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

“Could you come up?” Trudy responded rather less than steadily. “I’m shut in and I can’t seem to find…”

“Where are you? Hold on.” Jonathan’s mother ran upstairs and halted at the top. “Where’s Trudy?” she asked him. “What are you-”

“I’m in here, Esther.”

“What on earth do you think you’re doing, Jonathan? Let go at once.”

He was afraid that if she opened the door she would see his grandmother. She had to prise his fingers off the knob in order to let Trudy out. As Trudy fled onto the landing, he saw that the room was still unlit. “Trudy, I’m sorry,” his mother cried. “Tell me what happened.”

“Just an attempt to scare me off,” Trudy said more or less evenly. “I’m afraid someone doesn’t want me here.”

“My grandma doesn’t. She doesn’t like you making mum say bad things about her.”

“I think you’d better get ready for bed and stay in it,” his mother told him.

The women followed him into the hall and watched him trudge, weighed down by injustice and luggage, to his room. Was Trudy staying? His grandmother wouldn’t have to go far to find her, then. The thought failed to lessen his dismay at his grandmother’s state. He raced through preparing for bed and took as much refuge in it as he could. Trudy and his mother were murmuring downstairs, largely incomprehensibly. “He’ll have to get used to it,” he heard his mother say.

Did she mean Trudy or her own criticisms of his grandmother? How much would he have to pray to compensate for whatever she’d said over the weekend? He set about chanting his plea, only to wonder if it was too late. He couldn’t bring any other prayers to mind. Before long his mind gave up being awake.

He dreamed Trudy was inciting his mother to say worse and worse — at least, he hoped it was a dream. “That’s right, keep pulling me to bits,” he seemed to hear his grandmother complain. “Pull some more off me.” She’d go to Trudy in the night, he thought, hoping she would. The idea transfixed him with panic. At first he couldn’t understand why, even when he floundered awake — and then he realised how much of the fault was his. He’d willed his grandmother to look her worst for Trudy and his tormentors in the schoolyard.

He couldn’t deny he was glad that Trudy had crept into his room and was stooping to rouse him. When he blinked his eyes wide, however, it wasn’t Trudy’s face he saw looming closer in the dimness. What the boys had said about his grandmother had overtaken her. Even if she couldn’t see him, she could grope in search of him. He cowered under the bedclothes and tried to pray but could think of no words. Surely the noise he was making would bring his mother, or Trudy would do. Perhaps they were punishing him, because all it attracted was the sensation of less than hands plucking at the bedclothes. The time until dawn felt like for ever, and dawn might only show him what was waiting to be seen.

Steve Nagy lives in Michigan with his wife and two daughters. He studied journalism at Kent State University in Ohio, and worked as a reporter and copy editor for several newspapers in the Midwest before becoming a phone support rep for a software company that services the newspaper industry. Nagy’s story “The Revelation of St Elvis the Impersonator” recently appeared in Electric Velocipede, and he is working on various short stories and two novels.

One of the novels is a horror tale set during the First World War and the Roaring Twenties. The other tackles the issues of cloning and identity. When he isn’t writing or spending his free time with his family, Nagy works as fiction editor for the fan lifestyle eZine Mars Dust.

“‘The Hanged Man of Oz’ is the first story I ever sold,” reveals the author, “and its genesis was an unlikely series of coincidences. I had never heard the urban legend about the hanging until my wife Melissa and I went to a dinner party with some friends. One was a fanatic about the movie, and he played the tape for our kids while we ate dinner. As the video reached the scene at the Tin Man’s cabin, he told me about the Hanged Man.

“When I saw the ‘hanging’ I wasn’t sure whether the story was true or not. That day, I thought it was a bird. But the legend stayed with me and I couldn’t stop thinking about how people let their imagination trick them. I wrote the tale thinking about those ‘tricks’ and the characters did take on a life of their own beyond the page. I know I can’t watch the film any longer without pausing at the hanging scene, so I can understand the power found in obsession.

“I submitted the story several places before sending it to Dennis Etchison to consider for an HWA anthology he was editing. He turned it down for that book, but said he had another in mind for which he might want it. That anthology turned out to be Gathering the Bones. When I told my family I had sold the story, my oldest daughter Lindsey was especially excited because Bones had a story by Ray Bradbury in it and her freshman English class was reading Fahrenheit 451. She thought that was the coolest thing about my sale.”

Knee-high grass dominated the scene, thick blades uprooting the foundation of a sagging cabin, pushing aside cobbles in the shaded road, trees circled the clearing and an abandoned orchard lay behind the cabin, straight rows masked by weeds and windrows of dead leaves and forgotten fruit.

A pastoral display except for the people posed throughout — two middle-aged men, one dressed as a hobo, the second clad in a dirty threadbare uniform; an old woman sporting too much rouge and mascara, skinny legs visible beneath the hem of a little girl’s dress; and a dead man, hanging from a tree, his feet twitching at odd moments in time with some unheralded tune raised by the wind whistling through the forest.

Obsession is an art form.

And if you’re lucky it’s contagious.

Denise and I got together for dinner and drinks at her place. Our first date, although we saw each other in the apartment hall every day. I lived in 2B. She had moved into 2C in February. I’d made great strides, starting with an occasional nod and shared rides to work. I’d eventually thrown out an off-the-cuff comment about her hair, which she’d shorn from its ponytail length to a flapper-style skullcap. Guys should notice changes like that; it’s an easy way to score points.

After that first compliment, the progression from casual to intimate was natural. We left in the morning at the same time, talked about our days, compared notes on work. If you practice something enough, anything is possible. I knew the boy-next-door routine better than when to observe national holidays. And the Fourth of July doesn’t change from year to year.

Besides dinner and drinks, Denise made me sit down and watch The Wizard of Oz.

“You’ve seen this before, Michael?”

“Lots of times,” I said. “Not lately, though. Isn’t it usually on around Easter?”

“Until recently,” Denise said. “Ted Turner bought the rights and pulled it for theatrical release.”

Oz? God save me. I already regretted the date and struggled to keep an interested expression as Denise gave me the inside scoop. It was like a psychotic version of Entertainment Tonight.

When I was in college I worked at a greasy spoon as a busboy. The chef was a compact Italian named Ricky Silva who came across as uneducated, unhealthy, and gullible. I stayed late one night, and I found Silva poring over a stamp collection in a back booth. I questioned him about it, saying something crass because the idea of Silva as a philatelist didn’t match my preconceptions. He told me there were an infinite number of worlds. Each existed next to the other, always overlapping and occasionally intertwining. Learning about his deeper reality forced me to change my opinion of him.