eyes half-winked.

The driver offered to carry his bags up the steps to the hotel, but Michael told him that wasn’t necessary. “Travel light in my business.” The driver nodded as if he knew exactly what Michael was talking about. Michael gave him a generous tip anyway; he had to. Walking up the steps he wondered if he had enough expense money left.

In the dark, the SeaHarp was magnificent. Its classical lines flowed sweetly into the shadows left and right; its silhouette climbed smoothly out of the porchlight with very few of the architectural afterthoughts that spoiled the proportions of so many of its type. Outside lighting had been kept to a minimum, forcing the night-time visitor to focus on the windows—so many windows—exaggerating the width of that first floor.