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

Then she said, Also, something about my dad .

Your dad . . . Sophie never talked about her father.

When they were young. I don’t know; they fought over him. He was Rose’s boyfriend and Mom stole him, I think. I don’t remember him at all .

She said it so cleanly, so matter-of-factly, that he couldn’t believe she wasn’t masking her pain.

He disappeared before I was three. Who are you when you’re that young? You’re not even through becoming a person yet – you don’t have memories, even, just bright flashes of moments here and there, and what people remember for you, what they’ve told you so many times you start to think it belongs to you. He went away before I could have any part of him to myself .

“ Barton Fink ,” she said. She was pulling out handfuls of photos and tossing them on the bed. Sophie as toddler in a birthday hat, Sophie grinning to expose missing teeth for an elementary school photo, Sophie wearing a strapless blue dress and holding hands with a skinny dark-haired boy at a high school dance.

“Check. That’s two.”

She grinned, waved snapshots at him in a less than menacing manner. “I’ll show you the life of the mind!”

“You don’t look a bit like John Goodman.”

But she wasn’t listening anymore. “What’s this?”

He had a sinking feeling of inevitability, like the second or third time you watch a movie in which something terrible is going to happen, and even as you know it’s coming, some part of you is hoping against hope that this time the film will magically find its path to a different fate. But this was not a movie, and it was nothing he’d seen before, so there was no reason for this sick feeling to engulf him when Sophie pulled a key out of the box.

“This is freaking me out,” she said. “Where did she get all these pictures of me? And why’d she keep them?”

“Maybe your mom sent them to her.” Families did weird stuff like that, mingling devotion and resentment, like his cousin Shelby who wouldn’t speak to her dad but made her son write him a letter once a month.

“Sent a whole shoebox full of pictures?” she asked. He shrugged. “It looks like a door key,” she went on. “I wonder . . . Kevin, do you have any idea how much that stuff in the other room is worth? What if this is the key to something even more valuable? Imagine if I came out of this with enough money to open my own restaurant?” Her eyes were shining when she looked at him. He wanted to take her hand and insist that they leave immediately, tell her that her mother was right and they should let other people deal with this.

Instead he said again, “This window ought to look out at the front yard. Why can’t I see the car?”

“There’s nothing out there.” She was back at the doorway to the living room, tense and impatient. “There must be another room. Maybe she hung a rug over the doorway like she hid all the windows.”

He lingered, not wanting to go back to the stuffy closed-in part of the house. On a whim he tried one of the windows; it seemed important to have another route of escape besides the front door, and anyway he was noticing a heavy flowery scent hanging about, the kind of sickly sweetness used to disguise the odor of something foul. He took a deep breath, but could find no hint to the source of the rottenness underneath. It was not the same as the spoiled food in the kitchen; this was something earthier and more intense.

Fresh air would do him good. He tugged at the window, and it did not budge. It appeared to be painted shut.

When he walked back into the living room, Sophie had vanished. A woman stood with her back to him, shoulders rigid, black-haired, wearing Sophie’s sweater. She turned and smiled at him, Sophie’s smile, Sophie’s eyes.

“Check out this funky wig,” she said. “Wouldn’t it be great for Halloween? What do you think my batty old aunt was doing with something like this?”

“Take it off,” he pleaded, but he must not have sounded serious at all because she laughed and flounced past him. “Head in a box,” she said. “Are you sure it’s not Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia ?”

“Of course I’m sure, it’s my clue. I made it up,” he said, but he could no longer remember what he’d had in mind for the third head-in-a-box film or why he’d started them on such a gruesome tack in the first place.

“Torso-in-a-box,” she said. “ Boxing Helena , ugh. You’ve got me. I need another clue.” She had her back to him again, and her voice coming from the black-haired figure unnerved him. “Did I ever tell you what my Aunt Rose looked like?” she said. “She was beautiful once. Way more attractive than my mom. Mom got the brains, Rose got the beauty.”

“How do you know that? That she was beautiful?”

“You know what?” She laughed. “I hid some pictures of her when I was little, before my mom got hold of all the rest and cut them to pieces. I still have them somewhere, I guess. When I was a kid and I’d get mad at my mom, I’d make up a story that an evil witch had taken her over, my real mom was actually Aunt Rose and that she and my dad were coming to rescue me. Isn’t that stupid?”

“We should get going,” he said. “There’s nothing else out here, and it’s a long drive back.”

“That dance she taught me,” Sophie said. “She called it the something reel. The witches’ reel? Oh, I can’t remember. Anyway, I just want to look around a little more. I want to see if we can find out what this key goes to.”

He wanted to say that if it was truly concealing something so valuable, surely Aunt Rose would not make it so difficult to find and identify. Then again, Aunt Rose was at least a little bit crazy. Someone like Aunt Rose might think I have to hide it, so no one finds it and steals it before she gets here .

“I know,” Sophie said. He followed her into the hallway, where she was tugging at the wardrobe.

“Be careful,” he said, “you’ll bring it down on yourself.” He went forward to help her. “Take hold at the bottom here. We don’t want to overbalance it.” He had not noticed, when they first walked in, how much worse the smell was here. This place was sealed up so tightly, could the air go bad, like you heard about in caving collapses, mining disasters?

Between the two of them they heaved the wardrobe a couple of feet away from the wall. Sophie said, “Kevin, look. Come round on my side.” She’d been right, after all; it had concealed a door, and she could twist the key in the lock and open the door just far enough to allow her to slip inside.

“Don’t,” he said, while she still stood on his side of the doorway, her hand on the knob.

She grinned at him. “Let’s make a deal. You tell me the other head-in-a-box movie and I won’t open it.”

“I can’t remember,” he said. “I guess it was Bring Me the Head . Anyway, it wasn’t even my turn just then.”

“Not good enough,” she said, and slipped into the darkness.

Long moments later she spoke. “I can’t find a light switch. Maybe there’s a string I can pull or something. Do you have your lighter?” She sounded as though she were speaking to him from the bottom of a well.

“It’s in the car,” he said. “Sophie, come out of there.”

“Can’t you just run out and get it for me? Come on, Kevin, five minutes and then we’re gone.”

He hesitated, then threw up his hands. “Fine.” It was easier to get angry with her. He must have imagined the way the front door resisted him when he turned the knob; it was swollen from exposure, maybe, and that made it stick when he tugged at it. Then he was out on the porch again, where the day was still warm and sunny and their car waited just where he’d parked it. Halfway back to it he turned and searched for the bedroom windows he’d looked out from.