Year's Best Horror Stories XVIII Part 7

Then I turned toward the sea, cut a path between the sickly dunes down to the no-man's land of black slag and stinking slurry, and found a place to sit on a rock etched by chemical reaction into an anomalous hump. It was one of a line of rocks I remembered from my childhood, reaching out half a mile to the sea, from which the men had crabbed and cast their lines. But none of that now. Beyond where I sat, only the tips of the lifeless, once limpet- and mussel-festooned rocks stuck up above the slurry; a leaning, blackened signpost warned:

DANGER! QUICKSAND!.

Do Not Proceed Beyond This Point.

Quicksand? Quag, certainly, but not sand...

I don't know how long I sat there. The sea was advancing and gray gulls wheeled on high, crying on a rising breeze that blew their plaintive voices inland.

Sc.u.mmy waves broke in feathers of gray froth less than one hundred yards down the beach. Down what had been a beach before the invasion of the pit- yakkers. It was summer but down here there were no seasons. Steam curled up from the slag and misted a pitted, alien landscape.

I became lulled by the sound of the birds, the hissing throb of foamy waters, and, strangely, from some little distance away, the periodic clatter of an aerial dumper tilting its buckets and hurling more mineral debris down from on high, creating a mound which the advancing ocean would spread out in a new layer to coat and further contaminate the beach.

I sat there glumly, with my chin like lead in my hands and all of these sounds dull on the periphery of my consciousness, and thought nothing in particular and certainly nothing of any importance. From time to time a gull's cry would sound like Moira's voice, but too shrill, high, frightened, or desperate. She wasn't coming, wouldn't come, and I had lost her. We had lost each other.

I became aware of time trickling by, but again I state: I don't know how long I sat there. An hour? Maybe.

Then something broke through to me. Something other than the voices of the gulls, the waves, the near-distant rain of stony rubble. A new sound? A presence? I looked up, turned my head to scan north along the dead and rotting beach. And I saw him -- though as yet he had not seen me.

My eyes narrowed and I felt my brows come together in a frown. Raymond Maddison. The pit-yakker himself. And this probably as good a place as any, maybe better than most, to teach him a well-deserved lesson. I stood up, and keeping as low a profile as possible made my way round the back of the tarry dunes to where he was standing. In less than two minutes I was there, behind him, creeping up on where he stood wind-blown and almost forlorn-seeming, staring out to sea. And there I paused.

It seemed his large, rounded shoulders were heaving. Was he crying?

Catching his breath? Gulping at the warm, reeking air? Had he been running?

Searching for me? Following me as earlier he'd followed us? My feelings hardened against him. It was because he wasn't entirely all there that people tolerated him.

But I more than suspected he was all there. Not really a dummy, more a sc.u.mmy.

And I had him trapped. In front of him the rocks receding into pits of black filth, where a second warning notice leaned like a scarecrow on a battlefield, and behind him... only myself behind him. Me and my tightly clenched fists.

Then, as I watched, he took something out of his pocket. His new knife, as I saw now. He stared down at it for a moment, and then drew back his arm as if to hurl it away from him, out into the black wilderness of quag. But he froze like that, with the knife still in his hand, and I saw that his shoulders had stopped shuddering. He became alert; I guessed that he'd sensed I was there, watching him.

He turned his head and saw me, and his eyes opened wide in a pale, slack face. I'd never seen him so pale. Then he fell to one knee, dipped his knife into the slurry at his feet, and commenced wiping at it with a rag of a handkerchief. Caught unawares he was childlike, tending to do meaningless things.

"Raymond," I said, my voice grimmer than I'd intended. "Raymond, I want a word with you!" And he looked for somewhere to run as I advanced on him. But there was nowhere. "I didn't -- " he suddenly blurted. "I didn't -- "

"But you did!" I was only a few paces away.

"I... I...".

"You followed us, peeped on us, and messed it all up."

And again he seemed to freeze, while his brain turned over what I'd said to him. Lines creased his brow, vanis.h.i.+ng as quickly as they'd come. "What?"

"What?!" I shouted, stepping closer still. "You b.l.o.o.d.y well know what! Now Moira and me, we're finished. And it's your fault."

He backed off into the black mire, which at once covered his boots and the cuffs of his too-short trousers. And there he stood, lifting and lowering his feet, which went glop, glop with each up and down movement. He reminded me of nothing so much as a fly caught on the sticky paper they used at that time. And his mouth kept opening and closing, stupidly, because he had nothing to say and nowhere to run, and he knew I was angry.

Finally he said: "I didn't mean to... follow you. But I -- " And he reached into a pocket and brought out a packet of cigarettes. "Your cigarettes."

I had known that would be his excuse. "Throw them to me, Ray," I said. For I wasn't about to go stepping in there after him. He tossed me the packet but stayed right where he was, "You may as well come on out," I told him, lighting up, "for you know I'm going to settle with you."

"Josh," he said, still mouthing like a fish. "Josh...."

"Yes, Josh, Josh," I told him, nodding. "But you've really done it this time, and we have to have it out."

He still had his knife. He showed it to me, opened the main blade. He took a pace forward out of the slurry and I took a pace back. There was a sick grin on his face. Except... he wasn't threatening me. "For you," he said, snapping the blade shut. "I don't... don't want it no more." He stepped from the quag onto a flat rock and stood there facing me, not quite within arm's reach. He tossed the knife and I automatically caught it. It weighed heavy in my hand where I clenched my knuckles round it.

"A bribe?" I said. "So that I won't tell what you did? How many friends do you have, Ray? And how many left if I tell what a dirty, sneaky, spying -- " But he was still grinning his sick, nervous grin. "You won't tell," he shook his head. "Not what I seen."

I made a lunging grab for him and the grin slipped from his face. He hopped to a second rock farther out in the liquid slag, teetered there for a moment before finding his balance. And he looked anxiously all about for more stepping-stones, in case I should follow.

There were two or three more rocks, all of them deeper into the coal dust quicksand, but beyond them only a bubbly, oozy black surface streaked with oil and yellow mineral swirls.

Raymond's predicament was a bad one. Not because of me. I would only hit him. Once or twice, depending how long it took to b.l.o.o.d.y him. But this stuff would murder him. If he fell in. And the black slime was dripping from the bottoms of his trousers, making the surface of his rock slippery. Raymond's balance wasn't much, neither mentally nor physically. He began to slither this way and that, wind-milled his arms in an effort to stay put.

"Ray!" I was alarmed. "Come out of there!"

He leaped, desperately, tried to find purchase on the next rock, slipped! His feet shot up in the air and he came down on his back in the quag. The stuff quivered like thick black porridge and put out slow-motion ripples. He flailed his arms, yelping like a dog, as the lower part of his body started to sink. His trousers ballooned with the air in them, but the stuff's suck was strong. Raymond was going down.

Before I could even start to think straight he was in chest deep, the filth inching higher every second. But he'd stopped yelping and had started thinking.

Thinking desperate thoughts. "Josh... Jos.h.!.+" he gasped.

I stepped forward ankle-deep, got up onto the first rock. I made to jump to the second rock but he stopped me. "No, Josh," he whispered. "Or we'll both go."

"You're sinking," I said, for once as stupid as him.

"Listen," he answered with a gasp. "Up between the dunes, some cable, half- buried. I saw it on my way down here. Tough, 'lectric wire, in the muck. You can pull me out with that."

I remembered. I had seen it, too. Several lengths of discarded cable, buried in the sc.u.mmy dunes. All my limbs were trembling as I got back to solid ground, setting out up the beach between the dunes. "Jos.h.!.+" his voice reached out harshly after me. "Hurry!" And a moment later: "The first bit of wire you see, that'll do it...."

I hurried, ran, raced. But my heart was pounding, the air rasping like sandpaper in my lungs. Fear. But... I couldn't find the cable. Then there was a tall dune, a great heap of black-streaked, slag-crusted sand. A lookout place! I went up it, my feet breaking through the crust, letting rivulets of sand cascade, thrusting myself to the top. Now I could get directions, scan the area all about. Over there, between low humps of diseased sand, I could see what might be a cable: a thin, frozen black snake of the stuff.

But beyond the cable I could see something else: colors, anomalous, strewn in a clump of dead crabgra.s.s.

I tumbled down the side of the great dune, ran for the cable, and tore a length free of the sand and muck. I had maybe fifteen, twenty feet of the stuff.

Coiling it, I looked back. Raymond was there in the quag, going down black and sticky. But in the other direction -- just over there, no more than a dozen loping paces away, hidden in the crabgra.s.s and low humps of sand -- something blue and white and... and red.

Something about it made my skin p.r.i.c.kle. Quickly, I went to see. And I saw...

After a while I heard Raymond's voice over the crying of the gulls. "Jos.h.!.+

Josh"

I walked back, the cable looped in my lifeless hands, made my way to where he hung crucified in the quag; his arms formed the cross, palms pressing down on the belching surface, his head thrown back and the slop ringing his throat. And I stood looking at him. He saw me; saw the cable in my limp hands, looked into my eyes. And he knew. He knew I wasn't going to let him have the cable.

Instead I gave him back his terrible knife with all its terrible attachments -- which he'd been waiting to use, and which I'd seen no use for -- tossing it so that it landed in front of him and splashed a blob of slime into his right eye.

He pleaded with me for a little while then, but there was no excuse. I sat and smoked, without even remembering lighting my fresh cigarette, until he began to gurgle. The black filth flooded his mouth, nostrils, and the circles of his eyes. He went down, his sputtering mouth forming a ring in the muck, which slowly filled in when he was gone. Big s.h.i.+ny bubbles came bursting to the surface.... When my cigarette went out I began to cry, and crying staggered back up the beach between the dunes. To Moira.

Moira. Something I'd had -- almost -- which he didn't have. Which he could never have, except like this. Jealousy, or just sheer evil? And was I any better than him, now? I didn't know then, and I don't know to this day. He was just a pit- yakker, born for the pit. Him and roe both, I suppose, but I had been lucky enough to escape it.

And he hadn't....

Mr. Sandman.

by Scott D. Yost.

Quite a few years back, when Gerald W. Page was editor of The Year's Best Horror Stories, he bought stories by Manly Wade Wellman, David Drake, and me -- all three of us living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, all three of us in the same volume. I made some sort of remark about the weirdness of his choosing three stories from writers in the same small town. Vampirism? A secret cult?

Since then it's spread. I think it's something in the water. At any rate, here's a new Chapel Hill writer: Scott D. Yost.

Yost writes: "I was born July 21, 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina. I received my B.A. from Duke, where I double-majored in economics and philosophy. Currently, I'm finis.h.i.+ng up my Ph.D. in philosophy at UNC-Chapel Hill. I'm also near completion on my first novel." Yost's other recent sales include stories in Sc.r.a.pes, New Blood, Twisted, The Tome, Terror Time Again, Starsh.o.r.e, and Starbright. A stockbroker for two years, he has also done some free-lance financial writing, and he has an article on writing fiction recently published in The Writer.

By the way, this week a clerk at the local sci-fi bookshop sold his first horror novel to NAL.

He was twenty-one years old and tired of the doctors. He wanted to scream: Listen you dumb b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, the problem isn't that I sleep too much -- the problem is that I never sleep. Never. In fact, on one visit to Greensboro Memorial three years ago, Jeff had shouted something along those lines loud enough for everyone on the floor to hear it, and a nurse, acting on Dr. Saunders's instructions, had to pump a hypodermic full of tranquilizer into Jeff's arm.

But no one ever listened, least of all the doctors. They didn't listen mostly because often -- very often -- he did lie down, close his eyes, and (so he had been told) snore loudly.

Jeff made a promise to himself: after this, no more doctors, no more hospitals. He was a senior in college now and his parents couldn't drag him to clinics any more.

Dr. Saxon, the oldest doctor on this team, walked into the hospital room, never looking up from his clipboard. "Give it to me straight, Doc," Jeff said smiling, "how long do I have left?"

"Oh, I'd say about fifty years. I can't find one d.a.m.n thing wrong with you."

"How about calling my parents and telling them that."

"I plan to. But I'm also going to tell them that sleeping twelve hours a day is a sign of severe depression." Dr. Saxon paused a few seconds; his expression was serious as always. "Jeff, there's something else that concerns me. From reading Dr.

Rosten's report it's not at all clear you understand that your dreams -- no matter how vivid they seem to you -- are just that, dreams."

"Christ, of course I know that," Jeff lied convincingly. Dreams? he thought.

Right. Whatever happens when I shut my eyes is hard to explain but it sure as h.e.l.l isn't dreams. Dreams aren't real, this is. Dreams don't pick up where they left off, this does. So can I please not have any more wires strapped to my head because it's obvious they don't tell you a G.o.dd.a.m.n thing.

Jeff had lived with it his whole life and even he had trouble understanding it.

It always started with fatigue -- not just at bedtime (as if there was such a thing for him) but at odd times: during lunch, or a shower, or a tennis match. The sudden exhaustion would force him to lie down and shut his eyes. And start to dreams -- no, it wasn't dreams. Rather, Jeff would... become someone else, somewhere else.

If any of these witch doctors at Duke Medical had ever listened to him they could've checked it out themselves. Yesterday Jeff had asked Dr. Rosten -- the psychiatrist on this team -- if he wanted the name and address. Call him up, Jeff had suggested. Clyde Wa.s.serman, 102 Marco Rd., Wilmington, Delaware. You want the zip code? I've got it. You want to know what Clyde wore last night?

You've come to the right place. Or ask me something about Wilmington. I've never been there so how come I know it like the back of my hand?

Jeff had never been to Delaware (not as Jeff anyway). The farthest north he'd been was Virginia when he and his father drove up one weekend last fall to a Duke-UVA football game. And except for two weeks in Jamaica, he'd spent nearly all his life in North Carolina -- the first eighteen years in Greensboro, the last three at school in Durham.

But he knew Delaware intimately: the shortcut to Phipps's Gulf, the liquor stores with the best prices, the street corners where you could get decent cocaine.

He knew all this and more because whenever he slept, that's where Mr. Sandman sent him -- to his other life, the one in Wilmington.

Clyde, of course, saw it differently; to him Jeff was the dream. Unlike Jeff's parents who had taken their son to every doctor this side of the Mason-Dixon line, Clyde's parents had never bothered. At one point they had thought about taking Clyde to a psychiatrist but Mr. Wa.s.serman decided against it -- "A hundred bucks an hour for medical horses.h.i.+t." Instead, once when Clyde was sixteen, his father came into his room and said: "Just shut the f.u.c.k up about that guy in North Carolina." From that moment on Clyde had not mentioned it.

A smile lit Jeff's face as he left the cla.s.sroom. Time to party. This was the first semester in three and a half years of college that he didn't get stuck with an exam on the last day of exam period. Now another semester was history; seven down, one to go. He thought he'd done well on the test but right now he didn't care: Monetary Theory 305 was a b.i.t.c.h (especially when Havrilesky taught it) and Jeff was just glad to finally get it over with.

As he left the gothic building a rush of cold air blasted his face. Finally, Christmas break. He hesitated at the top of the stairs and a group of students hurried past him. In the distance, he saw students loading their cars. Some would stick around for parties tonight and tomorrow night and then head home.

When the crowd thinned he noticed Cynthia coming up the stairs toward him. She was as pretty as any girl on campus and that said a lot. She reached the top, threw her arms around him, and kissed the back of his neck. "How'd you do?"

she asked.

"Good, I think; let's go celebrate."

"I thought you might want to do that," she said, pulling two cans of Miller Lite from her purse.

"Very thoughtful of you." The beer had been kept cold by the December air.

The very best thing about going to a private school, Jeff thought, is being able to drink alcohol outdoors any time of the day or night.

They walked slowly back to Jeff's room, arms around each other, jackets pressed tightly together. When they got there, Jeff unlocked the door with his left hand, leaving his right arm around Cynthia. As they stepped inside she said what he hoped she would: "You know the parties don't start for five or six hours."

"I know."

She wrapped her other arm securely around him. "Good thing you don't have a roommate," she said immediately before kissing him.

He closed the door with his foot since his hands were busy undressing Cynthia -- first the white winter jacket, then her sweater, then her slacks. Her hands were busy unzipping his jeans. First things first. Jeff laughed at how tangled up they were, and they were still tangled when they fell naked in bed. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were as perfect as her face and legs and Jeff gently ran both his hands over every inch of her. Then he began to kiss the soft body his hands had just caressed. Soon he was completely on top of her and she pulled him closer and closer, not stopping until he was inside her. The coldness on his back felt good now that the warmth of the friction between his body and hers balanced it. He couldn't think about kissing her and being inside her at once because it felt so good it hurt. A few moments later he hardly realized that he had come, because at the time he was thinking of the kissing.

Jeff pulled the blankets over them for protection from the winter. Twenty minutes later, as they made love for a second time, the blankets and sheets fell to the floor and Jeff would have reached down to pick them up if only he wasn't having so much fun.

Clyde woke perspiring. Cynthia was too good to be true -- just too good. If it weren't for Jeff, Clyde thought, the only way I'd get to f.u.c.k girls like that would be to rape them. By far the best thing about dreaming Jeff's life was the girls he went to bed with: gorgeous girls -- girls who looked like Cynthia. Like Karen Baker from two years ago, and Sarah McLeary from Jeff's junior year.

As Clyde's head cleared he became aware of his alarm clock screaming in the background. Reaching to turn it off, he felt a puddle of warm s.e.m.e.n in his already filthy sheets. Sometimes that happened when Jeff made love. The suddenly quiet bedroom brought back the extreme fatigue. It overtook Clyde; he buried his head in the pillow and let himself return to North Carolina for a few minutes.

"I hate that," Cynthia said, her voice barely registering.