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

A movement on the roof caught his eye. Something scampered across the peak and out of his sight down the other side. Something blackened and low. Just a squirrel .

He snatched the lighter up from where he’d left it in the well between seats and sprinted back to the house. He called her name as he burst through the front door, and her voice came back to him, muffled.

“Oh, shit, Sophie, why’d you shut the door?” He slumped against the wardrobe, rattled the knob. “It’s locked. Did you lock it?”

She sounded close – she must have been just on the other side of the door, but she might have been whispering against his ear. “There’s nothing in here.”

“Well, stay where you are. Don’t go moving around in there when you can’t see.” But she was doing just that; he could hear her, thumping about. “Are you dancing in there?” The something reel. The witches’ reel .

He’d once read somewhere that the best way to go about breaking down a door was to direct a blow near the lock.

“What are you doing ?” Sophie said, as his foot smashed against it. His second kick splintered the wood; it was old and cheap and not made to keep anyone out. More than anything, he did not want to walk into that inky blackness. But he got the lighter out and struck at it once, twice, with the ball of his thumb. Third time’s the charm .

As he stepped over the threshold, he was surprised at how much of the room it illuminated when he held it high over his head. He felt his shoulders sag, tension draining out of them as he asked himself what he’d been expecting to find in there; Sophie’s father’s head in a box, perhaps? She was right, it was a small, bare, perfectly square room, perhaps ten feet by ten.

Then he noticed the walls. He stepped forward, one, two paces. “Get up,” he said. Sophie sat cross-legged in the middle of the room. The flame nipped at his thumb and he let the light go out.

He hoped that she had not seen what he had: every inch of wall space covered in thick black cursive writing or tattered pages torn from books, punctuated with photographs of Sophie. He thought that some of them had been hung upside down, perhaps defaced. He didn’t want to look again to confirm it.

Sophie was silent. Then, “There’s something painted on the floor here.” She sounded different in the dark. They had been together for years; how could any nuance be unknown to him? He took a few more steps in. He felt swallowed by the blackness. “Bring the light over here.”

His thumb was raw as he spun it against the wheel of the lighter. “Sophie,” he said, and the little flame spewed; the room flickered once more in shades of grey. He squatted, and held the lighter down low and close between them. “Sophie, will you please take off that wig?”

She giggled, and that sounded wrong too. “If it’s such a big deal to you,” she said, and snatched it off, tossed it in a corner. He wished she hadn’t done that, and almost asked her to pick it up. He hated the idea of it lying there like some furry dead thing, and he let the light go out once more.

“Your mother’s going to get worried if we don’t head back soon,” he said.

“I wonder what’s in the wardrobe?” she said.

“Your father’s head?”

Silence again. Then, “That’s not funny. Anyway, wouldn’t be much left of it, would there?”

“I’m sorry. I was kidding. It was stupid.” He could feel his shirt damp and stuck to his back, sweat trickling down his sides from his armpits. He became aware that his mouth hung open and he was breathing like he’d been running, heavy and ragged. “ Night Must Fall .”

“What?”

“ Night Must Fall . That’s the other movie with a head in it. I just remembered.”

“Oh. I never heard of it.”

“Albert Finney with an axe and a yen for decapitation.”

“Oh,” she said again. “That was kind of a cheat, then, if you knew I couldn’t possibly get it.” The boards creaked beneath her feet as she made her way over to him. He resisted the urge to recoil, but jumped anyway when she touched him. Her hand was icy through the cloth of his shirt, her fingernails sharp and hard. “It’s so dark in here. Like there never was any light.” Her breath was on his cheek, warm and moist and stale-smelling. “You know?” she said, and then she pressed against him and fixed her mouth on his. Her tongue invaded, prying his lips apart.

He stumbled back away from her. “We have to go.”

She coughed, a phlegmy sound like she was a longtime smoker. “You’re right,” she said. “There’s nothing here anyway.”

He was relieved when she pushed past him and continued down the hall. The wig had left her hair matted and stuck to the crown of her head. When she opened the front door and he saw how the light had changed he realized how much later it was than he’d thought. She commented that it seemed to be growing dark so early these days, it was hard to believe that it wasn’t yet fall.

“Sophie, those cuts look terrible,” he said, noticing her legs. They’d gone dry and puckered-looking, like tiny gaping mouths. But she was already crawling in on the passenger side, and didn’t seem to hear him.

The engine failed to turn over the first time, then again and again, and sweat was dripping into his eyes. Sophie sat placid beside him, unmoved by the useless revving of the motor.

“What’s the number for Triple A?” he said. “Where’s your phone?”

“It’s dead. I forgot to recharge it last night.” She went on, “It’s not such a bad place, really. I bet we could do something with it.”

“I forgot my lighter,” he said.

“What?”

“Nothing,” he said, already willing to forget that for a split second he’d thought of sending her back inside on the pretense of fetching something, then driving away – no, running away, a mile or more back up to the highway where he’d flag down a car. It wasn’t Sophie that stopped him—rather, the certainty that he might run as far as he could and would never find the highway, because it would no longer be there.

“Poor thing,” she said, “you must be tired. You probably shouldn’t drive anyway. There’s a bed inside, you know, if you need to rest.”

He steadied his foot on the accelerator and gunned the engine. He would feel better if only he would look at her, and she’d laugh, propose some calm and sensible plan for getting them out of this predicament. Someone will stop for us up on the highway, she’d say in a moment, out here in the country people still help you like that. But he could not do it. He found that a sort of numbness had taken him, rather than grief or any sense of loss, and he kept turning the key and pressing the gas long after it produced only a series of dry dead clicks, and still he could not bring himself to look into her eyes.

JAY LAKE

The American Dead

JAY LAKE LIVES IN PORTLAND, Oregon with his books and two inept cats, where he works on numerous writing and editing projects.

His current novels are Trial of Flowers from Night Shade Books and Mainspring from Tor Books, with sequels to both volumes due in 2008. His short fiction appears in numerous markets world-wide, most recently The Mammoth Book of Monsters and Logorrhea .

He is the winner of the 2004 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and a multiple nominee for the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards.

“There are little markers that tells us things about the world,” Lake explains, “so-called telling details. The airliner in the river in this story tells us the world has ended, because in our world we don’t leave downed airliners where they fell. The policeman’s notebook tells its own story. But the story that lasts the longest is the story of our dead.