Christopher Fowler - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 10

“Taylor? That you on those rickety old steps?”

He watches Jack Rayburn stumble out of the weeds crowding the front gate. “They ain’t rickety. Rebuilt ‘em last month.”

“Well, I sure wish you’d trim this monkey jungle back a tad. ‘Bout to scratch hell out of me.”

“Too much hell to scratch out, Jack. Least in my lifetime.”

Jack chuckles and sits down beside him. Taylor didn’t want company tonight, but he finds he’s glad to see his old friend.

“Here, brought you a Moon Pie.” Jack slaps the disk of chocolate-covered cardboard into Taylor’s hand. “Got it at the Circle K at Madison and McLean. I think that lady clerk is a man, what you think?”

“I think I wish my daddy’d lived long enough to buy cigarettes there. He might’ve asked that lady out.”

“Well, here’s to the sonovabitch!” Jack takes a big bite out of a Moon Pie of his own.

“Jesus, Jack. Ain’t it a little hot for that crap? Here, let me get you a beer.”

“It’s four in the morning, Taylor boy. Having spent a goodly part of this fine evening at Betty Boop’s Karaoke Club, I’m disinclined to imbibe further. Sorry you declined to join me, you inimical bastard.” Jack wiggles the remaining bit of Moon Pie. “Breakfast time.” He chews sloppily, frothing his lips white and brown. “Don’t. tell. me,” he says around another bite. “You’re working this late?”

“Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I think of a way to figure out doing a thing, and I like to start it, right then.” He tries to move his head away from Jack’s sickly sweet, Moon Pie smell. “Used to drive Angela crazy.”

“Unreasonable woman. She and the kids back, yet?”

“No. I haven’t heard from her.”

“Course not. If she was here, you wouldn’t be out on the porch drinking, and thinking up additional ways to torment this ancient southern structure.”

“Leave it, Jack. You’ll see, it’s going be a showplace.”

“I used to hear your daddy say that all the time, when we were kids, every time I came over. He’d sit in a broke-down davenport over, there where once-upon-a-time you had a porch, with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, and tell both us kids his big plans for his ‘showplace.’ Never saw him lift a hammer.”

“Tell me you never saw me with a tool.”

“Oh, you’re way different from your daddy. Beer in one hand, hammer in the other.” Jack finishes his snack. “You know you keep on like this, you’ll end up like Bobbie Thompson.”

“Wait. what’s happened to Bobbie?”

“I’m sorry — I thought you knew. Chimney fell on him out in that old shack of his. I kept telling him to hire a mason, but I guess he wanted to save some money and fix the brickwork himself. It was that old and crumbly stuff, should’ve been torn down a long time ago. This remodeling business -1 don’t know -1 think it’s for the birds.”

And that’s five. It’s a killer, friends.

Despite his declared misgivings Jack eventually accepts a beer, and then a couple more. Taylor stops himself after six — the more he drinks the sharper the fragrance of licorice, seasoned by a bitter cigarette smoke slipping out from under the steps.

“Before Daddy died he said this place was starting to look like an Orange Mound crackhouse. Said the whole neighborhood was going that way. He acted like it was my fault.”

“Your daddy’s idea of beautiful was that velvet portrait of Elvis as bullfighter hanging in The Lamplighter. You should’ve gotten Angela and the kids out of here a long time ago.”

“This place has been in the family almost a century and a half — you don’t just leave a home like this.”

“History’s a bitch, Taylor. After all those folks died in the yellow fever epidemics, what did the good citizens of Memphis do? Twenty-five thousand of them left. You’re always talking about the importance of history — can’t you learn from what they did? You’re the one drug me up to Elmwood to see the long mass grave where they buried some of ‘em. All those bodies with no names.”

“But that’s what I mean. I want to make a name for myself. If I restore this house good enough, maybe somebody will remember me.”

“History feeds on names, my friend. That’s pretty much all that making a name is worth. The past is a damned monster, or at least it can be. Better to have your children remember you, and their children if you’re lucky enough to live that long. Jesus Christ, Taylor, you gave up your kids for this goddamn house! You let your future slip away for a past that wasn’t all that great to begin with.”

The stench of cigarettes burns Taylor’s eyes. What other reason does he have to be crying? “I don’t know how to explain it any better. The past is just so much bigger a place to live in, you know? It’s so big it’s hard to think of much else sometimes. Like the Mississippi — you live by it long enough you don’t believe you’re thinking about it much at all when in fact it waters just about every sensation you have. It’s down in your bowels and in your walk — the pull and the flow and just the sheer size of it locks you into its rhythm.”

They talk into the new perfumes of morning, another night slipping away almost without Taylor noticing its passage.

Some time around dawn Taylor wakes up to light and air like the inside of a yellow bottle, and although he can sense the heat he cannot feel its presence. Jack lies only a few feet away, stretched out on his back in the weeds. The recollection of week-long summer sleepovers, a smaller but no less ornery Jack refusing the offer of ratty old blankets, hangs a smile on Taylor’s stiffened face. “Hey, Jack, come on. We’re too old for this shit.”

He nudges Jack with his boot. Brownish air drifts through the yard, and now his mouth tastes of stale cigarettes. He wipes his face with a hand sore with morning, attempts to loosen his tongue.

“Come on, Jack. I got beds inside. Things look pretty messed up, but I still got beds.”

Licorice and beer, cigarettes and azaleas. Taylor lifts his head and stares around the yard. Fragrance has come back to the azaleas, but was that the way they used to smell? Like garbage and exhaust and lettuce gone to black soup at the back of the refrigerator? Shadows shift across the yard and shift again, and he supposes the sun must be rising awfully fast to create such a dramatic change. Light suddenly knifes his eyes, a crack in his yellow bottle. “Jack? I can’t stay out here, Jack.”

He rises and goes to his friend, who stares up at him with wide eyes and a nosebleed, his face more yellow than Taylor’s morning. “Jack!” His mouth is open but he doesn’t say anything. Taylor can see that his friend’s gums have been bleeding, and there’s a web of bloody vomit on the chin. “Jack,” he whispers softly, but his friend is gone into a yellow fever dream. The past is a monster, Taylor boy. “Damn, Jack. You’re number six,” he says, and staggers back. Something’s here, he thinks, something vast and old as the river.

The house reels behind him, and when he turns around he throws his hands up over his face, sure it’s going to topple onto him. Windows swim in amber heat. Shingles flutter away like paper. Out of the door a boundless shade like a nicotine stain oozes across the missing boards and down the steps, through the weeds and out the gate, a faint hint of dead fish and stagnant water in its wake.

“It’s slipping away, Jack, it’s slipping away!” he cries and stumbles after, hands held out like a needy child.

But sometimes it just gets away from you. Sometimes it all just slips away. And chasing the past is like trying to recapture the breath that’s just left you, stinking of loss and regret, now floating out beyond the gate, now out on the river, making its own way to the sea.