Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year – Volume One

I turned to behold a large pear-shaped man, smooth-faced, hairless as a cave salamander. His face was oddly blurred, and he may have tried to remedy this lack of definition by the application of eyeliner to his forehead, but the eyebrows created in this manner only seemed to emphasize the absence of any assertive facial features. He wore a black sweatshirt with the hood thrown back and pleated black pants. The contours of his sweatshirt suggested lumpy pudding flesh beneath; pale hands, small as a child's, sprouted from black sleeves. I assumed that this much strangeness had to be calculated, that he was some sort of artist.

"Let us make of each other the acquaintance," he said. I'm not the least bit fastidious when it comes to drinking companions, so we moved to a corner booth, and we drank a lot of beer, which he must have paid for, because my bar tab didn't grow at all that night.

It's not clear what Derrick Thorn revealed of himself. I came away with the knowledge that English was not-surprise!-his native language ("It fall down on my tongue, these English"), but if he told me the country he called home, my brain failed to log it. He was in some sort of business requiring a lot of travel, and he lived alone. He must have volunteered this info; I know I didn't ask. A maudlin, drunken state had overtaken me, and at such times a drinking companion is merely an opportunity for a monologue. I told him I was divorced, unemployed, and paying child support to a woman so mean that her death would cause a thousand of Hell's toughest demons to opt for early retirement. I was exaggerating, out of bitterness and an alcohol-induced love of hyperbole.

Derrick nodded as I spoke. At some point during the evening, he took out a handkerchief and mopped the sweat from his brow, eradicating one eyebrow and smearing the other.

I was flickering in and out of a blackout, that alcoholic state in which the mind visits the moment, departs, and returns sporadically, illuminating scenes as might the world's slowest strobe. A moment that my mind chose to save consisted of Derrick, solemn and slick-faced, leaning toward me and saying, "At end times, the penguins will remember those who friended them." I recall this (now) because, in the context of whatever I was saying (and I can't remember what that was), it seemed profound.

It was very late when I found myself back in my room. I turned the television on while waiting for the floor to settle. Another nature documentary was in progress. Monkeys were eating mud.

When I woke in the morning, the television was taking it easy, some people slumped in sofas, talking about social ills with the calm resignation of people who only expect things to get worse.

I can't always tell when I'm ill, because I drink a lot, and the aftermath of drinking has many flu-like symptoms. But I was sneezing in the morning, and my forehead felt as hot as heated asphalt. My thoughts were trying to devour each other, a sign, I've found, of fever.

I thought of calling Victoria and telling her I couldn't make it, but she'd accuse me of being a selfish drunken bastard who cared nothing for anyone other than himself. I hate defending myself against accusations that are fundamentally true, so I made some coffee and drank it and rallied as best I could.

At night, I empty the contents of my pants pockets on the floor, and I was reassigning these items (car keys, lighter, artfully wadded-up bills, sundry coins, pens, et cetera) to the pockets of a clean pair of jeans when I found a business card of the inexpensive thermal-printed sort you might purchase from an Internet site for a pittance. It read:

Derrick Thorn

businesses • helping persons • solving problems

good deals by mutual bargain

friendship and opportunity guaranteed

please be calling at ”

A telephone number was hand-printed on the other side of the card.

Well, I thought, not a misspelled word in the lot. Not that it made any sense. I tossed the card in the nightstand's drawer, where it would lie with other business cards, many of unknown provenance.

I got dressed, regarded myself in the bathroom mirror, said, "If no one has told you they love you today, there's a good reason for that," and left my apartment. Evil Ed was in the hall, a garbage bag on his shoulder, heading to the stairs that led to the dumpster out back. He nodded to me and I nodded back, neither of us compelled to smile or speak.

It was snowing, slow dizzy wet flakes that turned black in the gutters. Aside from a couple of homeless people hunkered in doorways and a skeletal dog that was tearing apart a black plastic trash bag, spilling empty beer cans into the street, it was quiet the way Sunday mornings are in my neighborhood. The God of Church has either got you, swept you up and dragged you into some storefront salvation shop, or you are lying low, hardly breathing, feeling the oppressive holiness of the day coming for you like a hearse.

We were in the holiday season, almost Thanksgiving, and I could already feel Christmas bearing down on me, a black cloud of obligations and money-draining events. My bank account was no longer being fed by a salary-BC Graphics had fired me three weeks ago for excellent reasons that have no part in this narrative-and I hadn't informed Victoria of this reversal in my fortunes. I couldn't imagine her saying anything helpful.

Victoria, my ex, has never entirely approved of me. She married me, I suspect, because her father

despised me. In marrying me against his wishes, she was getting back at him for being a distant, aloof parent during her formative years. As time went by, the old man warmed to me. I turned out to be his ally in a sea of women-five daughters, no sons, a harridan of a wife!-and Victoria felt betrayed.

I married Victoria because I loved her, and, in the fullness of time, that love disappeared as though a magician had snapped his fingers.

Behold this shiny love. Keep your eyes on it, ladies and gentlemen. Are you watching? Voila! Gone in a flash of smoke, vanished in a whoop, and before I could catch my breath, there it was again, transformed, love sauntering in from offstage, grinning, the magician's misdirection flawless, as good as a miracle, there: Danny Boy Silvers, our son.

He was five now, and I was on my way into the heart of the suburbs to pick him up and take him to the zoo in West Orange.

"Can we stop at MacDonald's?" he asked, looking out the car's passenger window at the falling snow.

"If you don't tell your mother," I said. This was a Sunday tradition, covert MacDonald's, a small father-son conspiracy against a powerful regime that could crush us without raising a sweat.

"I won't tell," Danny said. He waited. Waited and grew impatient. "Why shouldn't I tell?"

"Because she'd slap us so hard our spines would fly out our butts!" I said.

Danny giggled.

"She'd stomp us so hard we'd pop like bugs on a griddle."

My son laughed, leaning forward.

"She'd knock us all the way into next year. She'd whack us till our tongues jumped out of our heads. And once a tongue gets away, it burrows down into the earth, quick as a snake, and you have to get a spade and dig like crazy, and by the time you catch it and put it back in your mouth… well, it doesn't taste very good, I can tell you that."

A stand-up comic is only as good as his audience. My audience was small but enthusiastic, giggling and hooting, his knees bouncing, his nose running, spittle flying.

"She'd shake us until we were so dizzy we couldn't tell up from down, and we would fall right into the sky and keep on falling until our asses hit the moon!"

In the MacDonald's we both ordered Egg McMuffins, hash browns, and chocolate shakes, the major food groups.

"When we go to the zoo, can we see the snakes?" Danny asked.