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

There had been no seduction, no ritual libations, no teasing or flirting. Michelle had taken him the way the Allies took Normandy, and it was all he could muster to keep from gasping. His pelvis felt hammered and his legs seemed numb and far away. She was alive, with the warm, randy needs of the living, and she had plundered him with a greed that cleansed them both of any lingering recriminations.

No grave rot, no mummy dust. Was it still necrophilia when the dead person moved and talked back to you?

“I have another blanket,” he said. His left leg was draped over her as their sweat cooled. He watched candle-shadows dance on the ceiling, making monster shapes.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Really.”

They bathed. Small bathtub, lime-encrusted shower head. It permitted Doug to refamiliarise himself with the geometry of her body, from a perspective different than that of the bedroom. He felt he could never see or touch enough of her; it was a fascination for him.

There was nothing to eat in the kitchen, and simply clicking on the TV seemed faintly ridiculous. They slept, wrapped up in each other. The circumstance was still too fragile to detour into lengthy, dissipate conversations about need, so they slept, and in sleeping, found a fundamental innocence that was already beyond logic – a feeling thing. It seemed right and correct.

Doug awoke, his feet and fingertips frigid, in the predawn. He added his second blanket and snuggled back into Michelle. She slept with a nearly beatific expression, her breath – real, living – coming in slow tidal measures.

The next afternoon Doug sortied to the market to stock up on some basics and find some decent food that could be prepared in his minimal kitchen. In the market, he encountered Joe Hopkins, from the digging crew. Doug tried unsuccessfully to duck him. He wanted to do nothing to break the spell he was under.

But Joe wanted to talk, and cornered him. He was holding a fifth of bourbon like he intended to make serious use of it, in due course.

“There was apparently a lot of activity in the cemetery last night,” he said, working his toothpick from one corner of his mouth to the other. Both ends were wet and frayed. “I mean, after we left. We went back this morning, things were moved around. Some graves were disrupted. Some were partially refilled. It was a mess, like a storm had tossed everything. We had to spend two hours just to get back around to where we left off.”

“You mean, like vandalism?” said Doug.

“Not exactly.” Joe had another habit, that of continually smoothing his upper lip with his thumb and forefinger, as though to keep his moustache in line when he wasn’t looking. To Doug, it signaled nervousness, agitation, and Joe was too brawny to be agitated about much for very long. “I tried to figure it, you know – what alla sudden makes the place not creepy, but threatening in a way it wasn’t, yesterday. It’s the feeling you’d have if you put on your clothes and alla sudden thought that, hey, somebody else has been wearing my clothes, right?”

Doug thought of what Michelle had said, about the dead hearing every footfall of the living above them.

“What I’m saying is, I don’t blame you for quitting. After today, I’m thinking the same thing. Every instinct I have tells me to just jump on my bike and ride the fuck out of here as fast as I can go. And, something else? Jacky says he ran into a guy last night, a guy he went to high school with. They were on the football team together. Jacky says the guy died four years ago in a Jeep accident. But the he saw him, last night, right outside the bar after you left. Not a ghost. He wasn’t that drunk. Then, this morning, Craignotti says something equally weird: That he saw a guy at the diner, you know the Ready-Set? Guy was a dead ringer for Aldus Champion, you know the mayor who died in 2003 and got replaced by that asshole selectman, whatsisname—?”

“Brad Ballinger,” said Doug.

“Yeah. I been here long enough to remember that. But here’s the thing: Craignotti checked, and today Ballinger was nowhere to be found, and he ain’t on vacation or nothing. And Ballinger is in bed with Coggins, the undertaker, somehow. Notice how that whole Marlboro Reservoir thing went into a coma when Champion was mayor? For a minute I thought Ballinger had, you know, had him whacked or something. But now Champion’s back in town – a guy Craignotti swears isn’t a lookalike, but the guy. So now I think there was some heavy-duty money changing hands under a lot of tables, and the reservoir is a go, except nobody is supposed to talk about it, and now we’re out there, digging up the whole history of Triple Pines as a result.”

“What does this all come to?” Doug really wanted to get back to Michelle. She might evaporate or something if left alone too long.

“I don’t know, that’s the fucked up thing.” Joe tried to shove his busy hands into his vest pockets, then gave up. “I’m not smart enough to figure it out, whatever it is . . . so I give it to you, see if any lightbulbs come on. I’ll tell you one thing. This afternoon I felt scared, and I ain’t felt that way since I was paddy humping.”

“We’re both outsiders, here,” said Doug.

“Everybody on the dig posse in an outsider, man. Check that out.”

“Not Jacky.”

“Jacky don’t pose any threat because he don’t know any better. And even him, he’s having fucking hallucinations about his old school buddies. Listen: I ain’t got a phone at my place, but I got a mobile. Do me a favor – I mean, I know we don’t know each other that well – but if you figure something out, give me a holler?”

“No problem.” They traded phone numbers and Joe hurried to pay for his evening’s sedation. As he went, he said, “Watch your ass, cowboy.”

“You, too.”

Doug and Michelle cooked collaboratively. They made love. They watched a movie together both had seen separately. They made more love. They watched the evening sky for several hours until chilly rain began to sheet down from above, then they repaired inside and continued to make love. The Peyton Place antics of the rest of the Triple Pines community, light years away from their safe, centered union, could not have mattered less.

The trick, as near as Billy Morrison could wrassle it, was to find somebody and pitch them into your hole as soon as you woke up. Came back. Revived. Whatever.

So he finished fucking Vanessa Billings. “Bill-ing” her, as his cohort Vance Thompson would crack, heh. Billy had stopped “billing” high school chicks three years ago, when he died. Now he was billing a Billings, wotta riot.

Billy, Vance, and Donna Christiansen had perished inside of Billy’s Boss 302 rebuild, to the tune of Black Sabbath’s “Mob Rules” on CD. The car was about half grey primer and fender-fill, on its way back to glory. The CD was a compilation of metal moldies. No one ever figured out how the car had crashed, up near a trailer suburbia known as Rimrock, and no one in authority gave much of a turd, since Billy and his fellow losers hailed from “that side” of town, rubbing shoulders an open-fire garbage dump, an auto wrecking yard, and (although Constable Dickey did not know it) a clandestine crack lab. The last sensation Billy experienced as a living human was the car sitting down hard on its left front as the wheel flew completely off. The speed was ticketable and the road, wet as usual, slick as mayonnaise. The car flipped and tumbled down an embankment. Billy dimly recalled seeing Donna snap in half and fly through the windshield before the steering column punched into his chest. The full tank ruptured and spewed a meandering piss-line of gasoline all the way down the hill. Vance’s cigarette had probably touched it off, and the whole trash-compacted mess had burned for an hour before new rain finally doused it and a lumber yard worker spotted the smoke.