The Year's Best Horror Stories 10 Read online

  Three to get ready

  Now go, cat, go!

  And he was off and running into a brilliant rendition of “Blue Suede Shoes.” Not an easy song to do, because the lyrics were laughable. It relied entirely on the music, and it took a real entertainer to make it work.

  This guy had it all, though. The jumps, gyrations, and forward thrusts of the groin were stock stuff—but somehow he made them look right. He played the audience, too, and his control was perfect. Holly could see shadowy shapes beyond the glare of the footlights, moving in a more than sexual frenzy, was astonished by their rapturous screams. All this in the first minutes of the set.

  He’s good, Holly marveled. Why was he wasting that kind of talent on a novelty act? There was a tug at his arm, and he shrugged it off.

  The tug came again. “Hey, man,” somebody said, and he turned to find himself again facing the woman. Their eyes met, and her expression changed oddly, becoming a mixture of bewilderment and outright fear. “Jesus God,” she said in awe. “You are Buddy Holly!”

  “You’ve already told me that,” he said, irritated. He wanted to watch the man on stage—who was he, anyway?—not be distracted by this foul-mouthed and probably not very clean woman.

  “No, I mean it—you’re really Buddy Holly. And that dude on stage”—she pointed—“he’s Elvis Presley.”

  “It’s a good act,” Holly admitted. “But it wouldn’t fool my grandmother. That good ol’ boy’s forty if he’s a day.”

  “Look,” she said. “I’m Janis Joplin. I guess that don’t mean nothing to you, but—hey, lemme show ya something.” She tried to tug him away from the stage.

  “I want to see the man’s act,” he said mildly.

  “It won’t take a minute, man. And it’s important. I swear it. It’s—you just gotta see it, is all.”

  There was no denying her. She led him away, down the corridor to the metal door with its red EXIT sign, and threw it open. “Look!”

  He squinted into a dull winter evening. Across a still, car-choked parking lot was a row of faded brick buildings. A featureless gray sky overhung all. “There used ta be a lot more out here,” Janis babbled. “All the rest of the town. It all went away. Can you dig it, man? It just all—went away.”

  Holly shivered. This woman was crazy! “Look, Miss Joplin,” he began. Then the buildings winked out of existence.

  He blinked. The buildings had not faded away—they had simply ceased to be. As crisply and sharply as if somebody had flipped a switch. He opened his mouth, shut it again.

  Janis was talking quietly, fervently. “I don’t know what it is, man, but something very weird is going down here.” Everything beyond the parking lot was a smooth, even gray. Janis started to speak again, stopped, moistened her lips. She looked suddenly hesitant and oddly embarrassed. “I mean, like, I don’t know how to break this to ya, Buddy, but you’re dead. You bought it in a plane crash way back in ’fifty-nine.”

  “This is ’fifty-nine,” Holly said absently, looking out across the parking lot, still dazed, her words not really sinking in. As he watched, the cars snapped out of existence row by row, starting with the farthest row, working inward to the nearest. Only the asphalt lot itself remained, and a few bits of litter lying between the painted slots. Holly’s groin tightened, and as fear broke through astonishment, he registered Janis’s words and felt rage grow alongside fear.

  “No, honey,” Janis was saying, “I hate to tell ya, but this is 1970.” She paused, looking uncertain. “Or maybe not. Ol’ Elvis looks a deal older than I remember him being. We must be in the future or something, huh? Some kinda sci-fi trip like that, like on ‘Star Trek’? You think we—”

  But Holly had swung around ferociously, cutting her off. “Stop it!” he said. “I don’t know what’s going on, what kind of trick you people are trying to play on me, or how you’re doing all these things, but I’m not going to put up with any more of—”

  Janis put her hand on Holly’s shoulder; it felt hot and small and firm, like a child’s hand. “Hey, listen,” Janis said quietly, cutting him off. “I know this is hard for you to accept, and it is pretty heavy stuff ... but, Buddy, you’re dead. I mean, really you are ... It was about ten years ago, you were on tour, right? And your plane crashed, spread you all over some farmer’s field. It was in all the goddamn papers, you and Ritchie Valens and ...” She paused, startled, and then grinned. “And that fat dude at the hotel, that must’ve been the Big Bopper. Wow! Man, if I’d known that I might’ve taken him up on it. You were all on your way to some diddlyshit hick town like ...” She stopped, and when she started to speak again, she had gone pale. “... like Moorhead, Minnesota. Oh, Christ, I think it was Morehead. Oh, boy, is that spooky ...”

  Holly sighed. His anger had suddenly collapsed, leaving him feeling hollow and confused and tired. He blinked away a memory that wasn’t a memory of torn-up black ground and twisted shards of metal. “I don’t feel dead,” he said. His stomach hurt.

  “You don’t look dead, either,” Janis reassured him. “But, honey, I mean, you really were.”

  They stood staring out across the now vacant parking lot, a cold, cinder-smelling wind tugging at their clothes and hair. At last, Janis said, her brassy voice gone curiously shy, “You got real famous, ya know, after ... afterwards. You even influenced, like, the Beatles ... Shit, I forgot—I guess you don’t even know who they are, do you?” She paused uncomfortably, then said, “Anyway, honey, you got real famous.”

  “That’s nice,” Holly said dully.

  The parking lot disappeared. Holly gasped and flinched back. Everything was gone. Three concrete steps with an iron pipe railing led down from the door into a vast, unmoving nothingness.

  “What a trip,” Janis muttered. “What a trip ...”

  They stared at the oozing gray nothingness until it seemed to Holly that it was creeping closer, and then, shuddering, he slammed the door shut.

  Holly found himself walking down the corridor, going no place in particular, his flesh still crawling. Janis tagged along after him, talking anxiously. “Ya know, I can’t even really remember how I got to this burg. I was in L.A. the last I remember, but then everything gets all foggy. I thought it was the booze, but now I dunno.”

  “Maybe you’re dead, too,” Holly said almost absentmindedly.

  Janis paled, but a strange kind of excitement shot through her face, under the fear, and she began to talk faster and faster. “Yeah, honey, maybe I am. I thought of that, too, man, once I saw you. Maybe whoever’s behind all this are magicians, man, black magicians, and they conjured us all up.” She laughed a slightly hysterical laugh. “And you wanna know another weird thing? I can’t find any of my sidemen here or the roadies or anybody, ya know? Valens and the Bopper don’t seem to be here either. All of ’em were at the hotel, but backstage here it’s just you and me and Elvis and that motherfucker Blemings. It’s like they’re not really interested in the rest of them, right? They were just window dressing, man, but now they don’t need ’em anymore, and so they sent them back. We’re the headline acts, sweetie. Everybody else they vanished, just like they vanished the fucking parking lot, right? Right?”

  “I don’t know,” Holly said. He needed time to think. Time alone.

  “Or, hey—how about this? Maybe you’re not dead. Maybe we got nabbed by flying saucers, and these aliens faked our deaths, right? Snatched you out of your plane, maybe. And they put us together here—wherever here is—not because they dig rock. Shit, they probably can’t even understand it—but to study us and all that kinda shit. Or maybe it is 1959; maybe we got kidnapped by some time-traveler who’s a big rock freak. Or maybe it’s a million years in the future, and they’ve got us all taped, see? And they want to hear us; so they put on the tape, and we think we’re here, only we’re not. It’s all a recording. Hey?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Blemings came walking down the corridor, cigar trailing a thin plume of smoke behind him. “Janis, honey! I
been beating the bushes for you, sweetie pie. You’re on in two.”

  “Listen, motherfuck,” Janis said angrily. “I want a few answers from you!” Blemings reached out and touched her hand. Her eyes went blank, and she meekly allowed him to lead her away.

  “A real trouper, hey?” Blemings said cheerfully.

  “Hey!” Holly said. But they were already gone.

  Elvis laid down his guitar, whipped the scarf from his neck, and mopped his brow with it. He kissed the scarf and threw it into the crowd. The screams reached crescendo pitch as the little girls fought over its possession. With a jaunty wave of one hand, he walked offstage.

  In the wings, he doubled over, breathing heavily. Sweat ran out of every pore in his body. He reached out a hand, and no one put a towel in it. He looked up angrily.

  The wings were empty, save for a kid in big glasses. Elvis gestured weakly toward a nearby piece of terry cloth. “Towel,” he gasped, and the kid fetched it.

  Toweling off his face, Elvis threw back his head, began to catch his breath. He let the cloth slip to his shoulders and for the first time got a good look at the kid standing before him. “You’re Buddy Holly,” he said. He was proud of how calmly it came out.

  “A lot of people have told me that today,” Holly said.

  The crowd roared, breaking off their conversation. They turned to look. Janis was dancing onstage from the opposite side. Shadowy musicians to the rear were laying down a hot, bluesy beat. She grabbed the microphone, laughed into it.

  “Well! Ain’t this a kick in the ass? Yeah. Real nice, real nice.” There were anxious lines about her eyes, but most of the audience wouldn’t be able to see that. “Ya know, I been thinking a lot about life lately. ’Deed I have. And I been thinkin’ how it’s like one a dem ole-time blues songs. Ya know? I mean, it hurts so bad, and it feels so good!” The crowd screamed approval. The band kept on laying down the rhythm. “So I got a song here that kind of proves my point.”

  She swung an arm up and then down, giving the band the beat, and launched into “Heart and Soul.”

  “Well?” Elvis said. “Give me the message.”

  Holly was staring at the woman onstage. “I never heard anyone sing like that before,” he murmured. Then, “I’m sorry—I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Presley.”

  “Call me Elvis,” he said automatically. He felt disappointed. There had been odd signs and omens, and now the spirits of departed rock stars were appearing before him—there really ought to be a message. But it was clear the kid was telling the truth; he looked scared and confused.

  Elvis turned on a winning smile and impulsively plucked a ring from one of his fingers. It was a good ring; lots of diamonds and rubies. He thrust it into Holly’s hands. “Here, take this. I don’t want the goddamned thing anymore, anyway.”

  Holly squinted at the ring quizzically. “Well, put it on,” Elvis snapped. When Holly had complied, he said, “Maybe you’d better tell me what you do know.”

  Holly told his story. “I understand now,” Elvis said. “We’re caught in a snare and delusion of Satan.”

  “You think so?” Holly looked doubtful.

  “Squat down.” Elvis hunkered down on the floor, and after an instant’s hesitation, Holly followed suit. “I’ve got powers,” Elvis explained. “The power to heal—stuff like that. Now me and my momma, we were always close. Real close. So she’ll be able to help us, if we ask her.”

  “Your mother?”

  “She’s in Heaven,” Elvis said matter-of-factly.

  “Oh,” Holly said weakly.

  “Now join hands and concentrate real hard.”

  Holly felt embarrassed and uncomfortable. Since he was a good Baptist, which he certainly tried to be, the idea of a backstage seance seemed blasphemous. But Elvis, whether he was the real item or not, scared him. Elvis’s eyes were screwed shut, and he was saying, “Momma. Can you hear me, Momma?” over and over in a fanatic drone.

  The seance seemed to go on for hours. Holly suffering through it in mute misery, listening as well as he could to Janis, as she sung her way through number after amazing number. And finally she was taking her last bows, crowing “Thank you, thank you” at the crowd.

  There was a cough at his shoulder and a familiar stench of tobacco. Holly looked up. “You’re on,” Blemings said. He touched Holly’s shoulder.

  Without transition, Holly found himself onstage. The audience was noisy and enthusiastic, a good bunch. A glance to the rear, and he saw that the backup musicians were not his regular sidemen. They stood in shadow, and he could not see their faces.

  But the applause was long and loud, and it crept up under his skin and into his veins, and he knew he had to play something. “Peggy Sue,” he called to the musicians, hoping they knew the number. When he started playing his guitar, they were right with him. Tight. It was a helluva good backup band; their playing had bone and sinew to it. The audience was on its feet now, bouncing to the beat.

  He gave them “Rave On,” “Maybe Baby,” “Words of Love,” and “That’ll be the Day,” and the audience yelped and howled like wild beasts, but when he called out “Not Fade Away” to the musicians, the crowd quieted, and he felt a special, higher tension come into the hall. The band did a good, strong intro, and he began singing.

  I wanna tell you how it’s gonna be

  You’re gonna give your love to me

  He had never felt the music take hold of him this immediately, this strongly, and he felt a surge of exhilaration that seemed to instantly communicate itself to the audience and be reflected back at him redoubled, bringing them all up to a deliriously high level of intensity. Never had he performed better. He glanced offstage, saw that Janis was swaying to the beat, slapping a hand against her thigh. Even Elvis was following the music, caught up in it, grinning broadly and clapping his ring-studded hands.

  For love is love and not fade away.

  Somewhere to the rear, one of the ghostly backup musicians was blowing blues harmonica, as good as any he’d ever heard.

  There was a flash of scarlet, and Janis had run onstage. She grabbed a free mike, and joined him in the chorus. When they reached the second verse, they turned to face each other and began trading off lines. Janis sang:

  My love’s bigger than a Cadillac

  and he responded. His voice was flat next to hers. He couldn’t give the words the emotional twist she could, but their voices synched, they meshed, they worked together perfectly.

  When the musical break came, somebody threw Janis a tambourine so she could stay onstage, and she nabbed it out of the air. Somebody else kicked a bottle of Southern Comfort across the stage, and she stopped it with her foot, lifted it, downed a big slug. Holly was leaping into the air, doing splits, using every trick of an old rocker’s repertoire, and miraculously he felt he could keep on doing so forever, could stretch the break out to infinity if he tried.

  Janis beckoned widely toward the wings. “Come on out,” she cried into the microphone. “Come on.”

  To a rolling avalanche of applause, Elvis strode onstage. He grabbed a guitar and strapped it on, taking a stance behind Holly. “You don’t mind?” he mumbled.

  Holly grinned.

  They went into the third verse in unison. Standing between the other two, Holly felt alive and holy and—better than either alive or holy—right. They were his brother and sister. They were in tune; he could not have sworn which body was his.

  Well, love is love and not fade away

  Elvis was wearing another scarf. He whipped it off, mopped his brow, and went to the footlights to dangle it into the crowd. Then he retreated as fast as if he’d been bitten by a snake.

  Holly saw Elvis talking to Janis, frantically waving an arm at the crowd beyond the footlights. She ignored him, shrugging off his words. Holly squinted, could not make out a thing in the gloom.

  Curious, he duckwalked to the edge of the stage, peered beyond.

  Half the audience was gone. As he watched, the twen
ty people farthest from the stage snapped out of existence. Then another twenty. And another.

  The crowd noise continued undiminished, the clapping and whooping and whistling, but the audience was gone now—except for Blemings, who sat alone in the exact center of the empty theater. He was smiling faintly at them, a smile that could have meant anything, and as Holly watched, he began softly, politely, to applaud.

  Holly retreated backstage, pale, still playing automatically. Only Janis was singing now.

  Not fade away

  Holly glanced back at the musicians, saw first one, then another, cease to exist. Unreality was closing in on them. He stared into Elvis’s face, and for an instant saw mirrored there the fear he felt.

  Then Elvis threw back his head and laughed and was singing into his mike again. Holly gawked at him in disbelief.

  But the music was right, and the music was good, and while all the rest—audience, applause, someplace to go when the show was over—was nice, it wasn’t necessary. Holly glanced both ways and saw that he was not the only one to understand this. He rejoined the chorus.

  Janis was squeezing the microphone tight, singing, when the last sideman blinked out. The only backup now came from Holly’s guitar—Elvis had discarded his. She knew it was only a matter of minutes before the nothingness reached them, but it didn’t really matter. The music’s all that matters, she thought. It’s all that made any of it tolerable, anyway. She sang.

  Not fade away

  Elvis snapped out. She and Holly kept on singing.

  If anyone out there is listening, she thought. If you can read my mind or some futuristic bullshit like that—I just want you to know that I’d do this again anytime. You want me, you got me.

  Holly disappeared. Janis realized that she had only seconds to go herself, and she put everything she had into the last repetition of the line. She wailed out her soul and a little bit more. Let it echo after I’m gone, she thought. Let it hang on thin air. And as the last fractional breath of music left her mouth, she felt something seize her, prepare to turn her off.