The Year's Best Horror Stories 11 Read online

  “We got drinking, dancing, carousing, and The Grab.”

  “The Grab?” Clark asked. “What is it?”

  The bartender stroked his handlebar moustache as if giving the matter lots of thought. Then he pointed down the bar at a rectangular metal box. The side I could see, painted with yellow letters, read, TEST YER GUTS.

  “What’s it do?” Clark asked.

  “Stick around,” the bartender said. With that advice, he moved on.

  Clark and I wandered over to the metal box. It stood more than two feet high, its sides about half as wide as its height. THE GRAB was painted on its front in sloppy red letters intended, no doubt, to suggest dripping blood. Its far side was printed with green: PAY $10 AND WIN.

  “Wonder what you win?” Clark said.

  I shrugged. Leaning over the bar, I took a peek at the rear of the box. It was outfitted with a pound of hardware and padlocked to the counter.

  While I checked out the lock, Clark was busy hopping and splashing beer. “No opening on top,” he concluded.

  “The only way in is from the bottom,” I said.

  “Twas ever thus,” he said, forgetting to be a cowboy. He quickly recovered. “Reckon we oughta grab a couple of fillies and raise some dust.”

  As we started across the room toward a pair of unescorted females, the juke box stopped. There were a few hushed voices as everyone looked toward the bartender.

  “Yes,” he cried, raising his arms, “the time is now! Step on over and face The Grab. But let me warn you, this ain’t for the faint of heart, it ain’t for the weak of stomach. It ain’t a roller coaster or a tilt-a-whirl you get off, laughing, and forget. This is a genuine test of grit, and any that ain’t up to it are welcome to vamoose. Any that stay to watch or participate are honor bound to hold their peace about what takes place here tonight. Alf s curse goes on the head of any who spill the beans.”

  I heard Clark laugh softly. A pale girl, beside him, looked up at Clark as if he were a curiosity.

  “Any that ain’t up to it, go now,” the bartender said.

  The bartender lowered his arms and remained silent while two couples headed for the door. When they were gone, he removed a thin chain from around his neck. He held it up for all to see. A diamond ring and a small key hung from it. He slid them free, and raised the ring.

  “This here’s the prize. Give it to your best gal, or trade it in for a thousand dollars if you’re man enough to take it. So far, we’ve gone three weeks with The Grab, and not a soul’s shown the gumption to make the ring his own. Pretty thing, isn’t it? Okay, now gather ’round. Move on in here and haul out your cash, folks. Ten dollars is all it takes.”

  We stepped closer to the metal box at the end of the bar, and several men reached for their wallets—Clark included.

  “You going to do it?” I whispered to him.

  “Sure.”

  “You don’t even know what it is.”

  “Can’t be that bad. They’re all gonna try it.”

  Looking around at the others as they took out their money, I saw a few eager faces, some wild, grinning ones, and several that appeared pale and scared.

  The bartender used his key to open the padlock at the rear of the metal box. He held up the lock, and somebody moaned in the silence.

  “Dal,” a woman whispered. She was off to my left, tugging on the elbow of a burly, bearded fellow. He jerked his arm free and sneered at her. “Then go ahead, fool,” she said, and ran. The muffled thud of her cowboy boots was the only sound in the room. Near the door, she slipped on the sawdust and fell, landing on her rump. A few people laughed.

  “Perverts!” she yelled as she scurried to her feet. She yanked open the door and slammed it behind her.

  “Gal’s got a nervous stomach,” Dal said, grinning around at the rest of us. To the bartender, he said, “Let’s get to it, Jerry!”

  Jerry set aside the padlock. He climbed onto the bar and stood over the metal container. Then he raised it. The cover slid slowly upward, revealing a glass tank like a tall, narrow aquarium. All around me, people gasped and moaned as they saw what lay at the bottom, barely visible through its gray, murky liquid. A stench of formaldehyde filled my nostrils, and I gagged.

  Face up at the bottom of the tank was a severed head, its black hair and moustache moving as if stirred by a breeze, its skin wrinkled and yellow, its eyes wide open, its mouth agape.

  “Well, well,” Clark muttered.

  Jerry, kneeling beside the glass tank, picked up a straight-bent coat hanger with one end turned up slightly to form a hook. He slipped the diamond ring over it. Standing, he lowered the wire into the tank. The ring descended slowly, the brilliance of its diamond a dim glow in the cloudy solution. Then it vanished inside the open mouth. Jerry flicked the hanger a bit, and raised it. The ring no longer hung from its tip.

  I let out a long-held breath, and looked at Clark. He was grinning.

  “All you gotta do, for the thousand dollar ring, is to reach down with one hand and take it out of the dead man’s mouth. Who’ll go first?”

  “That’s me!” said Dal, the bearded one whose girl had just run off. He handed a ten-dollar bill to Jerry, then swung himself onto the bar. Standing over the tank, he unbuttoned his plaid shirt.

  “Let me just say,” Jerry continued, “nobody’s a loser at the Bar None Saloon. Every man with grit enough to try The Grab gets a free beer afterwards, compliments of the house.”

  Throwing down his shirt, Dal knelt behind the tank. Jerry tied a black blindfold over his eyes.

  “All set?”

  Dal nodded. He lowered his head and took a few deep breaths, psyching himself up like a basketball player on the free-throw line. Nobody cheered or urged him on. There was dead silence. Swelling out his chest, he held his breath and dipped his right hand into the liquid. It eased lower and lower. A few inches above the face, it stopped. The thick fingers wiggled, but touched nothing. The arm reached deeper. The tip of the middle finger stroked the dead man’s nose. With a strangled yelp, Dal jerked his arm from the tank, splashing those of us nearby with the smelly fluid. Then he sighed, and shook his head as if disgusted with himself.

  “Good try, good try!” Jerry cried, removing the blindfold. “Let’s give this brave fellow a hand!”

  A few people clapped. Most just watched, hands at their sides or in pockets, as Jerry filled a beer mug and gave it to Dal. “Try again later, pardner. Everyone’s welcome to try as often as he likes. It only costs ten dollars. Ten little dollars for a chance at a thousand. Who’s next?”

  “Me!” called the pale girl beside Clark.

  “Folks, we have us a first! What’s your name, young lady?”

  “Biff,” she said.

  “Biff will be the very first lady ever to try her hand at The Grab.”

  “Don’t do it,” whispered a chubby girl nearby. “Please.”

  “Lay off, huh?”

  “It’s not worth it.”

  “Is to me,” she muttered, and pulled out a ten-dollar bill. She handed her purse to the other girl, then stepped toward the bar.

  “Thank you, Biff,” Jerry said, taking her money.

  She removed her hat, and tossed it onto the counter. She was wearing a T-shirt. She didn’t take it off. Leaning forward, she stared down into the tank. She looked sick.

  Jerry tied the blindfold in place. “All set?” he asked.

  Biff nodded. Her open hand trembled over the surface of the fluid. Then it slipped in, small and pale in the murkiness. Slowly, it eased downward. It sunk closer and closer to the face, never stopping until her fingertips lit on the forehead. They stayed there, motionless. I glanced up. She was tight and shaking as if naked in an icy wind.

  Her fingers moved down the head. One touched an open eye. Flinching away, her hand clutched into a fist.

  Slowly, her fingers fluttered open. They stretched out, trembled along the sides of the nose, and settled in the moustache. For seconds, they didn’t move. The upper
lip wasn’t visible, as though it had shrunken under the moustache.

  Biff’s thumb slid along the edges of the teeth. Her fingertips moved off the moustache. They pressed against the lower teeth.

  Biff started to moan.

  Her fingers trembled off the teeth. They spread open over the gaping mouth, and started down.

  With a shriek, she jerked her hand from the tank. She tugged the blindfold off. Face twisted with horror, she shook her hand in the air and gazed at it. She rubbed it on her T-shirt and looked at it again, gasping for air.

  “Good try!” Jerry said. “The little lady made a gutsy try, didn’t she, folks?”

  A few of the group clapped. She stared out at us, blinking and shaking her head. Then she grabbed her hat, took the complimentary beer, and scurried off the bar.

  Clark patted her shoulder. “Good going,” he said.

  “Not good enough,” she muttered. “Got spooked.”

  “Who’ll be next?” Jerry asked.

  “Yours truly,” Clark said, holding up a pair of fives. He winked at me. “It’s a cinch,” he said, and boosted himself onto the bar. Grinning, he tipped his hat to the small silent crowd. “I have a little surprise for y’all,” he said in his thickest cowboy drawl. “You see, folks . . .” He paused and beamed. “Not even my best friend, Steve, knows about this, but I work full time as a mortician’s assistant.”

  That brought a shocked murmur from his audience, including me.

  “Why, folks, I’ve handled more dead meat than your corner butcher. This is gonna be a sure cinch.”

  With that, he skinned off his shirt and knelt behind the tank. Jerry, looking a bit amused, tied the blindfold over his eyes.

  “All set?” the bartender asked.

  “Ready to lose your diamond ring?”

  “Give it a try.”

  Clark didn’t hesitate. He plunged his arm into the solution and drove his open hand downward. His fingers found the dead man’s hair. They patted him on the head. “Howdy pardner,” he said.

  Then his fingers slid over the ghastly face. They tweaked the nose, they plucked the moustache. “Say ahhhh.”

  He slipped his forefinger deep between the parted teeth, and his scream ripped through the silence as the mouth snapped shut.

  His hand shot upward, a cloud of red behind it. It popped from the surface, spraying us with formaldehyde and blood.

  Clark jerked the blindfold down and stared at his hand. The forefinger was gone.

  “My finger!” he shrieked. “My God, my finger! It bit . . . it . . .”

  Cheers and applause interrupted him, but they weren’t for Clark.

  “Look at him go!” Dal yelled, pointing at the head.

  “Go, Alf, go!” cried another.

  “Alf?” I asked Biff.

  “Alf Packer,” she said without looking away from the head. “The famous cannibal.”

  The head seemed to grin as it chewed.

  I turned to Biff, “You knew?”

  “Sure. Any wimp’ll make The Grab, if he doesn’t know. When you know, it takes real guts.”

  “Who’s next?” Jerry asked.

  “Here’s a volunteer,” Biff called out, clutching my arm. I jerked away from her, but was restrained by half a dozen mutilated hands. “Maybe you’ll get lucky,” she said. “Alf’s a lot more tame after a good meal.”

  THE SHOW GOES ON by Ramsey Campbell

  Born in Liverpool on January 4, 1946, Ramsey Campbell has devoted twenty years of writing to convincing readers to stay far away from that city. “The Show Goes On,” set in Campbell’s favorite boyhood cinema (since knocked down), is not due to result in any influx of tourism, either. The fact that Campbell has now moved across the river to Merseyside may well mean that all those horrors were coming home to roost.

  Ramsey Campbell was sixteen when he wrote his first book, The Inhabitant of the Lake & Less Welcome Tenants (Arkham House, 1964)—thereby becoming both an inspiration and an object of envy for every fledgling horror writer. Recovering from this adolescent infatuation with the works of H.P. Lovecraft, Campbell moved rapidly to develop his own brand of horror fiction. He has published three subsequent collections of short fiction: Demons by Daylight, The Height of the Scream, and, last year, Dark Companions, from which this story is taken. For collectors, the British edition of Dark Companions contains four stories not in the U.S. edition, and vice versa. Campbell has lately come on as one of the major horror novelists as well, with the publication of The Doll Who Ate His Mother, The Face That Must Die, To Wake the Dead (revised and retitled for the U.S. edition as The Parasite), and The Nameless. Just now he is completing work on The Incarnate and preparing to write For the Rest of Their Lives. Campbell somehow finds time to edit anthologies as well, with Superhorror (retitled The Far Reaches of Fear), New Terrors (two volumes), New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, and now The Gruesome Book. This last contains the stories that frightened Ramsey Campbell as a child. Buy one for your kid.

  The nails were worse than rusty; they had snapped. Under cover of several coats of paint, both the door and its frame had rotted. As Lee tugged at the door it collapsed toward him with a sound like that of an old cork leaving a bottle.

  He hadn’t used the storeroom since his father had nailed the door shut to keep the rats out of the shop. Both the shelves and the few items which had been left in the room—an open tin of paint, a broken-necked brush—looked merged into a single mass composed of grime and dust.

  He was turning away, having vaguely noticed a dark patch that covered much of the dim wall at the back of the room, when he saw that it wasn’t dampness. Beyond it he could just make out rows of regular outlines like teeth in a gaping mouth: seats in the old cinema.

  He hadn’t thought of the cinema for years. Old resurrected films on television, shrunken and packaged and robbed of flavor, never reminded him. It wasn’t only that Cagney and Bogart and the rest had been larger than life, huge hovering faces like ancient idols; the cinema itself had had a personality—the screen framed by twin theater boxes from the days of the music hall, the faint smell and muttering of gaslights on the walls, the manager’s wife and daughter serving in the auditorium and singing along with the musicals. In the years after the war you could get in for an armful of lemonade bottles, or a bag of vegetables if you owned one of the nearby allotments; there had been a greengrocer’s old weighing machine inside the paybox. These days you had to watch films in concrete warrens, if you could afford to go at all.

  Still, there was no point in reminiscing, for the old cinema was now a back entry for thieves. He was sure that was how they had robbed other shops on the block. At times he’d thought he heard them in the cinema; they sounded too large for rats. And now, by the look of the wall, they’d made themselves a secret entrance to his shop.

  Mrs. Entwistle was waiting at the counter. These days she shopped here less from need than from loyalty, remembering when his mother used to bake bread at home to sell in the shop. “Just a sliced loaf,” she said apologetically.

  “Will you be going past Frank’s yard?” Within its slippery wrapping the loaf felt ready to deflate, not like his mother’s bread at all. “Could you tell him that my wall needs repairing urgently? I can’t leave the shop.”

  Buses were carrying stragglers to work or to school. Ninety minutes later—he could tell the time by the passengers, which meant he needn’t have his watch repaired—the buses were ferrying shoppers down to Liverpool city center, and Frank still hadn’t come. Grumbling to himself, Lee closed the shop for ten minutes.

  The February wind came slashing up the hill from the Mersey, trailing smoke like ghosts of the factory chimneys. Down the slope a yellow machine clawed at the remains of houses. The Liver Buildings looked like a monument in a graveyard of concrete and stone.

  Beyond Kiddiegear and The Wholefood Shop, Frank’s yard was a maze of new timber. Frank was feeding the edge of a door to a shrieking circular blade. He gazed at Lee as though nobody had told h
im anything. When Lee kept his temper and explained, Frank said, “No problem. Just give a moan when you’re ready.”

  “I’m ready now,”

  “Ah, well. As soon as I’ve finished this job I’ll whiz around.” Lee had reached the exit when Frank said, “I’ll tell you something that’ll amuse you . . .”

  Fifteen minutes later Lee arrived back, panting, at his shop. It was intact. He hurried around the outside of the cinema, but all the doors seemed immovable, and he couldn’t find a secret entrance. Nevertheless he was sure that the thieves—children, probably—were sneaking in somehow.

  The buses were full of old people now, sitting stiffly as china. The lunchtime trade trickled into the shop: men who couldn’t buy their brand of cigarettes in the pub across the road, children sent on errands while their lunches went cold on tables or dried in ovens. An empty bus raced along the deserted street, and a scrawny youth in a leather jacket came into the shop, while his companion loitered in the doorway. Would Lee have a chance to defend himself, or at least to shout for help? But they weren’t planning theft, only making sure they didn’t miss a bus. Lee’s heart felt both violent and fragile. Since the robberies had begun he’d felt that way too often.

  The shop was still worth it. “Don’t keep it up if you don’t want to,” his father had said, but it would have been admitting defeat to do anything else. Besides, he and his parents had been even closer here than at home. Since their death, he’d had to base his stock on items people wanted in a hurry or after the other shops had closed: flashlights, canned food, light bulbs, cigarettes. Lee’s Home-Baked Bread was a thing of the past, but it was still Lee’s shop.

  Packs of buses climbed the hill, carrying home the rush-hour crowds. When the newspaper van dumped a stack of the evening’s Liverpool Echo on the doorstep, he knew Frank wasn’t coming. He stormed round to the yard, but it was locked and deserted.

  Well then, he would stay in the shop overnight; he’d nobody to go home for. Why, he had even made the thieves’ job easier by helping the door to collapse. The sight of him in the lighted shop ought to deter thieves—it better had, for their sakes.