Stephen (ed.) - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

And most mornings a beautiful daughter of Cambodia is seen walking beside the confluence of the Tonlé Sap and Mekong rivers. Like Cambodia, she plainly loves all things modern. She dresses in the latest fashion. Cambodian R&B whispers in her ear. She pauses in front of each new waterfront construction whether built by improvised scaffolding or erected with cranes. She buys noodles from the grumpy vendors with their tiny stoves. She carries a book or sits on the low marble wall to write letters and look at the boats, the monsoon clouds, and the dop-dops. She talks to the reflected sunlight on the river and calls it Father.

GLEN HIRSHBERG

Devil’s Smile

GLEN HIRSHBERG’S MOST RECENT collection, American Morons , was published by Earthling in 2006. The Two Sams , his first collection, won the International Horror Guild Award and was selected by Publishers Weekly and Locus as one of the best books of 2003.

Hirshberg is also the author of the novels The Snowman’s Children (published by Carroll & Graf in 2002) and Sisters of Baikal (forthcoming). With Dennis Etchison and Peter Atkins, he co-founded the Rolling Darkness Revue, a travelling ghost story performance troupe that tours the West Coast of the United States each October.

His fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including multiple appearances in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror , Dark Terrors 6 , The Dark , Inferno , Trampoline , Cemetery Dance , Summer Chills and Alone on the Darkside . He lives in the Los Angeles area with his wife and children.

“This story grew out of a delicious winter evening spent reading my children a book by Donald J. Sobol called True Sea Adventures ,” Hirshberg recalls, “in which we discovered the astonishing story of Charles F. Tallman, his boat the Christina , and the blizzard of January 7th, 1866.

“But the whole piece coalesced during my visit to New Bedford, Massachusetts, which still feels grim and blubber-soaked and strange even before you stick your head in the Whaling Museum and see the wall of implements for carving up whales at sea – as terrifying and poignant in their shapes as the gynaecological instruments for working on ‘mutant women’ in David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers – or the photographs of forests of baleen drying on the docks.”

“ In hollows of the liquid hills Where the long Blue Ridges run The flatter of no echo thrills For echo the seas have none; Nor aught that gives man back man’s strain – The hope of his heart, the dream in his brain .”

– Herman Melville

TURNING IN HIS SADDLE, Selkirk peered behind him through the flurrying snow, trying to determine which piece of debris had lamed his horse. All along what had been the carriage road, bits of driftwood, splintered sections of hull and harpoon handle, discarded household goods – pans, candlesticks, broken-backed books, empty lanterns – and at least one section of long, bleached-white jaw lay half-buried in the sand. The jaw still had baleen attached, and bits of blown snow had stuck in it, which made it look more recently alive than it should have.

Selkirk rubbed his tired eyes against the grey December morning and hunched deeper into his inadequate long coat as the wind whistled off the whitecaps and sliced between the dunes. The straw hat he wore more out of habit than hope of protection did nothing to warm him, and stray blond curls kept whipping across his eyes. Easing himself from the horse, Selkirk dropped to the sand.

He should have conducted his business here months ago. His surveying route for the still-fledgling United States Lighthouse Service had taken him in a crisscrossing loop from the tip of the Cape all the way up into Maine and back. He’d passed within fifty miles of Cape Roby Light and its singular keeper twice this fall, and both times had continued on. Why? Because Amalia had told him the keeper’s tale on the night he’d imagined she loved him? Or maybe he just hated coming back here even more than he thought he would. For all he knew, the keeper had long since moved on, dragging her memories behind her. She might even have died. So many did, around here. Setting his teeth against the wind, Selkirk wrapped his frozen fingers in his horse’s bridle and led her the last down-sloping mile and a half into Winsett.

Entering from the east, he saw a scatter of stone and clapboard homes and boarding houses hunched against the dunes, their windows dark. None of them looked familiar. Like so many of the little whaling communities he’d visited during his survey, the town he’d known had simply drained away into the burgeoning, bloody industry centers at New Bedford and Nantuckett.

Selkirk had spent one miserable fall and winter here fourteen years ago, sent by his drunken father to learn candle-making from his drunken uncle. He’d accepted the nightly open-fisted beatings without comment, skulking afterward down to the Blubber Pike tavern to watch the whalers: the Portuguese swearing loudly at each other and the negroes – so many Negroes, most of them recently freed, more than a few newly escaped – clinging in clumps to the shadowy back tables and stealing fearful glances at every passing face, as though they expected at any moment to be spirited away.

Of course, there’d been his cousin, Amalia, for all the good that had ever done him. She’d just turned eighteen at the time, two years his senior. Despite her blond hair and startling fullness, the Winsett whalers had already learned to steer clear, but for some reason, she’d liked Selkirk. At least, she’d liked needling him about his outsized ears, his floppy hair, the crack in his voice he could not outgrow. Whatever the reason, she’d lured him away from the pub on several occasions to stare at the moon and drink beside him. And once, in a driving sleet, she’d led him on a midnight walk to Cape Roby Point. There, lurking uncomfortably close but never touching him, standing on the rocks with her dark eyes cocked like rifle sites at the rain, she’d told him the lighthouse keeper’s story. At the end, without any explanation, she’d turned, opened her heavy coat and pulled him to her. He’d had no idea what she wanted him to do, and had wound up simply setting his ear against her slicked skin, all but tasting the water that rushed into the valley between her breasts, listening to her heart banging way down inside her.

After that, she’d stopped speaking to him entirely. He’d knocked on her door, chased her half out of the shop one morning and been stopped by a chop to the throat from his uncle, left notes he hoped she’d find peeking out from under the rug in the upstairs hallway. She’d responded to none of it, and hadn’t even bothered to say goodbye when he left. And Selkirk had steered clear of all women for more than a decade afterward, except for the very occasional company he paid for near the docks where he slung cargo, until the Lighthouse Service offered him an unexpected escape.

Now, half-dragging his horse down the empty main street, Selkirk found he couldn’t even remember which grim room the Blubber Pike had been. He passed no one. But at the western edge of the frozen, cracking main thoroughfare, less than a block from where his uncle had kept his establishment, he found a traveler’s stable and entered.

The barn was lit by banks of horseshoe-shaped wall sconces – apparently, local whale oil or no, candles remained in ready supply – and a coal fire glowed in the open iron stove at the rear of the barn. A dark-haired stable lad with a clam-shaped birthmark covering his left cheek and part of his forehead appeared from one of the stables in the back, tsked over Selkirk’s injured mount and said he’d send for the horse doctor as soon as he’d got the animal dried and warmed and fed.