The Year's Best Horror Stories 10 Read online

  Faces gazed at him. “I’m sorry,” he said, to turn them away. “All right!” he shouted. “I’m sorry! I am sorry,” he said quietly. Maybe Linda had been telling the truth. At least he’d escaped the trap of the dwindling moment, though his time still felt more intolerably stretched than it had since his childhood. Perhaps that was how Linda’s time felt too.

  Having eaten all he could, he retreated to the living-room. He lay back in its stillness, letting its shapes and colours lie on his eyes. If he didn’t move they would stay still. But they grew harsh, alert. Someone was coming down the hall.

  He’d forgotten: he had to get through an entire evening with Chris and the children. Surely the effect would fade before then. He had only to keep still, calm.

  Chris read while the children watched television. They were pretending. They knew something was wrong with him, they were watching covertly, until he betrayed himself. But he wasn’t going to. Let them watch how calm he was. He closed his eyes.

  Which sprang open. Rushing up from their depths there had been a doll whose head was cracked wetly like an egg of blood, a doll with Andrew’s face. As Pears glared at Andrew, he glimpsed the cracks fading into the boy’s hair.

  Worse was waiting for his eyes to close. He stared at the television. Too hectic. He stared at the palely coffee-coloured wall. If he kept his eyes open the images would die away. His eyes twinged, smarting, and he blinked.

  Linda sailed up, naked, posturing, ready to engulf him. He gasped, then tried to smile convincingly: he could just have woken from a doze, they couldn’t prove anything. He blinked. Chris flashed out at him and was etched on his mind. All her nerves were laid bare; small sharp hooks like dentist’s instruments plucked at them. Her head was a mass of buried razor-blades.

  He sprang from his chair and stumbled upstairs. If he couldn’t see the three of them they wouldn’t be able to provoke these nightmares. He lay on the bed. Ahead hung the window, a faint grey smudged rectangle. It was receding from him.

  Instead of yielding more light to his eyes it grew fainter, dwindling. The bedroom was enormous and very dark. The floor was crowded with figures, creeping lopsidedly toward him on all fours. The heads of the foremost, grey blurred ovals, were peering at him over the edge of the bed.

  Little of his scream escaped between his fingers. His other hand groped for the light-switch, found something, switched it on. The room was defiantly bare. He examined that fact for a long time, until he felt it might be true. The depths of his mind waited for him. It was only a temporary lull. The tide would flood back soon. Each time it returned it was more overpowering.

  He was descending the stairs, which felt still in the way a booby-trap might, when a terrible certainty gripped him. The effects must wear off eventually, no drug could last for the rest of one’s life; but his nightmares must be imprinted on the house. Exactly as if some dreadful tragedy had happened there, the house was haunted now.

  His gaze was drawn to the hall wallpaper. It was faintly speckled with a brownish stain. Blood. That was the beginning of the nightmare, when he’d seen the accident victim. If he could wipe off the last of the blood perhaps it would erase the imprint of his terror. Sickly he felt that the walls were soft within, as if subtly corrupted from their core, by the haunting; but he bent closer.

  Peering, he wasn’t sure whether the spots were blood or shadow. He sniffed the wall. Still unsure, he touched the stain with his tongue. A faint metallic taste: blood. Before he knew what he intended he was supporting himself, palms flat against the wall, while he licked avidly, searching for the taste.

  He threw himself back, but couldn’t escape himself. Maybe, he thought in a desperate bid for distraction, that’s what the dopey chemist thought I meant to do when he saw me in the hall. Now his fantasy’s true.

  Chris and the children looked up when he opened the door. His face froze. He didn’t know what expression he wore, but dared not alter it in case his face betrayed his terror. A tight mask he’d never seen before was clamped on him. As he paced to his seat the mask tugged painfully at his face, determined to reshape itself. He sat down and had to pass his hand over his face, as if brushing away sweat, in order to change the mask.

  “You don’t feel well, do you,” Chris said. He managed to shake his grinning head. “You ought to lie down,” she said.

  He realised fully how helpless and alone he was. “No!” he shouted.

  “You two had better go and play.”

  “I want them here.” He wanted to keep an eye on Linda. “Stay here,” he told them.

  He seemed to have earned himself a lull. Someone was knocking and ringing the bell next door, but he could bear that. Now they were banging on the window of the ground-floor flat, several of them talking in low voices. “Come on,” one said. “I can’t stand this.” Pears was glad to hear someone else feeling that, for a change. They were going; the gate clanked. He looked up, smiling emptily, and saw Linda gazing beyond him in horror.

  He twisted about. A dark blotch was scuttering over the wall, hectic tendrils quivering. It was—it was a crane-fly; its legs fluttering hysterically, as if in a dying paroxysm. Still the lull. It scuttered into a corner. “I’ll get it,” he told Chris. She usually dealt with intruding insects; this time he’d do it, to show that he could.

  He had trapped the whirring fly, it was trembling violently yet feebly in his fist like an essence of terror, when he glimpsed Chris’ expression.

  At once she was thrusting the poker deeper into the fire. He opened the window and released the fly, then he gazed at the fog, trying to understand. She wasn’t frightened of insects. Then he knew: he’d projected his own fading terror onto her face. His nightmare had lent her a mask. He sat down, smiling at her.

  When he looked away her weak smile collapsed into naked terror.

  This time her smile wasn’t swift enough. He forced himself to look behind him at the corner toward which she’d been glaring. He wouldn’t panic, he’d fought through, the effect was fading, vanquished. But as he turned, a faint smell of something like meat touched his nostrils.

  The corner was bare. He felt weak with relief, yet uneasily baffled. Briefly he’d dreamed that he was infecting Chris. He must have been right before: he was simply imposing the last of his terror on his perception of her. Mightn’t that show that the terror was leaving him? He glanced at her.

  She smiled at him. She smiled. She was almost convincing. But he knew what was happening, and reality parted beneath him. The smell filled his nostrils. She hadn’t been looking at the corner, but at him. He had already smelled what she smelled: himself. Behind her smile her eyes were transfixed by slivers of growing horror. As if her eyes were mirrors he could see what she saw.

  In his chair she saw an eyeless face of mottled bone, grinning at her through its gaping cheeks.

  At last he managed to look down at his hand. He felt his neck-bone creak. His hand was still flesh. But he could feel his corpse. It was inside him, slowly corroding its way to the surface, a core of numbness spreading outward, reaching lazily for him. It was unhurried. It had as much time as he.

  He suppressed his scream, even though it would say he was still alive. There was worse to come, he realised almost dispassionately. He looked at Andrew and Linda, watching television, sitting still. Still as corpses.

  Suddenly he knew, gazing at their immobile faces on which colours flickered lightly, that they were feeling rigor mortis stake its claim on them. Death was squeezing their windpipes experimentally, like a witch in a dream. But it was no dream, for he could smell them. It must be terror that was fluttering trapped in their eyes.

  All he could do was close his own. It no longer mattered what was waiting in there. Anything would be more bearable than the sight of his dead children. He closed them out.

  Blank.

  White.

  Nothing.

  When he opened his eyes, feeling purged and somehow released, he was in a room with three strangers.

&nbs
p; There was a woman, and a small imitation of her: a girl, less haggard, pinker, more plump. There was a small boy who reminded him vaguely of someone. All three of them were pretending his presence in the room was natural—pretending that they knew who this man was. But they didn’t, any more than he did.

  They were watching him surreptitiously. He had to get out before they moved on him, the stranger. But they would never let him reach the door unless he defended himself.

  He caught sight of the poker. Half of it was buried in the fire and red-hot, but the handle was insulated. He stood up gingerly and began to move stealthily toward the fire. He felt the three of them pretending not to watch him. If he used the weapon he would have to close his eyes, though he wouldn’t be able to close his ears.

  He had to escape. He inched toward the poker, trying to seem casual, aimless. For a moment he was surrounded by the three; his held breath burned in him. But they didn’t leap.

  The presence of the young girl disturbed him most of all. She was his greatest danger. There was something in her he must destroy; her freshness was deceitful, her soft plumpness was a snare. She was like the walls of the house, whose corrupted cores oozed now, thick with evil. Her innocence was disgusting, intolerable, false. He’d make sure her body could never again lure anyone. He stooped to the fire. As the poker stirred, its nest of cinders fell open, brightening.

  Something came howling toward the house.

  He jerked and almost fell. He stumbled to the window, knocking the television askew. They’d trapped him in his room until the howling came for him. He shouldered the clinging curtains aside and wrenched up the sash. The howling growled into silence.

  A blue glow pulsed through the fog. The fog’s dead heart was beating. It took him minutes to discern a blue will-o’-the-wisp, flashing sluggishly. Uniformed men strode toward him out of the fog. No, they were heading for the next house.

  He turned to watch, and came face to face with a pinched white almost fleshless mask, peering through the neighbouring window.

  It was his own reflection. No: it was his enemy, the man who’d been trying to drive him mad. At last Pears had found him. Now he would make him suffer.

  Pears was trying to remember where he’d put the poker when the uniformed men closed around his enemy. Pears snarled in frustration. The white mask was still as they lifted the body to its feet, but the body was breathing.

  They could have him, so long as they used the poker on him. Pears would give them his. He turned, but the ambulance had gone.

  He was staring emptily at the fog when the chemist’s friends returned. They were the three he’d seen on Thursday night. He could remember. He let memories drift back as they might, hoping he wouldn’t remember anything he couldn’t bear.

  One of the young men hurried into the flat and rummaged in a rickety chest of drawers. He snatched out a piece of paper, and something else. He moved offstage, and Pears heard a toilet flushing.

  As he emerged, one of his friends demanded, “Have you got the formula?”

  Pears tried to control himself, but already was screaming with laughter. The three glanced sharply at him. “I’m sorry,” he gasped, weeping, and was hoarse with laughter again. He ran out, ashamed and spasmodically hilarious, to explain if he could.

  One frowned at him from beneath a red mock-leather cap and edged away. “Don’t get paranoid,” said the one who’d entered the flat. “We aren’t going to make this stuff. Neither is anyone else,” and he tore up the piece of paper minutely. The fragments swarmed away on the hint of a wind.

  “He’d freaked out completely, that guy in there,” the third said, winding his long scarf tautly into his fists. “We had to call the ambulance.”

  “He’d synthesised a new trip,” the man in the red cap chattered, released apparently from guilt into speech. “It was too much. It got worse every time you tripped. But he said it was worth learning how to control it!”

  “The last one was so bad we took him away for the weekend. We thought we’d persuade him off it. But tonight he was even deeper into it.”

  “I never took any,” said the man with the stretched scarf. “But I was picking up his trip while we were waiting. It was that powerful, being near him could turn you on even if you hadn’t taken any. It was bad. We had to call the ambulance.”

  “I think you had,” Pears reassured him, feeling his surroundings start the long slow fall back into familiarity. He remembered the face he’d seen carried away. The eyes had been sunken, passive, immobile, at the mercy of whatever passed before or within them. They had looked exactly like red-cracked glass.

  Weeks later he told Chris some of what had happened, and why. Perhaps she believed him. “Did you feel any of it?” he asked. “Anything at all?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Anything you can describe?”

  “No.”

  Perhaps she was telling the truth; he couldn’t be sure. Had she forgotten her jealousy of Linda? If so, what should that convey to him? How should he react? Since his experience he seemed to be approaching decisions more and more gently and circuitously, and making fewer.

  He carried the paint and brush down the hall. Today would be the rusty gate’s last day. The children shouted in the playroom. Had they felt any of it? How could he find out? It would be better to let them forget. Besides, he seemed to have forgotten all he’d ever learned about how to talk to them.

  “The shuttlecock’s under the stairs,” Linda said, muffled.

  So it was, behind a tangle of nesting chairs. Andrew ran into the hall, bursting into brighter colour as he entered the path of sunlight. He stooped beneath the stairs, but shrank back at once. “I can’t find it,” he called, his voice unnaturally high.

  What had the boy flinched from? “There it is, Andrew,” Pears said, and handed him the shuttlecock.

  When Andrew had gone Pears forced himself to stoop beneath the stairs again. Under his hand the wall felt thin, a crust over softness. He made himself look at what he’d glimpsed from the corner of his eye.

  It was snarling silently from the dark corner where the underside of the stairs met the floor. It was pale and smooth, and had no eyes that he could see. A mat of grey hair like a lump of dust hung over most of the face. Its mouth was huge and red with an unbroken ring of teeth, gibbous with rage.

  He managed to save the tin of paint before it fell, and saw at once what the face must be. Someone had wiped a splotch of red paint with a wad of paper. The matted hair was a tangle of dust.

  But the corner was bare. There was no paper beneath the stairs, and the corner was clean of dust.

  TOURING by Gardner Dozois, Jack Dann, and Michael Swanwick

  A three-author collaboration is not something the reader happens upon just every day, and it’s even rarer to find one that’s a successful story. “Touring” is that rarest of the rare—a unified creation of three different minds. As Gardner Dozois explains: “A three-way collaboration is weird—like a menage a trois, it’s something you wouldn’t want to do every day, but it’s interesting on an occasional basis.”

  Gardner Dozois was born in 1947 in Salem, Massachusetts, where he grew up ice-skating on Gallows Hill. He is the author or editor of fourteen books, including the novel, Strangers, and the collection, The Visible Man; he also edits an annual series, Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year. Dozois is also noted as a critic and essayist in the science fiction field. He is currently at work on a novel for Timescape Books, tentatively entitled Flash Point. Unlike many writers, Dozois seems to enjoy collaborations, both as an author and an editor, and often with Jack Dann—as in their recent anthology, Unicorns.

  Jack Dann was born in Johnson City, New York in 1945, where he presently resides. Since his first science fiction story in 1970, his short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies; some of these are collected in Time-tipping. He is the author of two novels, Starhiker and Junction, and has finished a third, The Man Who Melted. He has edited se
ven anthologies, including the recent More Wandering Stars, a follow-up to the notable 1974 anthology, Wandering Stars.

  Like Gardner Dozois, Michael Swanwick lives in Philadelphia. Considered one of science fiction’s leading new writers, Swanwick has recently sold stories to a number of publications, including the prestigious New Dimensions and Universe anthology series. Born in Schenectady, New York in 1950, Swanwick earned a B.A. in English from William and Mary and has drifted through a variety of jobs ranging from dictionary salesman to low-level bureaucrat. He is currently working on a novel, The Drift. Dozois and Swanwick have also collaborated on several other stories (as have Dozois and Dann), although so far “Touring” is the only one all three have worked on. But this is not the only reason why “Touring” is a most unusual story.

  The four-seater Beechwood Bonanza dropped from a gray sky to the cheerless winter runways of Fargo Airport. Tires touched pavement, screeched, and the single-engine plane taxied to a halt. It was seven o’clock in the morning, February 3, 1959.

  Buddy Holly duckwalked down the wing and hopped to the ground. It had been a long and grueling flight; his bones ached, his eyes were gritty behind the large, plastic-framed glasses, and he felt stale and curiously depressed. Overnight bag in one hand, laundry sack in the other, he stood beside Ritchie Valens for a moment, looking for their contact. White steam curled from their nostrils. Brown grass poked out of an old layer of snow beside the runway. Somewhere a dog barked, flat and far away.

  Behind the hurricane fence edging the field, a stocky man waved both hands overhead. Valens nodded, and Holly hefted his bags. Behind them, J. P. Richardson grunted as he leaped down from the plane.

  They walked toward the man across the tarmac, their feet crunching over patches of dirty ice.

  “Jack Blemings,” the man rasped as he came up to meet them. “I manage the dance hall and the hotel in Moorhead.” Thin mustache, thin lips, cheeks going to jowl—Holly had met this man a thousand times before: the stogie in his mouth was inevitable; the sporty plaid hat nearly so. Blemings stuck out a hand, and Holly shuffled his bags awkwardly, trying to free his own hand. “Real pleased to meet you, Buddy,” Blemings said. His hand was soggy and boneless. “Real pleased to meet a real artist.”