The Year's Best Horror Stories 15 Part 10

I tapped him a new gla.s.s of Grizzly and he sipped at the froth and sighed.

"I'm tired," he said. "I've been looking for a replacement. Looking for someone-someone just like you-so I could retire."

"Retire-mister, you're crazy. Show how much you know. Death don't retire. Takes a vacation now and then-like in that film, Death Takes a Holiday. But retire? Mister, you're crazier than a rustler with a prairie dog down his pants."

The stranger just laughed. "No," he said. "I a.s.sure you, Don, I'm not. He grinned-an impossibly toothy, ear-to-ear grin. The flesh was beginning to flake away from his face like ancient peels of skin from a healing sunburn. His cheekbones shone through, white and s.h.i.+ny, as if he had no blood. I could smell the odor of over-ripe meat and his eyes were turning gla.s.sy and gelid-the pupils expanding into blackness.

"Truly," he said. "I'm old-older than you could ever imagine. Well, maybe not that old, but I have been Death for a long time-a very long time."

The stranger sighed and seemed to slump in his chair until he looked nearly as old as he claimed to be. He drained the last of his beer and pushed the empty gla.s.s away with his spider-leg-thin fingertips.

"It is someone else's turn, now. It's time for new blood-new att.i.tudes. Time for me to lay my burdens down, lay my soul down. I have given more service than was asked for, and I am tired of making decisions. I offer it to you-that you become what I am."

I sputtered for a moment while I caught my breath and calmed my stomach. "And what if I don't want to take you up on it?" I asked. I looked over at Jack and Ch.e.l.l for help and what I saw pulled me off my stool and set me up on my feet. They were frozen in place-as if time had stopped. Jack's mouth was open and even the flow of light amber liquid from the R.Y. bottle had solidified in mid-pour. That was what finally convinced me he wasn't crazy.

"If you refuse," he said before I had a chance to ask him what the h.e.l.l was going on, "then I will simply find someone else. I have all the time in the world. It's not an easy task to find just the right replacement-but I found you. I will find others." He paused, looked at the watch on his bony wrist, and reached around the bar to draw himself another gla.s.s of Grizzly. He drained it in one drink, set it down and continued.

"Before you decide, let me tell you something. In," he looked once again at his watch, "exactly one-and-a-half minutes, this bar will be hit by the worst lightning bolt of the storm. It will catch fire and everybody within will die. That means you-and Ch.e.l.ly-and Jack, over there. Everyone."

"How can I believe that? Believe you?"

The skin had shredded from his face and hands until he was, now, no more than skin and bones. There was a dark s.h.i.+ning, just beyond sight, deep within the black eyesockets of his skull. I should have been surprised or scared, but I wasn't. I'd half been expecting it.

"What would you have me do?" he whispered darkly. "Pull a rabbit from my hat? Disintegrate every piece of gla.s.s in the bar? Call up a demon? Should I line the dead up in front of you to testify? I can do these things, and more."

"No," I said. Even without the fact that he was all bones now, rattling around in loose black clothes, the sight of Jack and Ch.e.l.l and that stream of Rebel Yell, all frozen in time while I was still moving, was enough to convince me. Either that or I had gone crazy. "I believe you," I said. "I believe you."

"Then what will your choice be, Don? Would you be Death and live forever-or would you prefer your life to end with those of your friends?"

I thought-harder than I had ever thought before. No kind'a weird s.h.i.+t had ever happened to me-Don DuPress, biker, redneck and all round wastrel. I was just a broken down bar-keep. Stuff like this only happened to people in the Twilight Zone, or on Billy Bob's Nightmare Theatre-not in real life-and surely not to me.

I didn't want to die-I knew that real surely. Hardly had to think about that at all. And life after death, Heaven and h.e.l.l, a just and wrathful G.o.d-all that had hardly been real to me. I'd just tried to get along and take the c.r.a.p that life handed out as best as I was able. But when a man came into my bar, stopped time, shed his skin, told me he was Death-The Death-and told me I only had a minute-and-a-half to live ... well, that I paid attention to.

"I'll bite," I said, hardly able to talk but all whispery and quiet-like. "Okay, partner. You got yerself a deal."

Death sighed. "Thank you," he said, his voice stronger. The flesh began cohering to his bones again, filling out his clothes and face. I felt a sucking, deep in my soul. "Finally," he said, smiling. "Finally. Thank you."

I reached to shake the bubbling hand he held out. I touched him. There was a tearing crack, and a buzz that made my brain feel like Jell-O that had set in the icebox too long and turned watery, confused and a little green. I saw Jack and Ch.e.l.ly fall to the floor and lie still. The bottle of Rebel Yell lay on its side, emptying its contents onto the top of the bar while it slowly rocked back and forth.

There was a smell of burnt wood and sulfur. Heat radiated from all around me. My feet were numb and vibrating against the floor as the muscles in my legs and stomach convulsed.

I fell, too. Then there was a s.h.i.+ft, a painful, yet comforting jerk that I felt deep in my stomach, and I was standing in the middle of the room, looking down at a body on the floor. It was choking and jerking and clawing at its throat and eyes. When flames began licking the weathered, wooden plank walls of the bar, their light showed me that it was myself I was looking at. It was me-or what I had been, before.

I lifted my hands to my face-touched the skin that clung, newly formed, there, unfeeling of the heat.

I was dressed all in black; Black boots, black jeans, black s.h.i.+rt, black jacket. And skinny, like my bones were rattling around in a bloodless sh.e.l.l. It was strange enough, but somehow more comfortable than my own, overweight, rundown, underattractive body had been. I figured I could go far with a thing like this.

I picked my black Stetson hat up from the bar and put it on slowly-adjusted the angle and the sit. I started to bend down to touch my blistering body, lying on the floor-thought better of it-and walked through the flames into the dust and wind outside. He had gotten what he'd wanted, and so had I, sorta.

There was a black Harley in the dirt parking lot. I knew it was mine, now. I walked over to it and as I sat down it barked once and started. It ran with a deep purr, quiet and sneaky-like. I pulled the clutch in and kicked it into gear-grabbed a handful of the accelerator and let 'er rip. The tires lifted from the ground and I was soaring in the air, flying. The bike and I stretched out, molded together, and I was coasting on a mult.i.tude of bright, glowing lines of energy like a freeway of spinning stars.

But I knew where I was going. I didn't need no road signs. I knew what I had to do. And I knew, now, that I had a long, long time to do it. I was Death-and Death rides the sky forever.

THE MAN WHO DID TRICKS WITH GLa.s.s by Ron Wolfe Ron Wolfe was born on September 14, 1945 in North Platte, Nebraska-the celebrated hometown of Buffalo Bill Cody and where, Wolfe says, his grandmother once saw Buffalo Bill ride a white horse into a saloon. While he was too young to join up with Cody, Wolfe did follow in the same line of work as his father, writer Ed Wolfe, whose stories were popular in Collier's, The Sat.u.r.day Evening Post, American, and other magazines of the '40s.

Ron Wolfe now lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he is a feature writer, movie reviewer, and cartoonist for The Tulsa Tribune. He has had stories published in Twilight Zone Magazine, Night Cry, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, and Stardate. Wolfe has co-written one novel, Old Fears (with John Wooley), which is set in Oklahoma and is currently under option to Paramount Pictures. He is at work on a couple of other novels, one suspense and the other straight horror. The following story, from the final issue of Stardate, was begun some years ago as an attempt "to write a Charles Beaumont-type story," Wolfe says; Stardate credited it with "a sharp Bradbury touch." Good company, but the finished product stands very well as a Ron Wolfe story.

The metal click-clack studs in the soles of his boots rattled like hailstones against the mirrored floor under the mirrored ceiling adjoining the mirrored walls. "Joobie! And o-yes, but this is the place," he said to himself and himself and himself.

"The place of the Mirrormaster, o-yes," the Sec-robot machine echoed Birdie Rawson's voice from the mirror-topped desk in the center of the room. "Count yourself reflected here 1,114 times."

Some were just simple reflections. Some overlapped. Some wavered. Some made him different, in different ways. Evil and innocent, child-like, ancient, scarred, healed.

Birdie Rawson, however, lost count at himself times 53 when the mirror-faced panel to his left, or maybe right, or possibly it was behind him-anyway, went swipp-p-ppp! and opened, with a flash of light that made the diamond-faceted walls glitter. And the room count doubled.

"You! ..." Rawson peered through eyes of ice and water, into the chromium brilliance. Black-gloved and balding, he clapped like a seal. "You are real-o, after all."

"I am real, and I am worn out, Mr. Rawson," the Mirrormaster said. The silver of his hair shone bright as gla.s.s. "I meant to be retired."

"But for me, you are here."

J. Tipton Witt, last of the Mirrormasters, took his place behind the desk, sat down and made the rings on his fingers sparkle, drumming on the desk top.

"Yes, Mr. Rawson," he said, "for you."

"In the interest of easing these tensions between us ..." Rawson said, and withdrew a sealed envelope from one of several zippered pockets that ornamented the front of his jacket. He placed the envelope on the desktop.

"I am holding back nothing," Rawson said. "See for yourself."

The Mirrormaster slid the envelope, barely touching it, into a slot that opened almost invisibly. A whirring, a grinding sound followed.

"I don't need to see," the Mirrormaster said. "I don't believe you."

"Most people don't," Rawson said. "But I am not hurt. It helps me to get what I want."

"What you want is not the first of our discussions," the Mirrormaster said. "What I want is. And what I want is this, simply said, Mr. Rawson: to be left alone by the likes of you. I don't give a twit for your blackmail. I am not the least concerned about the case that you've managed to fabricate against me. What does interest me ... is that it must have cost you for lies almost what I charge for mirrors."

Rawson nodded. "I pay for the best."

"And that kind of payment, Mr. Rawson, is what I need for the purpose of disappearing. Understand: it is going to cost you unreasonably, whatever you want done."

Again, Rawson nodded happily, and his head bobbed back at him from 1,114 different angles.

"Moreover, said the Mirrormaster, "since this, in fact, will be the last job I take, I do dearly hope you can make it something of a challenge." He gestured palms up toward Rawson, as if to have something cold and oozing dropped into his hands. "Now, what can I do for you?"

"I had in mind, o-yes-something for the bedroom," Rawson said.

The Mirrormaster said flatly, "Oh."

"Something ... something different ... something joobie."

The Mirrormaster slumped. "In that case, Mr. Rawson, be it known that you have forced me out of retirement to perform the equivalent of playing with my toes. Something for the bedroom. Pfah!"

Rawson click-clacked across the mirrored floor to lean against the desk, with his California plum nose thrust into the face of the Mirrormaster, and his earrings dancing a ballet for silk sheets and fake fur. "So tell me what you can do for me," he said.

The Mirrormaster snorted again. "Anything." He pushed Rawson back. "I can make you look two feet taller and muscled as if you were carved out of ivory. I can put shapes on her to give you thoughts even you would be ashamed of. Again, pfah! You can't believe what old stuff this is to me."

But Rawson pressed in. "And you could make her float like a sea nymph out of the sea?"

The Mirrormaster nodded and bit off his thumb nail.

"And you could make six of her, and three of me, and two of us both?"

The Mirrormaster coughed and spat.

"And you could make her seem nothing but soft, questing lips?"

"All of those," the Mirrormaster said, "in one afternoon. Easy installation. Name the day."

The corners of Rawson's mouth bent up slowly then, like something crawling out from under his mustache. "Then if you can do all that, gla.s.s man." he said, "maybe you can do the thing I want done."

To which J. Tipton Witt sighed a breath of cold oatmeal and rain. "What I have always hated about this particular facet of my work, Mr. Rawson," he said, "is that it gives me no choice but to find out, in sordid detail, your idea of a good time in bed."

"Well-o ..." Rawson glanced back and forth and up and down, and his own look of sudden distrust ricocheted back at him. "We are alone?" he asked.

"We are."

Slowly, Rawson loosened another of the zippered pockets. He withdrew from it a badly-taken photograph, which he placed in front of the gla.s.s man.

"Beautiful, isn't she?" Rawson said.

The Mirrormaster did not answer immediately. But his face changed in ways that might have been imperceptible except in such a place of mirrors and light. The black-dot pupils of the Mirrormaster's eyes, already small, narrowed as if to blind him to the sight of the photograph.

He turned the photo face-down with a hand that might not have been seen to tremble, except for the unsteady glimmer of mirrored light against so many rings.

Rawson flipped the picture-snap/slap!-again, to confront the Mirrormaster. "Her name was Lela," Rawson said. "As femies go, I miss her terribly. Lovely, don't you think? Even after ..."

"I don't want to know." The Mirrormaster's voice cracked. It broke like crystal. "How you did ... to her ..."

Rawson edged in closer. "Call it, on my part, a fascination with gadgetry."

The Mirrormaster flinched back in his chair, wheezing at the smell of joobie-joobie seeds on Rawson's breath. He snapped the crystal b.u.t.ton on the Sec-robot, and said, "Mr. Rawson will be leaving now." And to Rawson: "Tragically, there are limits to what I can do with gla.s.s. I cannot build a prison of gla.s.s that would hold you."

Rawson clubbed an arm across the desk, smas.h.i.+ng the machine. "Neg-o, I'm staying, and you are going to listen to me, gla.s.s man." He smiled then-a smile of bloodied teeth from where the seeds had cut into the gums.

"I want her returned to me, gla.s.s man," Rawson said. "Not alive again. I didn't like her all that much alive. But I want the image of her-there in the mirrors, in the gla.s.s, beckoning to me. I want the reflection of me, the reflection of her, intertwined. You see ... I wasn't finished with her."

The Mirrormaster stood. He turned as if to look away from Birdie Rawson, but the mirrors allowed no such avoidance. "I am ... finished with you," the Mirrormaster said.

Rawson persisted, "You said you wanted a challenge."

"Yes, but ..." And, for a moment, again, the face of the Mirrormaster s.h.i.+fted-tightened ever so subtly, to an expression that could have been read as fear, or surprise, or contempt. But not disinterest.

"Can you do it?" Rawson pressured.

"I can ... tinker with reflections, Mr. Rawson. What you ask, is to conjure a ghost."

"So the answer to my question-the one-word answer from the last of the gla.s.s men-is a big phoo!" Rawson said.

"I didn't say that," the Mirrormaster countered. "What I mean is, it hasn't been tried."

"So, I tell you," Rawson said: "Try. Dare. Plunge. Be, not the follower, but the artist."

J. Tipton Witt ruffled his silvery curls like the idea itself was a bug in his hair. "And if I don't? ..."

"I will go out and tell the world what a fake you are, and it will have the ring of truth to it, gla.s.s man."

"And if I do? ..."

"Then, I will see to it that you become rich, revered-and rid of me. I will put all three in writing to your complete satisfaction."

Silence filled the room like mirrors.

The Mirrormaster again contemplated the woman's photograph.

"I can see in her eyes. She died hating you," the Mirrormaster said. "So will I."

But he took from the desk drawer a long, silver-colored pencil and a pad of paper, and began drawing arrows and angles and little dotted lines criss-crossing this way and that, and muttering to himself about "angle of incidence" and "angle of deviation."

"By 'deviation,' " Rawson said, "I hope you mean nothing personal."

"Get out," the Mirrormaster ordered.

"Joobie! O-yes, I will be anxious to hear from you." Rawson said, and his boots, departing, rattled applause for the work so auspiciously begun.

It was a week later that J. Tipton Witt motioned a crew of workmen into Birdie Rawson's bedroom, and the door closed.

After awhile, the workmen left, but the Mirrormaster stayed inside, and the door closed again.

Rawson rapped and called, "When can I see?" But all he heard from the other side was the sound of shattering gla.s.s.

And when the door finally did edge open, casting a flicker of brilliance into the hallway, the Mirrormaster squeezed through in the smallest s.p.a.ce he could. He slammed and locked the door shut behind him. His eyes were cobwebbed with red; his mouth ticked and trembled.

"Yes? ..." Rawson rushed him. "Is it done? Is she there? I have certain ... plans ... I am eager to put in motion."

Bits of Birdie Rawson reflected off the beads of sweat that streamed from the Mirrormaster's brow.

"Something ... not her," the Mirrormaster said. "What I made in there, in the gla.s.s ... I don't know where it came from. I can't describe it, you wouldn't want it, and I'm leaving," the Mirrormaster said, trying to edge past Rawson.