The Year's Best Horror Stories 15 Part 11

Rawson's black-gloved seal hands clasped the old man's throat before J. Tipton Witt could take another step away. "Neg-o, you don't, gla.s.s man. I paid you plenty. What you're telling me is that it needs more work, and I'm telling you more work is what it's going to get," and he shoved the Mirrormaster, hard, against the door.

J. Tipton Witt saw Rawson's fingers clenching and unclenching and smelled the joobie-joobie sweetness on Rawson's breath stronger than ever, and he unlocked the door and eased back inside.

Rawson went about his business the rest of the day, ignoring the screams and the shattering sounds.

And when the door opened again, there was J. Tipton Witt, shaking and tattered, arms and face criss-crossed with delicate, bleeding cuts, and all the same-very much the Mirrormaster. "I have done it," he said. "You can see for yourself."

Rawson jumped for the door, but J. Tipton Witt stopped him with an outstretched hand. "The thing is," J. Tipton Witt said, "I still don't know how. I still don't like it. I'm still leaving. And my advice to you, Mr. Rawson, is to do the same."

Rawson pushed him aside and went in.

Rawson's voice drifted out of the room then like soft clouds and soap suds. "Ohh-h-h-h. O-my. It is her, gla.s.s man. And so many of her. And so many angles, and she is beckoning to me, gla.s.s man. Ahhh! ..."

The Mirrormaster did not follow, did not watch, only called into the room. "And does she float like a sea nymph out of the sea?"

"O-yes!"

"And are there six of her, and three of you, and two of you both?"

"Even more, and even better."

"And does she seem nothing but soft, questing lips?"

"Questing ..."

"And what of her touch, Mr. Rawson? What of that?"

The answer was silence.

The Mirrormaster closed the door. He walked to the end of the hallway, almost there before the door clicked open behind him.

The voice that stopped him was not Rawson's. It was the whisper of slowly splintering gla.s.s, taking the shape of a single word.

He turned toward the sound.

The word repeated-"Mirrormaster"-out of lips that bore the glint of ice.

Turning, the Mirrormaster saw himself reflected in the silvered gla.s.s of Lela's eyes. She touched him, gently, on the cheek. He felt the nail cut, knowing it would leave a scar as fine and white as a length of thread.

"I could only reflect what was there of you," the Mirrormaster said. "Hatred ..."

She smiled at him, lips glistening. "But, oh, won't you say that I'm lovely?"

She twirled for him, naked, and almost transparent.

"Lovely," the Mirrormaster agreed.

"Then, come." She took his hand. It bled within her grasp. "See the rest of what you've done."

She led the way back to the bedroom, softly pus.h.i.+ng the door open.

The room stood silent, empty, and yet filled with those gaping-mouthed screams that came out of the mirrors.

"You see, Mirrormaster?" Lela said. "You could, after all, build a prison of gla.s.s that would hold him."

"A prison ..."

"But not a lonely one." Lela touched a gla.s.s-edged nail to the tip of her tongue-a thousand nails, a thousand tongues. A thousand Lelas, intertwined, reflected from the mirrored floor under the mirrored ceiling adjoining the mirrored walls.

She smiled a radiant, lovely smile, a smile of the coldest white.

The Mirrormaster grasped a workman's hammer from the floor. He struck the wall blindly, ignoring the sting of slivered gla.s.s. And again, and again: the impact of a thousand gleaming hammers in the hands of a thousand silver-haired madmen.

The gla.s.s cracked; it shattered; it fell.

And every broken, bloodied shard of it, every large, every small, every sharp-edged reflection-all of them, Birdie Rawson-kept on screaming.

BIRD IN A WROUGHT IRON CAGE.

by John Alfred Taylor.

One of the fun things about editing this series is that there's no predicting where a good horror story will turn up. Case in point: "Bird in a Wrought Iron Cage" was winner in a local arts group Halloween ghost story compet.i.tion, and their little booklet probably didn't even make the Somerset best-seller list.

John Alfred Taylor, however, has had other stories more widely circulated. He has appeared in both The Year's Best Horror Stories and The Year's Best Fantasy Stories, with stories in Twilight Zone Magazine, Weirdbook, Galaxy, Galileo, and elsewhere. Born in Springfield, Missouri on September 12, 1931, Taylor holds a B.A. from the University of Missouri and an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. Currently he teaches English at Was.h.i.+ngton and Jefferson College in Was.h.i.+ngton, Pennsylvania. His recently completed novel, The Black Ark, is receiving close consideration from a major publisher.

I remember I laughed when Father told me about the hand. Though when he shouted, his face mottled red and white, I realized he wasn't joking.

It was another side to Dad. I had always thought him the essence of normality; brutally practical, a sworn enemy of fantasy, and now he was raving. Still waters run deep, I told myself, the cuckoo nests in any head.

How would Moorc.o.c.k Sheet and Tube survive it?

But then he showed me the family heirloom, as Grandfather had shown him, and I knew Dad was his usual unimaginative self; the sight of it was better than any argument or description.

He opened up the musty buffalo-hide trunk with its green-stained bra.s.s fittings and pulled out the cage inside. For a second, I thought it held a huge brown spider, until I saw the fingernails like broken roots. Then it crawled to the corner of the cage and picked up a pen.

It liked the new ball-points. WELCOME FREDERICK IV. WE ARE GLAD TO SEE YOU. WILL YOU GIVE US WHAT WE WANT?

I didn't know what that meant, and when I did, I wasn't eager, but after Dad explained, I got out my penknife and sterilized it with my lighter. The cut didn't hurt as much as I expected, and only a few drops were necessary-"for the form," Dad said, but I don't think he understood any better than I did. I held my forearm carefully over the notebook, and afterward the hand wrote under it, smearing the page, FREDERICK IV HIS BLOOD.

So I too gained the knowledge of the hand, of the advice that had pyramided the family fortune for three generations, that had guided Great-Grandfather through his speculations in railways and iron, that had warned Grandfather six weeks before Black Friday, that in 1937 gave Father a detailed month-by-month chronology of World War II and its investment opportunities.

It was about time, since I had been Executive Vice President almost a year, and Dad was already thinking of retiring himself to Chairman of the Board. And the hand and I had a very cozy relations.h.i.+p. At first I would take it a new notebook every morning, tie a string through the spiral binding, and let it down through the cage bars as per instructions.

Because I once tried to do it my way, without the string, and the hand had thrown itself up to turn over in midair and claw open the ball of my third finger. I had a teta.n.u.s booster immediately and never took the risk again.

But I asked it all sorts of questions, not just business questions, though I asked more of those than Dad did-after all it was the hand and I who planned the company's diversification. All sorts of questions-I wanted to know where the hand came from, what it wanted.

"What are you?" I would ask. "Where did my greatgrandfather find you?" The hand would pick up the pen, shuffle and slide across the page, and all it would leave would be HAHAHA or WOULDN'T YOU LIKE TO KNOW.

I asked Father if he knew anything about the hand, but all he knew was that we'd always had the hand, and what Great-Grandfather said was all there was. So I went back and read the bleached brown script of Great-Grandfather's diary, and learned what I already knew: Great-Grandfather had paid somebody else to subst.i.tute for him in the Civil War, and made his first fortune out of quartermaster contracts, and gone west afterward. But he says next to nothing about the hand or where he got it. Though he seemed to have more to do with the Indians than your average businessman.

I never did learn anything but WOULDN'T YOU LIKE TO KNOW and HAHAHA.

Dad involved himself less and less with the company, and finally, one day in June, 1966, he called me on the intercom and asked me to join him. I gave our special knock and he let me in. We've always kept Grandfather's office as he left it; the gaudily painted safe no burglar would look at twice was open, the buffalo-hide trunk on top of it with the cage that held the hand on the desk.

"What's up?" I asked.

"It's time," he said in a gray voice, and I noticed he looked gray too; his face was damp and pale and his lips bluish.

"Time for what?" I said, and he gestured toward the cage.

The hand was capering back and forth beside the notebook, where it had scrawled JUNE 19 8:11 PM YOU WILL DIE OF A CORONARY. PLAN ACCORDINGLY.

"It can't know," I said, then noticed Father was trying to keep himself from trembling.

"It knows," he said. "It told my father-your grandfather-when he was going to die to the minute. I said the same thing you did, and he told me I was wrong. Then proved it. Pour me a drink. Bourbon." So I went over and poured him a drink from Grandfather's tantalus.

And Father died of a coronary at 8:11 on June 19.

We had planned accordingly despite my skepticism, and Moorc.o.c.k Industries went on without a tremor.

By that time I was asking the hand "Will I have a son?" For years Jessica and I had tried. YOU WILL HAVE NEITHER SON NOR DAUGHTER wrote the hand. The doctors said it was Jessica, so I made other arrangements. Every mistress knew exactly how much it was worth to bear my child-at the end I was willing to divorce Jessica-but none ever conceived.

And last week it said I would die today. But I'm proving it doesn't know everything. I've built a fire in Grandfather's fireplace, a good hot fire. Now I'm opening the safe, opening the buffalo-hide trunk.

The hand knows what I have in mind-it's hanging upside down on the cage top and trying to claw me, but the handle was made long on purpose.

Now the cage is in the fire. The hand is hopping angrily against the top and sides, slapping the bars so hard the cage rocks, but scorched and singed already.

We'll see who lasts longest.

THE OLYMPIC RUNNER.

by Dennis Etchison.

Dennis Etchison had a busy year in 1986. As editor, he saw publication of Masters of Darkness from Tor and Cutting Edge from Doubleday, and his long-antic.i.p.ated first novel (under his own name), Darkside came out from Charter. The only downside was that the third collection of his own short fiction from Scream/Press was delayed. Etchison kept from being bored during all this by working on a number of major screen projects. Not a bad way, all in all, to celebrate his twenty-fifth year as a professional writer.

Born in Stockton, California on March 30, 1943, Dennis Etchison is one of the quiet forces in the horror genre-a field too often plagued with media hype and self-promoting, thirty-day wonders. Over the years Etchison's work has won the respect of his fellow writers and finally the attention of major publishers-not easy for a writer who has worked almost entirely with short fiction. Etchison presently lives in Los Angeles, where he busily pursues his favorite breaks from writing-watching films and television wrestling. Second volumes of both Masters of Darkness and Cutting Edge are in the works, and, one hopes, perhaps a second novel is not too far off.

Driving, she thought: This is about the time I'd be getting ready to crawl back into bed.

With Lori and Elizabeth fed and dressed and out the door to meet the school bus, there would be nothing more to worry about for a while. Geoff always dropped Erin off for her car pool on his way to work; neither of them needed or wanted Casey's help in the mornings. And then she would have a precious hour to herself, before it began again with the neighbors and the gardener and the was.h.i.+ng and the mail and the bank and the market and the cleaners, the employment agency and the lawyers ...

No, the last two came later, after Geoff left for good, after Erin ran away. Since then things had become too complicated to allow her even a few extra minutes under the covers. What could she have been thinking?

"Did you know," said Lori from the back seat, "that in the summertime your index fingernail grows fifty percent faster?"

Casey snapped to. She tightened her grip on the wheel and blinked, aware once again of the sea and the guardrail, of the car swerving too close to the yellow cliffs. There was no time for dozing. This was real life. She steered back to the center of the narrow lane, her left front tire erasing the dotted line, and tried to remember how she had gotten here. For a few seconds she could not. It seemed impossible, a bad dream. She lowered her winds.h.i.+eld visor against the merciless glare and reached for the rearview mirror to be sure Lori was there.

"Mom? Are you listening to me?"

"I am, baby. I promise. Faster than what?"

"Um, it doesn't say."

The car steadied as she regained control. The sea s.h.i.+fted, then settled again into a smooth blanket of the purest cerulean blue under the bright light bulb of the morning sun. Just then something skittered down the cliffside and tumbled out into the highway; she veered to avoid it, unreasonably frightened. When the tires struck and crushed it there was a soft pattering like knuckles against the underseal. She rolled her window down and tried to locate what was left of it, but she was too late.

"What was that?"

"Nothing, baby. A loose rock."

"Are you sure?"

As they rounded the curve, she framed a last glimpse of a tiny mound of sandstone in the mirror. "Yes, I'm sure. I was afraid it was an animal. You know, the kind that run out in the road and freeze when they see a car coming? What do they call them? You remember. We read a story about it. When you were little."

"Armadillos?"

"I don't think so. Not around here."

"Um, did you know that armadillos are the only animals besides humans that get leprosy?"

"No, I didn't know that. Thank you." She hid her amus.e.m.e.nt from her daughter, who lately could not tolerate any degree of teasing. "Are you getting hungry?"

"I'm on a diet." The girl made a breathy, impatient sound. "Can't we listen to some music? You haven't turned the radio on since we left L.A."

"Certainly. All you have to do is ask. Politely."

Casey flicked the radio on, but only static came out of the speakers, a white sound like surf filling the car. She pushed the b.u.t.tons one by one but now, away from home, all the presets were wrong. She curled the k.n.o.b past the weak, reflected voices of unfamiliar djs, the latest installment of Dr. Gene Scott's quasi-religious marathon, an all-news station. At the moment it was time for another sports break, with more information per second than the human mind could comprehend about the current Olympics. No matter where she turned, Casey could not escape the feeling that someone was trying to sell her something. She was not sure she wanted any of it. She yawned to clear her head.

"Did you bring my tapes?" asked Lori. She clattered through the box under the seat and handed up a battered ca.s.sette. "Here. Play side two."

Casey sighed. "Whatever you say." She was determined that this trip not turn into a nightmare for both of them. A little music, she told herself. That couldn't hurt. It would keep her awake.

The highway wound higher, an endless torture test under a deceptively peaceful sky. The terrain did not permit her to see very far ahead; occasionally she caught flashes of open s.p.a.ce and the suggestion of a new topography, but the view was so frequently obstructed, so fragmented that it was impossible to tell whether she was making any real progress. Behind her, Lori shuffled her Dynamite magazines aside and returned to her copy of The Book of Uncommon Knowledge, the million-seller paperback that Casey had not had time to read. By the sound of some of the excerpts Lori had recited, Casey did not know if she should bother. She found it stupefying, lists of facts that did not relate to her life in any manner that might help. In truth, they only made her feel that much less competent, the way a close-up of crystal formations under a microscope in college had left her dizzy, without perspective, as if she were confronting an alien landscape.

She eased her neck into the headrest and waited for the next road sign. She had never been this way before, and now the sky and the sea in the distance flattened and receded, the beach appearing dangerously detached, as if the highway had come unstuck from the sh.o.r.eline. She forced herself to focus on the dashboard and inserted the tape.