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

“It is over anyway,” he says. “Come.” He leads her deeper into the Cementerio Americano . Here Pobrecito has always been careful to hop from stone to stone, scramble along mortared kerbs, step on open ground, never making a path.

Here among the houses of the American dead is his greatest treasure.

He shows Lucia a squared-off vault, door wedged tightly shut. Grabbing a cornice, Pobrecito pulls himself to the roof though his body strains with the pain of the beating and the curious ache of his fall into the river. He then dangles his arm over to help her up. There are two windows in the roof, and he knows the secret of loosening one.

In a moment they are in the cool darkness of the vault. There are two marble coffins here, carved with wreaths and flowers, and Pobrecito’s precious box of magazines at one end. He has left a few supplies, a can of drinkable water and some dried fruit, a homespun shirt without quite enough holes for it to disintegrate to ragged patches. And matches, his other great treasure.

“These people do not seem so wealthy,” Lucia whispers. “This is a fine little house for them, but the only riches here are yours.”

Pobrecito shrugs. “Perhaps they were robbed before I found them. Or perhaps their riches are within their coffins. This is a finer room than any you or I will ever live or die in.” As soon as he says that last, he wishes he hadn’t, as they may very well die in this room.

“So now what will you do?”

He pulls the magazines out of the their box, fans the pages open. Sleek American flesh in a hundred combinations flashes before his eyes, cocks, breasts, tongues, leather and plastic toys, sleek cars . . . all the world that was, once. The American world lost to the heat and the sicknesses. Pobrecito tosses the magazines into a pile, deliberately haphazard. After a few moments, Lucia begins to help, tearing a few apart, breaking their spines so they will lay flat. She ignores the pictures, though she is not so used to them as Pobrecito is.

Soon they have a glossy pile of images of the perfect past. Without another word, Pobrecito strikes a match and sets fire to a bright, curled edge. Cool faces, free of sweat and wounds, blacken and shrivel. He lights more matches, sets more edges of the pile on fire, until the flames take over.

The smoke stinks, filling the little vault, curling around the opening in the roof. He does not care, though Lucia is coughing. Pobrecito pulls off his wet, bloody clothes and pushes them into the base of the fire, then climbs atop one of the marble coffins. A few moments later, Lucia joins him.

She is naked as well.

They lie there on the bed of marble, smooth skinned as any Americans, kissing and touching, while the fire burns the pretty people in their pretty houses and the smoke rises through the roof. Outside dogs howl and guardia pistols crack.

When Lucia takes his cock in her mouth, Pobrecito knows he is as wealthy as any American. A while later he feels the hot rush of himself into her, even as the smoke makes him so dizzy his thoughts have spun off into the sky like so many airplanes rising from their river grave.

Soon he will be a true American, wealthy and dead.

PETER ATKINS

Between the Cold Moon and the Earth

PETER ATKINS IS A NATIVE of Liverpool, but has lived in Los Angeles for fifteen years with his wife Dana. He is the author of the novels Morningstar and Big Thunder and the collection Wishmaster and Other Stories .

His work has also appeared in Weird Tales, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Cemetery Dance and several award-winning anthologies. He has written for television and the stage, but is probably best known for his work in the cinema, where he has scripted three of the Hellraiser movies and created the Wishmaster franchise.

“Between the Cold Moon and the Earth” was written for the October 2006 tour of The Rolling Darkness Revue , the multi-media collective that Atkins founded with his friends and fellow-authors Glen Hirshberg and Dennis Etchison. It first appeared in At the Sign of the Snowman’s Skull , a chapbook produced for the tour by Paul Miller’s Earthling Publications.

“The story played very well on the reading tour,” recalls Atkins, “but my American audiences were confused by the fact that some of the 16-year-old characters had spent the earlier part of the evening in a pub.

“In fact, such flouting of the drinking laws was common in the 1970s Liverpool where I grew up. Other parts of the story are from life also, including its lovely and foul-mouthed heroine.”

THEY ONLY BRUSHED his cheek for a second or two, but her lips were fucking freezing .

“Christ, Carol,” he said. “Do you want my coat?”

She laughed. “What for?” she asked.

“Because it’s one in the morning,” he said. “And you’re cold.”

“It’s summer,” she pointed out, which was undeniably true but wasn’t really the issue. “Are you going to walk me home then?”

Michael had left the others about forty minutes earlier. Kirk had apparently copped off with the girl from Woolworth’s that they’d met inside the pub so Michael and Terry had tactfully peeled away before the bus stop and started walking the long way home around Sefton Park. He could’ve split a taxi fare with Terry but, given that they were still in the middle of their ongoing argument about the relative merits of T. Rex and Pink Floyd and that it was still a good six months before they’d find Roxy Music to agree on, they’d parted by unspoken consent and Michael had opted to cut across the park alone.

Carol had been standing on the path beside the huge park’s large boating lake. He’d practically shit himself when he first saw the shadowed figure there, assuming the worst – a midnight skinhead parked on watch ready to whistle his mates out of hiding to give this handy glam-rock faggot a good kicking – but Carol had been doing nothing more threatening than staring out at the center of the lake and the motionless full moon reflected there.

“All right, Michael,” she’d said, before he’d quite recognised her in the moonlight, and had kissed his cheek lightly in further greeting before he’d spoken her name. Now, he fell into step beside her and they began to walk the long slow curve around the lake.

“God, Carol. Where’ve you been?” he asked. “Nobody’s seen you for months.”

It was true. Her mum had remarried just before last Christmas and they’d moved. Not far away, still in the same city, but far enough for sixteen-year-olds to lose touch.

“I went to America,” Carol said.

Michael turned his head to see if she was kidding. “You went to America ?” he said. “What d’you mean, you went to America? When? Who with?”

Her eyes narrowed for a moment as if she were re-checking her facts or her memory. “I think it was America,” she said.

“You think it was America?”

“It might have been an imaginary America,” she said, her voice a little impatient. “Do you want to hear the fucking story or not?”

Oh. Michael didn’t smile nor attempt to kiss her, but he felt like doing both. Telling stories – real, imagined, or some happy collision of the two – had been one of the bonds between them, one of the things he’d loved about her. Not the only thing of course. It’s not like he hadn’t shared Kirk and Terry’s enthusiastic affection for her astonishingly perfect breasts and for the teasingly challenging way she had about her that managed to suggest two things simultaneously: that, were circumstances to somehow become magically right, she might, you know, actually do it with you; and that you were probably and permanently incapable of ever conjuring such circumstances. But her stories, and her delight in telling them, were what he’d loved most and what, he now realised, he’d most missed. So yes, he said, he wanted to hear the story.