Karl Wagner: The Year's Best Horror Stories 11

“Good try, good try!” Jerry cried, removing the blindfold. “Let’s give this brave fellow a hand!”

A few people clapped. Most just watched, hands at their sides or in pockets, as Jerry filled a beer mug and gave it to Dal. “Try again later, pardner. Everyone’s welcome to try as often as he likes. It only costs ten dollars. Ten little dollars for a chance at a thousand. Who’s next?”

“Me!” called the pale girl beside Clark.

“Folks, we have us a first! What’s your name, young lady?”

“Biff,” she said.

“Biff will be the very first lady ever to try her hand at The Grab.”

“Don’t do it,” whispered a chubby girl nearby. “Please.”

“Lay off, huh?”

“It’s not worth it.”

“Is to me,” she muttered, and pulled out a ten-dollar bill. She handed her purse to the other girl, then stepped toward the bar.

“Thank you, Biff,” Jerry said, taking her money.

She removed her hat, and tossed it onto the counter. She was wearing a T-shirt. She didn’t take it off. Leaning forward, she stared down into the tank. She looked sick.

Jerry tied the blindfold in place. “All set?” he asked.

Biff nodded. Her open hand trembled over the surface of the fluid. Then it slipped in, small and pale in the murkiness. Slowly, it eased downward. It sunk closer and closer to the face, never stopping until her fingertips lit on the forehead. They stayed there, motionless. I glanced up. She was tight and shaking as if naked in an icy wind.

Her fingers moved down the head. One touched an open eye. Flinching away, her hand clutched into a fist.

Slowly, her fingers fluttered open. They stretched out, trembled along the sides of the nose, and settled in the moustache. For seconds, they didn’t move. The upper lip wasn’t visible, as though it had shrunken under the moustache.

Biff’s thumb slid along the edges of the teeth. Her fingertips moved off the moustache. They pressed against the lower teeth.

Biff started to moan.

Her fingers trembled off the teeth. They spread open over the gaping mouth, and started down.

With a shriek, she jerked her hand from the tank. She tugged the blindfold off. Face twisted with horror, she shook her hand in the air and gazed at it. She rubbed it on her T-shirt and looked at it again, gasping for air.

“Good try!” Jerry said. “The little lady made a gutsy try, didn’t she, folks?”

A few of the group clapped. She stared out at us, blinking and shaking her head. Then she grabbed her hat, took the complimentary beer, and scurried off the bar.

Clark patted her shoulder. “Good going,” he said.

“Not good enough,” she muttered. “Got spooked.”

“Who’ll be next?” Jerry asked.

“Yours truly,” Clark said, holding up a pair of fives. He winked at me. “It’s a cinch,” he said, and boosted himself onto the bar. Grinning, he tipped his hat to the small silent crowd. “I have a little surprise for y’all,” he said in his thickest cowboy drawl. “You see, folks…” He paused and beamed. “Not even my best friend, Steve, knows about this, but I work full time as a mortician’s assistant.”

That brought a shocked murmur from his audience, including me.

“Why, folks, I’ve handled more dead meat than your corner butcher. This is gonna be a sure cinch.”

With that, he skinned off his shirt and knelt behind the tank. Jerry, looking a bit amused, tied the blindfold over his eyes.

“All set?” the bartender asked.

“Ready to lose your diamond ring?”

“Give it a try.”

Clark didn’t hesitate. He plunged his arm into the solution and drove his open hand downward. His fingers found the dead man’s hair. They patted him on the head. “Howdy pardner,” he said.

Then his fingers slid over the ghastly face. They tweaked the nose, they plucked the moustache. “Say ahhhh.”

He slipped his forefinger deep between the parted teeth, and his scream ripped through the silence as the mouth snapped shut.

His hand shot upward, a cloud of red behind it. It popped from the surface, spraying us with formaldehyde and blood.

Clark jerked the blindfold down and stared at his hand. The forefinger was gone.

“My finger !” he shrieked. “My God, my finger! It bit… it…”

Cheers and applause interrupted him, but they weren’t for Clark.

“Look at him go!” Dal yelled, pointing at the head.

“Go, Alf, go!” cried another.

“Alf?” I asked Biff.

“Alf Packer,” she said without looking away from the head. “The famous cannibal.”

The head seemed to grin as it chewed.

I turned to Biff, “You knew?”

“Sure. Any wimp’ll make The Grab, if he doesn’t know. When you know, it takes real guts.”

“Who’s next?” Jerry asked.

“Here’s a volunteer,” Biff called out, clutching my arm. I jerked away from her, but was restrained by half a dozen mutilated hands. “Maybe you’ll get lucky,” she said. “Alf’s a lot more tame after a good meal.”

Born in Liverpool on January 4, 1946, Ramsey Campbell has devoted twenty years of writing to convincing readers to stay far away from that city. “The Show Goes On,” set in Campbell’s favorite boyhood cinema (since knocked down), is not due to result in any influx of tourism, either. The fact that Campbell has now moved across the river to Merseyside may well mean that all those horrors were coming home to roost.

Ramsey Campbell was sixteen when he wrote his first book, The Inhabitant of the Lake & Less Welcome Tenants (Arkham House, 1964)—thereby becoming both an inspiration and an object of envy for every fledgling horror writer. Recovering from this adolescent infatuation with the works of H.P. Lovecraft, Campbell moved rapidly to develop his own brand of horror fiction. He has published three subsequent collections of short fiction: Demons by Daylight, The Height of the Scream, and, last year, Dark Companions, from which this story is taken. For collectors, the British edition of Dark Companions contains four stories not in the U.S. edition, and vice versa. Campbell has lately come on as one of the major horror novelists as well, with the publication of The Doll Who Ate His Mother, The Face That Must Die, To Wake the Dead (revised and retitled for the U.S. edition as The Parasite), and The Nameless. Just now he is completing work on The Incarnate and preparing to write For the Rest of Their Lives. Campbell somehow finds time to edit anthologies as well, with Superhorror (retitled The Far Reaches of Fear), New Terrors (two volumes), New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, and now The Gruesome Book. This last contains the stories that frightened Ramsey Campbell as a child. Buy one for your kid.

The nails were worse than rusty; they had snapped. Under cover of several coats of paint, both the door and its frame had rotted. As Lee tugged at the door it collapsed toward him with a sound like that of an old cork leaving a bottle.

He hadn’t used the storeroom since his father had nailed the door shut to keep the rats out of the shop. Both the shelves and the few items which had been left in the room—an open tin of paint, a broken-necked brush—looked merged into a single mass composed of grime and dust.

He was turning away, having vaguely noticed a dark patch that covered much of the dim wall at the back of the room, when he saw that it wasn’t dampness. Beyond it he could just make out rows of regular outlines like teeth in a gaping mouth: seats in the old cinema.

He hadn’t thought of the cinema for years. Old resurrected films on television, shrunken and packaged and robbed of flavor, never reminded him. It wasn’t only that Cagney and Bogart and the rest had been larger than life, huge hovering faces like ancient idols; the cinema itself had had a personality—the screen framed by twin theater boxes from the days of the music hall, the faint smell and muttering of gaslights on the walls, the manager’s wife and daughter serving in the auditorium and singing along with the musicals. In the years after the war you could get in for an armful of lemonade bottles, or a bag of vegetables if you owned one of the nearby allotments; there had been a greengrocer’s old weighing machine inside the paybox. These days you had to watch films in concrete warrens, if you could afford to go at all.