Karl Wagner: The Year's Best Horror Stories 11

And Raylee.

Raylee came last; was last to slip silently and trembling through the portal of the yellow front door, was last to slip even more silently down the creaking cellar steps to the Poe-cellar below. She came cat silent and cautious, holding her breath—was indeed dressed cat-like, in whiskered mask, black tights, and black rope tail, all black to mix silently with the black basement.

No one saw her come in; only the black-beetle eyes of Poe over the apple tub noted her arrival.

The apple tub was well in use by now, a host of devils, ghosts, and Frankensteins clamoring around it and eagerly awaiting a turn at its game under Poe’s watchful eyes.

“I got one!” shouted one red devil, triumphantly pulling a glossy apple from his mouth; no devil mask here, but a red-painted face, red and dripping from the tub’s water. It was Peter, one of the taunting boys in Raylee’s class.

Raylee hung back in the shadows.

“I got one!” shouted a Frankenstein monster.

“And me!” from his Bride. Two crisp red apples were held aloft for Poe’s inspection.

“And me!” “And me!” shouted Draculas, hunchbacks, little green men.

Spooks and wolfmen shouted too.

One apple left.

“Who hasn’t tried yet?” cried Cleo, resplendent in witch’s garb. She was a miniature Ms. Grinby. She leaned her broom against the tub, called for attention.

“Who hasn’t tried?”

Raylee tried to sink into the shadows’ protection but could not. A deeper darkness was what she needed; she was spotted.

“Raylee! Raylee!” shouted Cleo. “Come get your apple!” It was a singsong, as Raylee held her hands out, apple-less, and stepped into the circle of ghouls.

She was terrified. She trembled so hard she could not hold her hands still on the side of the metal tub as she leaned over it. She wanted to bolt from the room, up the stairs and out through the yellow doorway into the dark night.

“Dunk! Dunk!” the ghoul circle began to chant, impatient.

Raylee stared down into the water, saw her dark-reflection and Poe’s mingled by the ripples of the bobbing apple.

“Dunk! Dunk!” the circle chanted.

Raylee pushed herself from the reflection, stared at the faces surrounding her. “I don’t want to!”

“Dunk!…” the chant faded.

Two dozen cool eyes surveyed her behind eye-holes, weighed her dispassionately in the sharp light of peer pressure. There were ghouls behind those ghoulish masks and eyes.

Someone hissed a laugh as the circle tightened around Raylee. Like a battered leaf with its stem caught under a rock in a high wind, she trembled.

Cleo, alone outside the circle, stepped quickly into it to protect her. She held out her hands. “Raylee—” she began soothingly.

The circle tightened still more, undaunted. Above them all, Poe’s eyes in the low crimson light seemed to brighten with anticipation.

Desperate, Cleo suddenly said, “Raylee, tell us a story.”

A moment of tension, and then a relaxed “Ah” from the circle.

Raylee shivered.

“Yes, tell us a story!”

This from someone in the suffocating circle, a wolfman, or perhaps a vampire.

“No, please,” Raylee begged. Her cat whiskers and cat tail shivered. “I don’t want to!”

“Story! Story!” the circle began to chant.

“No, please!”

“Tell us the rest of the other story!”

This from Peter in the back of the circle. A low voice, a command.

Another “Ah.”

“Yes, tell us!”

Raylee held her hands to her ears. “No!”

“Tell us!”

“ No! ”

“Tell us now!”

“I thought you were my friends!” Raylee threw her cat-paw hands out at them, her eyes begging.

“Tell us.”

A stifled cry escaped Raylee’s throat.

Instinctively, the circle widened. They knew she would tell now. They had commanded her. To be one of them, she would do what they told her to do.

Cleo stepped helplessly back into the circle, leaving Raylee under Poe’s twisted grin.

Raylee stood alone shivering for a moment. Then, her eyes on the floor, she ceased trembling, became very calm and still. There was a moment of silence. In the dark basement, all that could be heard was the snap of a candle in a far corner and the slapping of water against the lone apple in the tub behind her. When she looked up her eyes were dull, her voice quiet-calm.

She began to speak.

“They took Pumpkin Head away after that, and they put him in a place with crazy people in it. There was screaming all day and night. Someone was always screaming, or hitting his head against the wall, or crying all the time. Pumpkin Head was very lonely, and very scared.

“But Pumpkin Head’s parents loved him more than he ever knew. They decided they couldn’t let him stay in that place any longer. So they made a plan, a quiet plan.

“One day, when they went to visit him, they dressed him up in a disguise and carried him away. They carried him far away where no one would ever look for him, all the way across the country. They hid him, and kept him disguised while they tried to find some way to help him. And after a long search, they found a doctor.

“And the doctor did magical things. He worked for two years on Pumpkin Head, on his face and on his body. He cut into Pumpkin Head’s face, and changed it. With plastic, he made it into a real face. He changed the rest of Pumpkin Head’s head too, and gave him real hair. And he changed Pumpkin Head’s body.

“Pumpkin Head’s parents paid the doctor a lot of money, and the doctor did the work of a genius.

“He changed Pumpkin Head completely.”

Raylee paused, and a light came into her dull eyes. The circle, and Poe above them, waited with indrawn breath.

Waited to say “Ah.”

“He changed Pumpkin Head into a little girl.”

Breath was pulled back deeper, or let out in little gasps.

The light grew in Raylee’s eyes.

“There were things that Pumpkin Head, now not Pumpkin Head any more, had to do to be a girl. He had to be careful how he dressed, and how he acted. He had to be careful how he talked, and he always had to be calm. He was very frightened of what would happen if he didn’t stay calm. For his face was really just a wonderful plastic one. The real Pumpkin Head was still inside, locked in, waiting to come out.”

Raylee looked up at them, and her voice suddenly became something different. Hard and rasping.

Her eyes were stoked coals.

“All he ever wanted was friends.”

Her cat mask fell away. Her little girl face became soft and bloated and began to grow as if someone were blowing up a balloon inside her. Her hair began to pull into the scalp, forming a circle knot at the top. Creases appeared up and down her face.

With a sickening, rubber-inflated sound, the sound of a melon breaking, Raylee’s head burst open to its true shape. Her eyes, ears, and nose became soft orange triangles, her mouth a lazy, grinning crescent. She began to breathe with harsh effort, and her voice became a sharp, wheezing lisp.

“He only wanted friends.”

Slowly, with care, Raylee reached down into her costume for what lay hidden there.

She drew it out.

In the black cellar, under Poe’s approving glare, there were screams.

“My lunch and dinner,” she said, “my dinner and breakfast.”

COPYRIGHT ©, 1983, BY DAW BOOKS, INC.

All Rights Reserved.

Cover art by Michael Whelan.

FIRST PRINTING, NOVEMBER 1983

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

PRINTED IN U.S.A.

Wickerman eBooks