The Year's Best Horror Stories 9 (7 page)

Now he sat in the boat, looking at Petey. “Muffling the cymbals doesn’t work,” he said. “I tried it once.”

Petey cast a nervous glance at the flight bag. “What happened, Daddy?”

“Nothing I want to talk about now,” Hal said, “and nothing you want to hear about. Come on and give me a push.”

Petey bent to it, and the stem of the boat grated along the sand. Hal dug in with an oar, and suddenly that feeling of being tied to the earth was gone and the boat was moving lightly, its own thing again after years in the dark boathouse, rocking on the light waves. Hal unshipped the oars one at a time and clicked the oarlocks shut.

“Be careful, Daddy,” Petey said. His face was pale.

“This won’t take long,” Hal promised, but he looked at the flight bag and wondered.

He began to row, bending to the work. The old, familiar ache in the small of his back and between his shoulder blades began. The shore receded. Petey was magically eight again, six, a four-year-old standing at the edge of the water. He shaded his eyes with one infant hand.

Hal glanced casually at the shore but would not allow himself to actually study it. It had been nearly fifteen years, and if he studied the shoreline carefully, he would see the changes rather than the similarities and become lost. The sun beat on his neck, and he began to sweat. He looked at the flight bag, and for a moment he lost the bend-and-pull rhythm. The flight bag seemed . . . seemed to be bulging. He began to row faster.

The wind gusted, drying the sweat and cooling his skin. The boat rose and the bow slapped water to either side when it came down. Hadn’t the wind freshened, just in the last minute or so? And was Petey calling something? Yes. Hal couldn’t make out what it was over the wind. It didn’t matter. Getting rid of the monkey for another twenty years—or maybe forever (please God, forever)—that was what mattered.

The boat reared and came down. He glanced left and saw baby whitecaps. He looked shoreward again and saw Hunter’s Point and a collapsed wreck that must have been the Burdon’s boathouse when he and Bill were kids. Almost there, then. Almost over the spot where Amos Culligan’s Studebaker had plunged through the ice one long-ago December. Almost over the deepest part of the lake.

Petey was screaming something; screaming and pointing. Hal still couldn’t hear. The rowboat rocked and bucked, flatting off clouds of thin spray to either side of its peeling bow. A tiny rainbow glowed in one, was pulled apart. Sunlight and shadow raced across the lake in shutters and the waves were not mild now; the whitecaps had grown up. His sweat had dried to gooseflesh, and spray had soaked the back of his jacket. He rowed grimly, eyes alternating between the shoreline and the flight bag. The boat rose again, this time so high that for a moment the left oar pawed at air instead of water.

Petey was pointing at the sky, his screams now only a faint, bright runner of sound.

Hal looked over his shoulder.

The lake was a frenzy of waves. It had gone a deadly dark shade of blue sewn with white seams. A shadow raced across the water toward the boat and something in its shape was familiar, so terribly familiar, that Hal looked up and then the scream was there, struggling in his tight throat.

The sun was behind the cloud, turning it into a hunched working shape with two gold-edged crescents held apart. Two holes were torn in one end of the cloud, and sunshine poured through in two shafts.

As the cloud crossed over the boat, the monkey’s cymbals, barely muffled by the flight bag, began to beat.
Jang-jang-jang-jang, its you, Hal, its finally you, you’re over the deepest part of the lake now and its your turn, your turn, your turn
—

All the necessary shoreline elements had clicked into their places. The rotting bones of Amos Culligan’s Studebaker lay somewhere below, this was where the big ones were, this was the place.

Hal shipped the oars to the locks in one quick jerk, leaned forward unmindful of the wildly rocking boat, and snatched the flight bag. The cymbals made their wild, pagan music; the bag’s sides bellowed as if with tenebrous respiration.

“Right here, you sonofabitch!
” Hal screamed.
“RIGHT HERE!”

He threw the bag over the side.

It sank fast. For a moment he could see it going down, sides moving, and for that endless moment
he could still hear the cymbals beating.
And for a moment the black waters seemed to clear and he could see down into that terrible gulf of waters to where the big ones lay; there was Amos Culligan’s Studebaker, and Hal’s mother was behind its slimy wheel, a grinning skeleton with a lake bass staring coldly from the skull’s nasal cavity. Uncle Will and Aunt Ida lolled beside her, and Aunt Ida’s gray hair trailed upward as the bag fell, turning over and over, a few silver bubbles trailing up:
jang-jang-jang-jang
. . .

Hal slammed the oars back into the water, scraping blood from his knuckles
(and ah God the back of Amos Culligan’s Studebaker had been full of dead children! Charlie Silverman .
. .
Johnny McCabe
. . .), and began to bring the boat about.

There was a dry pistol-shot crack between his feet, and suddenly clear water was welling up between two boards. The boat was old; the wood had shrunk a bit, no doubt; it was just a small leak. But it hadn’t been there when he rowed out. He would have sworn to it.

The shore and lake changed places in his view. Petey was at his back now. Overhead, that awful, simian cloud was breaking up. Hal began to row. Twenty seconds was enough to convince him he was rowing for his life. He was only a so-so swimmer, and even a great one would have been put to the test in this suddenly angry water.

Two more boards suddenly shrank apart with that pistol-shot sound. More water poured into the boat, dousing his shoes. There were tiny metallic snapping sounds that he realized were nails breaking. One of the oarlocks snapped and flew off into the water—would the swivel itself go next?

The wind now came from his back, as if trying to slow him down or even to drive him into the middle of the lake. He was terrified, but he felt a crazy kind of exhilaration through the terror. The monkey was gone for good this time. He knew it somehow. Whatever happened to him, the monkey would not be back to draw a shadow over Dennis’s life, or Petey’s. The monkey was gone, perhaps resting on the roof or the hood of Amos Culligan’s Studebaker at the bottom of Crystal Lake. Gone for good.

He rowed, bending forward and rocking back. That cracking, crimping sound came again, and now the rusty old bait can that had been lying in the bow of the boat was floating in three inches of water. Spray blew in Hal’s face. There was a louder snapping sound, and the bow seat fell in two pieces and floated next to the bait box. A board tore off the left side of the boat, and then another, this one at the waterline, tore off at the right. Hal rowed. Breath rasped in his mouth, hot and dry, and his throat swelled with the coppery taste of exhaustion. His sweaty hair flew.

Now a crack ran directly up the bottom of the rowboat, zig-zagged between his feet, and ran up to the bow. Water gushed in; he was in water up to his ankles, then to the swell of calf. He rowed, but the boat’s shoreward movement was sludgy now. He didn’t dare look behind him to see how close he was getting.

Another board tore loose. The crack running up the center of the boat grew branches, like a tree. Water flooded in.

Hal began to make the oars sprint, breathing in great, failing gasps. He pulled once . . . twice . . . and on the third pull both oar swivels snapped off. He lost one oar, held onto the other. He rose to his feet and began to flail at the water with it. The boat rocked, almost capsized, and spilled him back onto his seat with a thump.

Moments later more boards tore loose, the seat collapsed, and he was lying in the water which filled the bottom of the boat, astounded at its coldness. He tried to get on his knees, desperately thinking:
Petey must not see this, must not see his father drown right in front of his eyes, you’re going to swim, dog-paddle if you have to, but do, do something
—

There was another splintering crack—almost a crash—and he was in the water, swimming for the shore as he never had swum in his life . . . and the shore was amazingly close. A minute later he was standing waist-deep in water, not five yards from the beach.

Petey splashed toward him, arms out, screaming and crying and laughing. Hal started toward him and floundered. Petey, chest-deep, floundered.

They caught each other.

Hal breathed in great, winded gasps, nevertheless hoisted the boy into his arms and carried him up to the beach where both of them sprawled, panting.

“Daddy? Is it really gone? That monkey?”

“Yes. I think it’s really gone.”

“The boat fell apart. It just . . . fell apart all around you.”

Disintegrated,
Hal thought, and looked at the boards floating loose on the water forty feet out. They bore no resemblance to the tight handmade rowboat he had pulled out of the boathouse.

“It’s all right now,” Hal said, leaning back on his elbows. He shut his eyes and let the sun warm his face.

“Did you see the cloud?” Petey whispered.

“Yes. But I don’t see it now . . . do you?”

They looked at the sky. There were scattered white puffs here and there, but no large dark cloud. It was gone, as he had said.

Hal pulled Petey to his feet. “There’ll be towels up at the house. Come on.” But he paused, looking at his son. “You were crazy, running out there like that.”

Petey looked at him solemnly. “You were brave, Daddy.”

“Was I?” The thought of bravery had never crossed his mind. Only his fear. The fear had been too big to see anything else. If anything else had indeed been there. “Come on, Pete.”

“What are we going to tell Mom?”

Hal smiled. “I dunno, big guy. We’ll think of something.”

He paused a moment longer, looking at the boards floating on the water. The lake was calm again, sparkling with small wavelets. Suddenly Hal thought of summer people he didn’t even know—a man and his son, perhaps, fishing for the big one.
I’ve got something
,
Dad!
the boy screams.
Well reel it up and let’s see,
the father says, and coming up from the depths, weeds draggling from its cymbals, grinning its terrible, welcoming grin . . . the monkey.

He shuddered—but those were only things that might be.

“Come on,” he said to Petey again, and they walked up the path through the flaming October woods toward the home place.

From the
Bridgton News

October 24, 1980:

MYSTERY OF THE DEAD FISH

By BETSY MORIARTY

HUNDREDS of dead fish were found floating belly-up on Crystal Lake in the neighboring township of Casco late last week. The largest numbers appeared to have died in the vicinity of Hunter’s Point, although the lake’s currents make this a bit difficult to determine. The dead fish included all types commonly found in these waters—bluegills, pickerel, sunnies, carp, brown and rainbow trout, even one landlocked salmon. Fish and Game authorities say they are mystified, and caution fishermen and women not to eat any sort of fish from Crystal Lake until tests have determined . . .

Born January 4, 1946 in Liverpool, Ramsey Campbell has devoted most of his life to frightening tourists away from that city; Campbell is a writer of urban horrors who revels in deteriorating neighborhoods and industrial slums, and not surprisingly Liverpool has been the setting of many of his stories and novels. Campbell’s first book,
The Inhabitant of the Lake & Less Welcome Tenants
, was published by Arkham House in 1964. Since this teenage infatuation with the works of H. P. Lovecraft, Campbell moved rapidly to establish his own approach to horror fiction and is now considered one of this genre’s foremost stylists. Campbell is versatile. His books include collections of his own stories:
Demons by Daylight
,
The Height of the Scream
; original anthologies that he has edited:
Superhorror
(retitled
The Far Reaches of Fear
in paperback),
New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos
, and the two-volume
New Terrors;
as well as novels:
The Doll Who Ate His Mother
,
The Face That Must Die
,
To Wake the Dead
(which was retitled
The Parasite
for the U.S. edition and given an alternate ending).

Campbell lives with his wife, Jenny, in cannibal-haunted Liverpool, where for the past several years he has worked full time as a writer—evoking unexpected horrors from territories that threaten to expand worldwide. Currently Campbell is at work on a horror novel set in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. “The Gap” was published in the second number of
Fantasy Readers Guide
, subtitled
The File on Ramsey Campbell;
this booklet contains an index to all of Campbell’s fiction to date, along with several commentaries and appreciations, and I recommend it to serious fans of fantasy literature.

Tate was fitting a bird into the sky when he heard the car. He hurried to the window. Sunlit cars blazed, a doublestranded necklace on the distant main road; clouds transformed above the hills, assembling the sky. Yes, it was the Dewhursts: he could see them, packed into the front seat of their Fiat as it ventured into the drive. On his table, scraps of cloud were scattered around the jigsaw. The Dewhursts weren’t due for an hour. He glanced at the displaced fragments and then, resigned, went to the stairs.

By the time he’d strolled downstairs and opened the front door, they were just emerging from the car. David’s coat buttons displayed various colors of thread. Next came his wife Dottie: her real name was Carla, but they felt that Dave and Dottie looked a more attractive combination on book covers—a notion with which millions of readers seemed to agree. She looked like a cartoonist’s American tourist: trousers bulging like sausages, carefully silvered hair. Sometimes Tate wished that his writer’s eye could be less oppressively alert to telling details.

Dewhurst gestured at his car like a conjuror unveiling an astonishment. “And here are our friends that we promised you.”