Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Vol 15

Me, I was never afraid of the dark. It was Jeremy who bothered me — Jeremy with his black rubber spiders in my lunchbox, Jeremy with his guttural demon whisper (I’m coming to get you, Simon) just as I was drifting off to sleep, Jeremy with his stupid Vincent Prince laugh (Mwha-ha-ha-ba-ha), like some cheesy mad scientist, when he figured the joke had gone far enough. By the time I was walking, I was already shell-shocked, flinching every time I came around a corner.

I remember this time, I was five years old and I had fallen asleep on the sofa. I woke up to see Jeremy looming over me in this crazy Hallowe’en mask he’d bought: horns and pebbled skin and a big leering grin, the works. Only I didn’t realize it was Jeremy, not until he cut loose with that crazy laugh of his, and by then it was too late.

Things got worse when we left Starkville. The new house was smaller and we had to share a bedroom. That was fine with me. I was seven by then, and I had the kind of crazy love for my big brother that only little kids can feel. The thing was, when he wasn’t tormenting me, Jeremy was a great brother — like this one time he got a Chuck Foreman card in a package of Topps and he just handed it over to me because he knew the Vikings were my favorite team that year.

The room thing was hard on Jeremy, though. He’d reached that stage of adolescence when your voice has these alarming cracks and you spend a lot of time locked in the bathroom tracking hair growth and… well, you know, you were a kid once, right? So the nights got worse. I couldn’t even turn to Mom for help. She was sick at that time, and she had this frayed, wounded look. Plus, she and Dad were always talking in these strained whispers. You didn’t want to bother either one of them if you could help it.

Which left me and Jeremy alone in our bedroom. It wasn’t much to look at, just this high narrow room with twin beds and an old milk crate with a lamp on it. Out the window you could see one half-dead crab-apple tree — a crap-apple, Jeremy called it — and a hundred feet of crumbling pavement and a rusting 1974 El Camino which our neighbor had up on blocks back where the woods began. There weren’t any street lights that close to the edge of town, so it was always dark in there at night.

That was when Jeremy would start up with some crap he’d seen in a movie or something. “I heard they found a whole shitload of bones when they dug the foundation of this house,” he’d say, and he’d launch into some nutty tale about how it turned out to be an Indian burial ground, just crazy stuff like that. After a while, it would get so I could hardly breathe. Then Jeremy would unleash that crazy laugh of his. “C’mon, Si,” he’d say, “you know I’m only kidding.”

He was always sorry — genuinely sorry, you could tell by the look on his face — but it never made any difference the next night. It was like he forgot all about it. Besides, he always drifted off to sleep, leaving me alone in the dark to ponder open portals to Hell or parallel worlds or whatever crazy stuff he’d dreamed up that night.

The days weren’t much better. The house was on this old winding road with woods on one side and there weren’t but a few neighbors, and none of them had any kids. It was like somebody had set off a bomb that just flattened everybody under twenty — like one of those neutron bombs, only age-specific.

So that was my life — interminable days of boredom, torturous insomniac nights. It was the worst summer of my life, with nothing to look forward to but a brand-new school come the fall. That’s why I found myself poking around in the basement about a week after we moved in. Nobody had bothered to unpack — nobody had bothered to do much of anything all summer — and I was hoping to find my old teddy bear in one of the boxes.

Mr Fuzzy had seen better days — after six years of hard use, he literally had no hair, not a single solitary tuft — and I’d only recently broken the habit of dragging him around with me everywhere I went. I knew there’d be a price to pay for backsliding — Jeremy had been riding me about Mr Fuzzy for a year — but desperate times call for desperate measures.

I’d just finished rescuing him from a box of loose Legos and Jeremy’s old Star Wars action figures when I noticed a bundle of rags stuffed under the furnace. I wasn’t inclined to spend any more time than necessary in the basement-it smelled funny and the light slanting through the high dirty windows had a hazy greenish quality, like a pond you wouldn’t want to swim in — but I found myself dragging Mr Fuzzy over toward the furnace all the same.

Somebody had jammed the bundle in there good, and when it came loose, clicking metallically, it toppled me back on my butt. I stood, brushing my seat off with one hand, Mr Fuzzy momentarily forgotten. I squatted to examine the bundle, a mass of grease-stained rags tied off with brown twine. The whole thing was only a couple feet long.

I loosened the knot and pulled one end of the twine. The bundle unwrapped itself, spilling a handful of rusty foot-long skewers across the floor. There were half a dozen of them, all with these big metal caps. I shook the rag. A scalpel tumbled out, and then a bunch of other crap, every bit of it as rusty as the skewers. A big old hammer with a wooden head and a wicked-looking carving knife and one of those tapered metal rods that butchers use to sharpen knives. Last of all a set of ivory-handled flatware.

I reached down and picked up the fork.

That was when I heard the stairs creak behind me.

“Mom’s gonna kill you,” Jeremy said.

I jumped a little and stole a glance over my shoulder. He was standing at the foot of the stairs, a rickety tier of backless risers. That’s when I remembered Mom’s warning that I wasn’t to fool around down here. The floor was just dirt, packed hard as concrete, and Mom always worried about getting our clothes dirty.

“Not if you don’t tell her,” I said.

“Besides, you’re messing around with the furnace,” Jeremy said.

“No, I’m not.”

“Sure you are.” He crossed the room and hunkered down at my side. I glanced over at him. Let me be honest here: I was nobody’s ideal boy next door. I was a scrawny, unlovely kid, forever peering out at the world through a pair of lenses so thick that Jeremy had once spent a sunny afternoon trying to ignite ants with them. The changeling, my mother sometimes called me, since 1 seemed to have surfaced out of somebody else’s gene pool.

Jeremy, though, was blond and handsome and already broad-shouldered. He was the kind of kid everybody wants to sit with in the lunchroom, quick and friendly and capable of generous strokes of kindness. He made such a gesture now, clapping me on the shoulder. “Geez, Si, that’s some weird-looking shit. Wonder how long it’s been here?”

“I dunno,” I said, but I remembered the landlord telling Dad the house was nearly a hundred and fifty years old. And hasn’t had a lick of work since, I’d heard Dad mutter under his breath.

Jeremy reached for one of the skewers and I felt a little bubble of emotion press against the bottom of my throat. He turned the thing over in his hands and let it drop to the floor. “Beats the hell out of me,” he said.

“You’re not gonna tell Mom, are you?”

“Nah.” He seemed to think a moment. “Course I might use that scalpel to dissect Mr Fuzzy.” He gazed at me balefully, and then he slapped my shoulder again. “Better treat me right, kid.”

A moment later I heard the basement door slam behind me.

I’d been clutching the fork so tightly that it had turned hot in my hand. My knuckles grinned up at me, four bloodless white crescents. I felt so strange that I just let it tumble to the floor. Then I rewrapped the bundle, and shoved it back under the furnace.