The Year's Best Horror Stories 7 (11 page)

Sky Tiger half closed his eyes, and the notes of the moon-guitar hummed in his brain.

"Does he drowse?" asked Lotas Moon, very distinctly.

"Yes, the hog drowses, ripe with food and drugged by the powder we prepared for his wine," said Orchid Moon, as distinctly.

Sky Tiger, eyes half-shut, rather than feeling unease, found himself amused by this statement. Had they drugged him? It must be true. Now they mentioned it, he could perceive it in himself, a buoyant happy floating of the senses.

"How long must we wait?" asked Lotus Moon. She did not sound impatient or anxious. Her voice was ritualistic and quite flat

"The hour of the moon's rising above the lake."

This too was an automatic response.

Sky Tiger wished to ask his concubines what venture they planned for the hour of moonrise, but he was quite unable to enter their dialogue, his tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth.
It is as the woman says, I am a worthless hog,
he chid himself mildly.
A warrior accustomed to battle, but a bending reed before her vixen's wiles.
 

"I wonder," said Lotus Moon, "if he will suffer, as men presumably do, when death claims him."

"It is no matter to us. He is a wicked and despised person. And we have only to follow the instructions of our august lord."

Sky Tiger stirred, lazily. He was going to die. This should worry him, should it not? Honorless and purposeless death at the hands of two harlots? (Ah, but the scent of-) No. He must rouse himself. He had no belly for death just now.

Futilely, he struggled. The struggle made no impression on his relaxed body.

"But," said Lotus Moon, "the water will fill his eyes, Ms mouth and nostrils."

"So it did with our pious and peerless lord. And we, who had been set to guard him, failed to save him."

"But was it not, perhaps, a foolishness to seat himself upon the brink of the lake-" Lotus Moon's voice had abruptly gained personality. An odd excited breathless sort of personality.

"Younger sister, be still," yapped Orchid Moon. "Do not presume."

An argument ensued.

Sky Tiger, lying prone upon the cushions, the wine bowl fallen from his hands, could do nothing but listen helplessly.

It appeared one priest had remained in the temple when the others had abandoned it. A holy and miraculous man he had been, who had ordered the courts alone by means of wizardry, for he could govern divers magic arts. Otherwise, he would pray and meditate upon the divine Path of Knowledge, and sometimes his soul would leave his body to explore the psychic regions. He had sat himself at the lake's edge beneath the shade of a mulberry tree, when just such a thing occurred. His soul had flown, leaving his body senselessly propped on the tree trunk. Presently, an evil man chanced that way. Always he had feared the priest's marvelous powers, being himself a robber and brawler of the district, who had once lost his prey due to the priest's intervention. Never before had he dared visit the temple, but having done so and discovering the priest helpless, he could not resist such a fortunate opening. Even the two women guardians of the priest, on their own admission, had dropped asleep in the warm grass. They awoke to witness their master's body, having been thrown in the lake, sinking like a stone, while the robber was heard laughing and congratulating himself in the distance. Thus, the body of the priest perished. When the soul returned, finding itself homeless, it must descend to Hell.

Thereafter, three years had passed. Tonight, at the moon's rising-

A paroxysm of panic seized Sky Tiger's inarticulate and unresponsive frame. He knew now what fate awaited him and it was worse, worse by a thousand, thousand degrees, than mere death.

Hell, the Land of the Dead, where wrongdoing was mercilessly punished and good explicitly rewarded, was not in it self an area of loathing. Virtuous men aught cross a silver bridge and observe the gods walk by on a bridge of gold. Besides, rebirth into the world would inevitably come at length. Unless the man or woman who entered Hell had died before their allotted time. That being the case, they were doomed to an eternity of futile howling, without hope of re birth-save in one instance. After three years, a soul was per mitted to return to the scene of its mortal fatality. Once there, if it could cause another to die in like manner to itself, thereby exchanging that luckless soul for its own, it could re gain life. '

The priest, drowned in the lake, was returning after three years, at the rising of the moon. He had ordered his women to take a traveler to the lake and drown him. The priest's soul would then be exchanged for the traveler's in the most wretched quarter of Hell. Sky Tiger's was to be the luckless soul.

Rebelling at last, and utterly, all his excellent young body could manage were a series of writhing spasms.

The women giggled in nasty yappy sharp little bursts. Next, to his dismay, he learned they were able to haul him from his seat and across the flowery court

They were taking him to the water.

He had dreamed of a sensuous couch. Instead, it would be the lightless floor of the lake, and after that, an eternal yard In Hell.

Presently, his feeble resistance exhausted, he trailed from the women's spiteful grasp (they had even fastened their teeth in his shoulders). In this way, Sky Tiger the warrior left the temple, and. was borne joltingly over the roots of the Bight-veiled peach trees.

No longer satin, the lake, but cold black jade, and set in it a round peony of white jade, slowly rising, as it rose in the heaven.

The women were dragging Sky Tiger forward Inch by inch. Strands of his long hair already swam before him on the water, omens of what was to come. The inexorable progress continued, until there was a sudden, spontaneous check. The women left Sky Tiger lying, and lifting their heads, let out terrible thin wails of delight. Somehow, Sky Tiger managed to turn his head at an unlikely angle. He was then able to look aslant into the air, and see, between shore and moon, a ghastly pallid shimmering.

The ghost had all the appearance of a figure painted on a scroll and the color and the fine-drawn lines of ink and brush half washed away by rain or some other fluid. A priest for sure he was, lean and narrow as when living, shaved and solemn, with wide and ancient eyes.

At first these eyes were fixed dispassionately upon his female minions, then they lowered themselves to glare upon Sky Tiger. With a frantic shriek, the women floundered their victim forward again. In a total surrender of despair, Sky Tiger's head submerged. Choking, he swallowed and inspired the frigid liquid of the lake. Another second, and he would have lost consciousness, except that a vague din broke out above the surface, and in that vital second he was wrenched up again to the air. From the center of his coughing and crowing for breath, Sky Tiger was aware of an insane diatribe taking place.

"Stupid bitches!" shouted the whistling ghost-voice of the drowned priest's rage. "Can you do nothing right? Yes, grovel you may, you brainless ones. What would my further punishment be in Hell, if I were to have on my conscience the death of this valiant young hero? Say, exalted prince, are you recovered?"

Sky Tiger became aware that the effects of the drug seemed to have been driven out by the water. Trembling in every limb, he bowed three times to the ghost.

"Most venerable priest, I am a miserable item, not worthy of your notice."

"It is I who am miserable," said the priest. "My shame is insupportable, and brought about by these, my idiot servants'. I assure you that you were not the man I had elected to drown in my stead. Know that through my powers some of which I have retained even in Hell, I was able to divine that my own murderer, that accursed bandit of the road who cast me in the lake, would ride by the temple tonight And recalling his partiality to young women, I had arranged matters, instructing these two on what they must do at his arrival. But, the fools, the grasshoppers, they snared you in error, a warrior deserving of long life."

His mind rapidly clearing, Sky Tiger contemplated the events of the day in retrospect.

"Dread venerable," he finally said, "would you, from your great kindness, describe to me this bandit who murdered you, and whose soul you wished to bargain with in Hell?"

The ghost agreed, and promptly described the warrior Sky Tiger had fought with and slain at the edge of the wood some hours earlier. Sky Tiger revealed this fact.

"Unhappily, revered one, I have thereby cheated you of your hope of exchange," Sky Tiger apologized, "though there is this consolation, that, since you had predicted the robber would have come here, had it not been for the intervention of my sword, he too has died before his allotted span was accomplished, and must therefore eternally languish in Hell, saving some trick of his own."

The ghost smiled.

"That surely is a consolation, but there is more. By my power I shall be able to heal his wound and enter his body, for it has been dead but a few short hours. Thus shall I regain my interrupted life, and in the flesh of a healthful man of middle years. Might my mediocre self prevail upon your generosity to bring the corpse to the lake?"

Sky Tiger and the ghostly priest bowed several times.

The two young women lamented in the grass.

Soon after, Sky Tiger was riding back up the road toward the forest.

When he returned, leading his horse, with the dead bandit across it, the dawn was opening chrysanthemum petals in the east. Sky Tiger feared he was too late but nevertheless went to the lakeshore, and laid the corpse down there.

Despite the rekindling of the light and his own wondrous escape, Sky Tiger had begun to abhor the spot, and a grim horror caused his muscles to shiver. Glancing about, he saw no sign either of the ghost or his two handmaidens. With a relinquishing shudder, Sky Tiger spurred his horse in retreat through the peach trees.

On the road above, he did look back, but only once. He was not reassured to see, through the blossoming boughs, an armoured figure walking from the lake toward the temple. Nor to hear it calling, in a commanding voice, to two beings named Lotus and Orchid.

But less reassuring even than that, was the encounter a minute later with two little ivory and black lap-dogs, which came bounding from the shrub at the roadside, passed yapping under Sky Tiger's horse's hooves, and on, racing toward the temple. Plainly, in answer to the voice of a beloved master, vehemently calling their names.

6: Janet Fox - Intimately, With Rain

The land had a barren, torn-up look, the dark soil churned up by the workmen and their machines, native brush cleared away to the last ragged stand of timber along the creek. Aanmarie clutched her black plastic patent purse against herself, shivering a little in the raw March wind, for all the portliness of her figure. Her matching shoes squished ridges of mud as she stood staring off toward the creek; she knew those bends, the sluggish trickle of mud-brown water dimly mirroring overhanging foliage. She knew where to seine for minnows and the deeper spots where skinny-dipping had been possible. Her heavy bosom heaved a little as she remembered.

She felt a hand on her elbow. "We can go inside. Nothing's finished in there yet, of course." She looked at William Dudley with almost a sense of shock-a round face, chins doubling down to his white shirtfront, a laurel wreath of thin gray hair garlanding a bald head, a permanent red flush beneath the skin. She was surprised, not that he seemed so old but that she could remember him no other way.

"It's cold out here," she said, hearing the whininess of her own voice, but unable to alter its tone. "I must get back soon. I have a Women Workers Club meeting at four."

They entered the unfinished house that would be their new home. There was the woody smell of new lumber and a rawness to it, though she could not have said it had an empty feel. It was as though the place was inhabited by something-shy but ineffably present. "A good omen," she thought, even though she knew it was imaginary. Something almost childlike about it, creeping about unseen with a suppressed giggle. It had been 20 years since Angela, her youngest, had been a child. Now they were all grown and gone. And she couldn't really say she was sorry about that; there were always so many good uses to which time could be put

She wandered away from William, who was inspecting the basement, and went from room to room, trying to imagine how these bare chambers would look when all was complete. She supposed her nerves weren't all they should be, for the feeling of someone else in the house just wouldn't leave, even though she knew it was imagination. She could almost have sworn that she was being watched by wide, wondering eyes, that there had been a blur of motion at the window. So strong was the impression that she rushed to the window, a glassless frame, gripped the sill and looked out. The sun was bright, making everything appear terrifically real. Nothing was there except a small brown lizard, its back as rough as tree bark, sunning on a pile of bricks. Disturbed, it lifted its head to survey her out of one bead-black eye and then slithered down into the pile between bricks. Leaf shadows fluttered under one vulnerable tree left standing by the work crew.

She looked down and saw that a splinter of wood had pierced her wrist when she'd grabbed the sill. She pursed her plum-colored lips and with a shudder of distaste, drew out the sliver; a thin line of blood was drawn down her arm, almost reaching the cuff of her best gray dress. Somehow the day seemed spoiled for her. "Let's go, William. My club meeting…"

"Calm down, Annie," he said. He'd begun calling her that after the last child had left, she realized. Odd how it startled her now. "We've got plenty of time. This is a nice place. A nice place to settle in. You'll have to agree now that I had a good idea there. And for you it's coming home."

"Things change. In over thirty years people die… people leave. I can't really say it's home."

"But look how well you fit in, even though we've only been living here for six months."

She smiled. One learned things, what to join, whom to cultivate. Money helped too, and William had plenty of that.