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

For the premiere season of Showtime Network’s Masters of Horror he adapted his own short story “Pick Me Up” for director Larry Cohen, and for the second season he scripted “We All Scream for Ice Cream” (based on a John Farris story) for director Tom Holland.

Schow also wrote forty-one instalments of his popular “Raving & Drooling” column for Fangoria magazine, later collected in the book Wild Hairs . His many other books include his fourth novel, Bullets of Rain , and seventh story collection, Havoc Swims Jaded .

He is currently on the verge of his next book, script, or chaotic house renovation.

“ ‘Obsequy’ was originally written to demonstrate the difference between a ‘half-hour’s worth of story’ versus an hour for the benefit of several TV executives,” reveals the author.

“Now, I know what you’re thinking: That would be like trying to train a dog to eat with a fork . And you would be right. The good part is the story came to life on its own and didn’t need TV for anything. One indirect result was that I was asked to rewrite the 2004 French film Les Revenants (released in the US as They Came Back ) for an American production company.

“As American re-takes of foreign horror movies are mandated to provide lots of explanations for everything going on, I had to invent these. The reaction I got on my somewhat anti-linear take was . . . horrifying.

“Horror fiction seems to spawn more dumbass ‘rules’ than any other kind of writing, and one of the dumbest is the assumed ‘requirement’ of a twist ending, going all the way back to H. H. Munro. This story is also the result of a long rumination on how stories are sometimes scuttled or diminished by succumbing to such ‘rules’.

“Another landmine is use of the zombie archetype, which has become polluted with extra-stupid assumptions derived from an endless mudslide of movies featuring resurrected corpses who want to eat your brain. That’s fine, but it’s not what I wanted to explore here.”

DOUG WALCOTT’S NEED for a change of perspective seemed simple: Haul ass out of Triple Pines, pronto. Start the next chapter of my life. Before somebody else makes the decision for you, in spades .

He grimly considered the shovel in his grasp, clotted with mulchy grave dirt. Spades, right. It was the moment Doug knew he could not go on digging up dead people, and it was only his first day on the job. Once he had been a teacher, with a teacher’s penchant for seeing structure and symbols in everything. Fuck all that , he thought. Time to get out. Time to bail, now .

“I’ve got to go,” he said, almost mumbling, his conviction still tentative.

Jacky Tynan had stepped down from his scoop-loader and ambled over, doffing his helmet and giving his brow a mop. Jacky was a simple, basically honest guy; a spear carrier in the lives of others with more personal color. Content with burgers and beer, satellite TV and dreams of a someday-girlfriend, Jacky was happy in Triple Pines.

“Yo, it’s Douglas, right?” Jacky said. Everybody had been introduced shortly after sunrise. “What up?” He peeled his work gloves and rubbed his hands compulsively until tiny black sweatballs of grime dropped away like scattered grains of pepper.

“I’ve got to go,” Doug repeated. “I think I just quit. I’ve got to tell Coggins I’m done. I’ve got to get out of here.”

“Graves and stuff getting to ya, huh?” said Jacky. “You should give it another day, at least. It ain’t so bad.”

Doug did not meet Jacky’s gaze. His evaluation of the younger man harshened, more in reaction against the locals, the natives, the people who fit into a white trash haven such as Triple Pines. They would hear the word “cemetery” and conclude “huge downer”. They would wax prosaic about this job being perverse, therefore unhealthy. To them, digging up long-deceased residents would be that sick stuff. They all acted and reacted strictly according to the playbook of cliché. Their retinue of perception was so predictable that it was almost comically dull. Jacky’s tone suggested that he was one of those people with an almost canine empathy to discord; he could smell when something had gone south.

Doug fought to frame some sort of answer. It was not the funereal atmosphere. The stone monuments, the graves, the loam were all exceptionally peaceful. Doug felt no connection to the dearly departed here . . . with one exception, and one was sufficient.

“It’s not the work,” Doug said. “It’s me. I’m overdue to leave this place. The town, not the cemetery. And the money doesn’t matter to me any more.”

Jacky made a face as though he had whiffed a fart. “You don’t want the money, man? Hell, this shit is easier than workin’ the paper mill or doin’ stamper time at the plant, dude.” The Triple Pines aluminum plant had vanished into Chapter Eleven a decade ago, yet locals still talked about it as if it were still a functioning concern.

The people in Triple Pines never saw what was right in front of them. Or they refused to acknowledge anything strange. That was the reason Doug had to eject. He had to jump before he became one of them.

One of them . . .

A week ago, Doug had not been nearly so philosophical. Less than a week from now, and he would question his own sanity.

Craignotti, the job foreman, had seen Jacky and Doug not working – that is to say, not excavating – and already he was humping his trucker bulk over the hilltop to yell at them. Doug felt the urge to just pitch his tools and helmet and run, but his rational side admitted that there were protocols to be followed and channels to be taken. He would finish out his single day, then do some drinking with his workmates, then try to decide whether he could handle one more day. He was supposed to be a responsible adult, and responsible adults adhered to protocol and channels as a way of reinforcing the gentle myth of civilisation.

Whoa, dude, piss on all that , Jacky might say. Just run . But Jacky rarely wrestled with such complexities. Doug turned to meet Craignotti with the fatalism of a man who has to process a large pile of tax paperwork.

A week ago, things had been different. Less than a week from now, these exhumations would collide with every one of them, in ways they could not possibly predict.

Frank Craignotti was one of those guys who loved their beer, Doug had observed. The man had a relationship with his pilsner glass, and rituals to limn his interaction with it. Since Doug had started haunting Callahan’s, he had seen Craignotti in there every night – same stool at the end of the bar, same three pitchers of tap beer, which he emptied down his neck in about an hour and a half. Word was that Craignotti had been a long-haul big-rig driver for a major nationwide chain of discount stores, until the company pushed him to the sidelines on account of his disability. He had stepped down from the cab of his sixteen-wheeler on a winding mountain road outside of Triple Pines (for reasons never explained; probably to relieve himself among Nature’s bounty) and had been sideswiped by a car that never saw him standing there in the rain. Presently he walked with a metal cane because after his surgery one leg had come up shorter than the other. There were vague noises of lawsuits and settlements. That had all happened before Doug wound up inside Callahan’s as a regular, and so it maintained the tenuous validity of small-town gossip. It was as good a story as any.

Callahan’s presented a nondescript face to the main street of Triple Pines, its stature noted solely by a blue neon sign that said BAR filling up most of a window whose sill probably had not been dusted since 1972. There was a roadhouse fifteen miles to the north, technically “out of town”, but its weak diversions were not worth the effort. Callahan’s flavor was mostly clover-colored Irish horse apples designed to appeal to all the usual expectations. Sutter, the current owner and the barman on most weeknights, had bought the place when the original founders had wised up and gotten the hell out of Triple Pines. Sutter was easy to make up a story about. To Doug he looked like a career criminal on the run who had found his perfect hide in Triple Pines. The scar bisecting his lower lip had probably come from a knife fight. His skin was like mushrooms in the fridge the day before you decide to throw them out. His eyes were set back in his skull, socketed deep in bruise-colored shadow.