The Year's Best Horror Stories 13 Read online

  Copyright © 1985, by DAW Books, Inc.

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  DAW Collectors Book No. 648

  First Printing, October 1985

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  Acknowledgments

  Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut by Stephen King. Copyright © 1984 by Stephen King for Redbook, May 1984. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Kirby McCauley Ltd.

  Are You Afraid of the Dark? by Charles L. Grant. Copyright © 1984 by Charles L. Grant for Fantasycon IX Programme Booklet. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Catch Your Death by John Gordon. Copyright © 1984 by John Gordon for Catch Your Death and Other Ghost Stories. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Pamela Todd.

  Dinner Party by Gardner Dozois. Copyright © 1984 by Gardner Dozois for Light Years and Dark. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Virginia Kidd.

  Tiger in the Snow by Daniel Wynn Barber. Copyright © 1984 by Phantasm Press for The Horror Show, Fall 1984. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Watch the Birdie by Ramsey Campbell. Copyright © 1984 by Ramsey Campbell for Watch the Birdie, A Haunted Library Publication. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You by David J. Schow (under the pseudonym Oliver Lowenbruck). Copyright © 1984 by TZ Publications for Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine, March/April 1984. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Hands with Long Fingers by Leslie Halliwell. Copyright © 1984 by Leslie Halliwell for The Ghost of Sherlock Holmes. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Scott Ferris Associates.

  Weird Tales by Fred Chappell. Copyright © 1984 by Division of English, Foreign Languages, and Journalism, Sam Houston State University for The Texas Review, Spring/Summer 1984. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  The Wardrobe by Jovan Panich. Copyright © 1984 by Lari Davidson for Potboiler Magazine #7. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Angst for the Memories by Vincent McHardy. Copyright © 1984 by R.L. Leming for Damnations. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  The Thing in the Bedroom by David Langford. Copyright © 1984 by David Langford for Knave (U.K. edition), November 1984. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Borderland by John Brizzolara. Copyright © 1984 by TZ Publications for Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine, November/December 1984. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  The Scarecrow by Roger Johnson. Copyright © 1984 by Rosemary Pardoe for Ghosts & Scholars 6. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  The End of the World by James B. Hemesath. Copyright © 1983 by James B. Hemesath for WIND/Literary Journal, Vol. 14, No. 51, 1984. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Never Grow Up by John Gordon. Copyright © 1984 by John Gordon for Catch Your Death and Other Ghost Stories. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Pamela Todd.

  Deadlights by Charles Wagner. Copyright © 1984 by Charles Wagner for Twisted Tales #9. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Talking in the Dark by Dennis Etchison. Copyright © 1984 by Dennis Etchison for Shadows 7. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  To Robert Bloch

  In shivering gratitude for fifty years of frights

  Introduction: 13 Is a Lucky Number

  So. You survived 1984, did you? Now then, let’s see if you can survive The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XIII—presenting eighteen of the best horror stories published during 1984.

  The real horror of 1984, at least for me, was in trying to limit my choices for this year’s annual of the best horror fiction. Perhaps George Orwell meant to warn us that 1984 would be an outstanding year for horror fiction. Series XIII could easily have been twice the size of the present volume, and I had a few sleepless nights trying to decide which stories I would have to exclude because of space restrictions. Perhaps next year someone will write a horror story about that.

  In any event, The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XIII represents the best of the best from a Very Good Year. As usual, the stories were written by a mixture of Famous Names and of new and/or unfamiliar authors. Looking over the final line-up, I note that half of the writers have appeared in The Year’s Best Horror Stories at least once before, while for the other half this is their first appearance. Sources of these stories range from genre magazines and anthologies to small press publications and chapbooks to literary magazines and women’s/men’s magazines. One story is from a convention program booklet, and another is from a comic book. The stories themselves run from quiet horror to the grisly. You’ll find contemporary horror as well as traditional supernatural stories. There’s science fiction alongside black humor and dark fantasy. These stories selected without regard to taboos, Big Names, or any particular subgenre of horror. I sifted through a year’s output of short fiction to find stories that hold the power to chill the imagination—whether through icy terror or with a disquieting shiver. Here are the eighteen stories from 1984 that best succeeded in evoking a mood of horror.

  Thirteen volumes is about the record for any best-of-the-year anthology series. Judith Merrill’s outstanding best-of-the-year science fiction/fantasy series lasted thirteen volumes (under various titles) from the 1950s up until the close of the 1960s. Donald Wollheim’s year’s-best science fiction series is the only other such series to last as long. This is the thirteenth volume of The Year’s Best Horror Stories, begun by Sphere Books in England with Richard Davis as editor, reprinted by DAW Books in the United States and continued by DAW with Gerald W. Page as editor, and (when Page elected to devote more time to his own writing career) edited by me for the last half-dozen volumes. If you have all thirteen volumes of this series, then you have a good cross-section of the best in horror short fiction over the past decade-and-a-half. You will also have seen how young, unknown writers such as Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, Dennis Etchison, or Charles L. Grant have developed into major forces in modern horror literature.

  Stick with us. In another thirteen years some of the young, unknown writers whose work you’re reading here will have become giants in the field.

  The scariest is yet to come.

  —Karl Edward Wagner

  Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut by Stephen King

  Stephen King is generally considered to be the author who put horror fiction on the map. Certainly he is the author who put horror novels at the top of the bestsellers charts, and subsequently made publishers think of horror fiction as something with a greater audience than a lunatic fringe of costumed sci-fi buffs. Beginning with Carrie, King has had a string of best-selling novels—’Salem’s Lot, The Shining, The Stand, The Dead Zone, Firestarter, Cujo, Christine, Pet Sematary—many of which have been made into major films. King also excels as a writer of short fiction, as can be seen in his short story collections, Night Shift, Different Seasons, and the recent Skeleton Crew. Other recent books include The Talisman (with Peter Straub), Cycle of the Werewolf, The Eyes of the Dragon, and Thinner, writing as Richard Bachman.

  Born September 21, 1946 in Portland, Maine, King has made frequent use of Down East backgrounds in his fiction. He and his wife, Tabitha (who also writes horror fiction), live with their children in a large Victorian house in Bangor. “Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut” grew out of Tabitha’s obsession with finding new shortcuts—and, yes,
she does drive a Mercedes. For those who assume anything written by Stephen King is automatically published, three women’s magazines rejected this story before Redbook accepted it. “Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut” is one of King’s finest pieces of writing, and is a further proof that King stands to become an important regionalist as well as horror writer.

  “There goes the Todd woman,” I said.

  Homer Buckland watched the little Jaguar go by and nodded. The woman raised her hand to Homer. Homer nodded his big, shaggy head to her but didn’t raise his own hand in return. The Todd family had a big summer home on Castle Lake, and Homer had been their caretaker since time out of mind. I had an idea that he disliked Worth Todd’s second wife every bit as much as he’d liked ’Phelia Todd, the first one.

  This was just about two years ago and we were sitting on a bench in front of Bell’s Market, me with an orange soda-pop, Homer with a glass of mineral water. It was October, which is a peaceful time in Castle Rock. Lots of the lake places still get used on the weekends, but the aggressive, boozy summer socializing is over by then and the hunters with their big guns and their expensive nonresident permits pinned to their orange caps haven’t started to come into town yet. Crops have been mostly laid by. Nights are cool, good for sleeping, and old joints like mine haven’t yet started to complain. In October the sky over the lake is passing fair, with those big white clouds that move so slow; I like how they seem so flat on the bottoms, and how they are a little gray there, like with a shadow of sundown foretold, and I can watch the sun sparkle on the water and not be bored for some space of minutes. It’s in October, sitting on the bench in front of Bell’s and watching the lake from afar off, that I still wish I was a smoking man.

  “She don’t drive as fast as ’Phelia,” Homer said. “I swan I used to think what an old-fashion name she had for a woman that could put a car through its paces like she could.”

  Summer people like the Todds are nowhere near as interesting to the year-round residents of small Maine towns as they themselves believe. Year-round folk prefer their own love stories and hate stories and scandals and rumors of scandal. When that textile fellow from Amesbury shot himself, Estonia Corbridge found that after a week or so she couldn’t even get invited to lunch on her story of how she found him with the pistol still in one stiffening hand. But folks are still not done talking about Joe Camber, who got killed by his own dog.

  Well, it don’t matter. It’s just that they are different racecourses we run on. Summer people are trotters; us others that don’t put on ties to do our week’s work are just pacers. Even so there was quite a lot of local interest when Ophelia Todd disappeared back in 1973. Ophelia was a genuinely nice woman, and she had done a lot of things in town. She worked to raise money for the Sloan Library, helped to refurbish the war memorial, and that sort of thing. But all the summer people like the idea of raising money. You mention raising money and their eyes light up and commence to gleam. You mention raising money and they can get a committee together and appoint a secretary and keep an agenda. They like that. But you mention time (beyond, that is, one big long walloper of a combined cocktail party and committee meeting) and you’re out of luck. Time seems to be what summer people mostly set a store by. They lay it by, and if they could put it up in Ball jars like preserves, why, they would. But ’Phelia Todd seemed willing to spend time—to do desk duty in the library as well as to raise money for it. When it got down to using scouring pads and elbow-grease on the war memorial, ’Phelia was right out there with town women who had lost sons in three different wars, wearing an overall with her hair done up in a kerchief. And when kids needed ferrying to a summer swim program, you’d be as apt to see her as anyone headed down Landing Road with the back of Worth Todd’s big shiny pickup full of kids. A good woman. Not a town woman, but a good woman. And when she disappeared, there was concern. Not grieving, exactly, because a disappearance is not exactly like a death. It’s not like chopping something off with a cleaver; more like something running down the sink so slow you don’t know it’s all gone until long after it is.

  “ ’Twas a Mercedes she drove,” Homer said, answering the question I hadn’t asked. “Two-seater sportster. Todd got it for her in sixty-four or sixty-five, I guess. You remember her taking the kids to the lake all those years they had Frogs and Tadpoles?”

  “Ayuh.”

  “She’d drive em no more than forty, mindful they was in the back. But it chafed her. That woman had lead in her foot and a ball bearing sommers in the back of her ankle.”

  It used to be that Homer never talked about his summer people. But then his wife died. Five years ago it was. She was plowing a grade and the tractor tipped over on her and Homer was taken bad off about it. He grieved for two years or so and then seemed to feel better. But he was not the same. He seemed waiting for something to happen, waiting for the next thing. You’d pass his neat little house sometimes at dusk and he would be on the porch smoking a pipe with a glass of mineral water on the porch rail and the sunset would be in his eyes and pipe smoke around his head and you’d think—I did, anyway—Homer is waiting for the next thing. This bothered me over a wider range of my mind than I liked to admit, and at last I decided it was because if it had been me, I wouldn’t have been waiting for the next thing, like a groom who has put on his morning coat and finally has his tie right and is only sitting there on a bed in the upstairs of his house and looking first at himself in the mirror and then at the clock on the mantel and waiting for it to be eleven o’clock so he can get married. If it had been me, I would not have been waiting for the next thing; I would have been waiting for the last thing.

  But in that waiting period—which ended when Homer went to Vermont a year later—he sometimes talked about those people. To me, to a few others.

  “She never even drove fast with her husband, s’far as I know. But when I drove with her, she made that Mercedes strut.”

  A fellow pulled in at the pumps and began to fill up his car. The car had a Massachusetts plate.

  “It wasn’t one of these new sports cars that run on unleaded gasoline and hitch every time you step on it; it was one of the old ones, and the speedometer was calibrated all the way up to a hundred and sixty. It was a funny color of brown and I ast her one time what you called that color and she said it was champagne. Ain’t that good, I says, and she laughs fit to split. I like a woman who will laugh when you don’t have to point her right at the joke, you know.”

  The man at the pumps had finished getting his gas.

  “Afternoon, gentlemen,” he says as he comes up the steps.

  “A good day to you,” I says, and he went inside.

  “ ’Phelia was always looking for a shortcut,” Homer went on as if we had never been interrupted. “That woman was mad for a shortcut. I never saw the beat of it. She said if you can save enough distance, you’ll save time as well. She said her father swore by that scripture. He was a salesman, always on the road, and she went with him when she could, and he was always lookin for the shortest way. So she got in the habit.

  “I ast her one time if it wasn’t kinda funny—here she was on the one hand, spendin her time rubbin up that old statue in the Square and takin the little ones to their swimmin lessons instead of playing tennis and swimming and getting boozed up like normal summer people, and on the other hand bein so damn set on savin fifteen minutes between here and Fryeburg that thinkin about it probably kep her up nights. It just seemed to me the two things went against each other’s grain, if you see what I mean. She just looks at me and says, ‘I like being helpful, Homer. I like driving, too—at least sometimes, when it’s a challenge—but I don’t like the time it takes. It’s mending clothes—sometimes you take tucks and sometimes you let things out. Do you see what I mean?’

  “ ‘I guess so, missus,’ I says, kinda dubious.

  “ ‘If sitting behind the wheel of a car was my idea of a really good time all the time, I would look for long-cuts,’ she says, and that tickled me s’much I h
ad to laugh.”

  The Massachusetts fellow came out of the store with a six-pack in one hand and some lottery tickets in the other.

  “You enjoy your weekend,” Homer says.

  “I always do,” the Massachusetts fellow says. “I only wish I could afford to live here all year round.”

  “Well, we’ll keep it all in good order for when you can come,” Homer says, and the fellow laughs.

  We watched him drive off toward someplace, that Massachusetts plate showing. It was a green one. My Marcy says those are the ones the Massachusetts Motor Registry gives to drivers who ain’t had a accident in that strange, angry, fuming state for two years. If you have, she says, you got to have a red one so people know to watch out for you when they see you on the roll.

  “They was in-state people, you know, the both of them,” Homer said, as if the Massachusetts fellow had reminded him of the fact.

  “I guess I did know that,” I said.

  “The Todds are just about the only birds we got that fly north in the winter. The new one, I don’t think she likes flying north too much.”

  He sipped his mineral water and fell silent a moment, thinking.