Year's Best Horror Stories XVIII Part 22

: for that is all we do in Narcopolis, for the bloated present is too much. The past denied, the future defiled.

Narcopolis AKA Prescription City AKA Smallville ad nauseum, the one true inner city where pregnant leeches dangle from the rusted streetlamps of what little memory remains

VI. WALLS OF DAY.

coexist with those of night, L.A.

freeways intersect an Arkham dirtroad, a dead king performs endless benedictions of medley in a sea eternally October (C C Rider) (C C Rider) (I said) is it a dream when chitinous souls shove communion wafers into vacant windows, ghastly parking lots, to insure that the virgin straddles truth?| Or is this, too, a wanting release, a discharge of reason, as opposed to sailing off to Key Largo between blinks, with a full deck br.i.m.m.i.n.g of a.n.a.l-retentive harlequins

VII. TOURIST TRAP.

Come. Run on a cool ribbon of intestine.

You know the score or you wouldn't be asking.

VIII. LEGEND IN NEON.

endlessly October... but for a breezeway seventeen molecules long: a favorite spot of Mary Kelly, and Jack the Ripper's last known victim laps at gutter surf the texture of Kennedy's blood. The causeway is refuge for the clinically sane, its sole light a Cerveza Fria sign dangling hypnotically from a pile of eye sockets, a legend in neon.

The prima donna of Spitalfields hails claim to each brittle handhold in the dirt, and each glance of her smiling eyelids reminds us of those in 'Nam or Iran, a field near Countryside, or bas.e.m.e.nt abattoir in Ogden, Utah. Those who knew that the worst of their lives, wafer- thin yet lingering, was all that kept them from this ghastly, cramped town that Kelly calls home.

The guns are c.o.c.ked clothes removed hydrochloric acid poured.

Ready. Steady. Go.

IX. BOY THE WAY GLENN MILLER PLAYED.

Forget the demographics of suicides and addicts; anyone's allowed in, and rent is cheap as your own future: the lambent american scream.

At 2 am, the fear is gone, and the background dirges are sung by Mary and Rhoda and Archie and Bob, rerun refugees from SitCom City (Boy the way Glenn Miller played...) and the streets, the streets washed blue, sometimes blue mixed with pale, and a gentle wind moans take me now.

Release yourself to the void, let it suck your pleasure dry.

Think of where those years have gone: syndicated sitcoms now a generation old. You can check out of this town any time you like, but time is not what you think.

X. YOUR HOME TOWN.

And where do these poetic roads lead, if not to h.e.l.l, Perdition, or Misteroger's Neighborhood?

What point need be made? Walk down your own street in zombie dusk and rubberneck the vacant eyes of your neighbors at their blue, sometimes blue and pale. TV screens, man! Tsktsking the news of life while lapping up lifestyles of the rich and fantastical. Narcopolis is a way station for the d.a.m.ned, guarded by bored men bronzed by arthritic balm, and haloed by bullet holes.

XI. THE FUGITIVE.

his kind cruel hand: but himself the n.o.blest of citizens, though shy of face and gaunt of leg, a 60's videodrome (boy the way I said C C Rid -- ) searching in gutter patois, running out of love for pooling metaphors vagrant fragrances and a facial tick that won't stay gone; his whole benign being contraflicts what he's trying to deny to die perchance to dream and the episode never truly ends...

Nights In The City.

by Jessica Amanda Salmonson.

Born in January of 1950, Jessica Amanda Salmonson presently works and lives out of a bookshop in Seattle, Was.h.i.+ngton. She remains very active in the small press scene, despite showing an increasing presence in the major leagues.

Her latest books include two collections of her short stories, A Silver Thread of Madness and John Collier and Fredric Brown Went Quarrelling Through My Head, and two anthologies, Tales by Moonlight II and What Did Miss Darrington See?. Somehow she finds time to continue to edit the small press magazines, Fantasy Macabre and Fantasy & Terror. Salmonson is a genius when it comes to unearthing obscure works by forgotten writers of fantasy and horror, particularly those by little-known women writers.

Forthcoming books include a novel from Mark Ziesing Books, anthologies of neglected women writers from Scream/Press, and The Encyclopedia of Amazons. "Nights in the City" is one of several stories original to A Silver Thread of Madness. Salmonson calls it: "a ghost story I'm exceedingly proud of, but it is not properly horror, though embodying something of a mini-essay about the meaning of horror." As I've said before, not all horrors are drenched in gore.

What a shame that in this world there is so much suffering. Today in the street I saw an elderly man standing alone, miserable and lost, having soiled his pants so that pedestrians made sour faces and veered away from his odor. He wanted to know where there was a certain street, but no one would answer him. He had gotten off the bus because the driver told him the street was nearby, but he couldn't find it. So, holding my breath, I walked up to this very old and ugly man and said, "You cannot get to that street from here. You are in the entirely wrong part of the city." And he began to wail, "But I haven't a bus transfer and it was my last change! The driver didn't give me a transfer! Why did he tell me my street was this one?" What should I tell him? That the driver probably didn't want a man who had soiled his pants to ride the bus and had neglected to give him a transfer in case he tried once more to get on the bus and find his proper way? I left the old man so that I could take a couple deep breaths, then I walked back to him and told him not to shout and weep, that if he would walk down to the bottom of the hill, which was a long way, he would see a bridge across the freeway, and across that, some distance further, he would find the road that would connect him with the street he sought, or at least one end of it. The last I saw of him, he was going down the hill as I directed. Several minutes later, as I continued toward errands of my own, I suddenly realized I had told him a wrong turn, and he would end up under the freeway viaduct, even more hopelessly lost than before.

So you see it is a sad world. And as this is the truth of things, how can I be expected to sit down and write stories for the magazines and anthologies that are so much hot air meant to entertain? How can I write you a spooky ghost story that you will enjoy a great deal because secretly you do not believe in ghosts and the terror isn't real to you. Someday you will be standing on a street corner, old and pitiful, having s.h.i.+t your pants, and a middle-aged woman with a sincere face will give you bad directions. That, my friend, is real terror. But you would rather hear about a weird visitation -- a ghost or a vampire -- something like that. Very well, but no more of these trumped up horror stories that could never be. This is about an actual spirit, an absolutely true story that I have never told anybody until now because I knew they wouldn't believe me. It happened to me quite a while ago, when I was a pretty girl. All kinds of men were attracted to me in those days, even a dead one. I thought I would never be rid of him. Don't laugh, or you will s.h.i.+t your pants! Then who will want to sit by you on the bus?

The bus is in a lot of my stories because I live in the city and don't drive a car. I write about what I know. That is also why I so often write about pain and about ghosts. I know about ghosts. If I had a dollar for every bus I've been on and five dollars for every ghost I've seen, I could break even riding the bus. One day on the bus, when I was young and good-looking, a very pale fellow got on without paying. I saw him not pay the driver, but the driver didn't say a thing. I should have known at that moment that the pale man was a ghost, but in those days, I didn't believe in them. Whether someone believes in ghosts or not, they are everywhere.

Everybody sees them all the time. But if you don't believe in them, you think they are something else, living people perhaps, or crazy ones, or dogs hunched back in the shadows of the alleys. But they're ghosts.

I have a lot of tricks to keep people from sitting beside me on the bus. The simplest is to slouch all over the place and pretend not to notice anybody. A more subtle method is to give the general impression that I'm getting off at the next stop.

No one likes to sit beside someone, only to have to get up and let them out of the seat right away. Another excellent method is to look very intensely out the window on the opposite side of the bus. A new rider will not want to sit down and get in your line of vision. Usually I do things like that, but as this fellow had not paid his bus fare, I looked at him as if to say, "Hey, I had to pay for this ride, so you better do it too!" But the eye contact was a bad idea. He completely misunderstood what I was thinking. He smiled at me and I knew he intended to sit beside me. Another girl might have liked the idea, because he looked pretty clean, and his smile was innocent. But I thought he looked like Aubrey Beardsley and who wants to sit with some sick, skinny young fellow who parts his hair down the middle? What a clown he was! And now he was sitting beside me, a bit too close, and saying, "I only just got here."

I didn't say a thing to him at first. I ignored him. What was I supposed to say to such a line as that? Oh, that's nice, I'm very glad you just got here. Or, should I have asked him where "here" is and how was he so sure he had made it even now?

"In Seattle, I mean," he added. "Until a few minutes ago, I was in Dallas."

He had a Texas accent. It added to his general air of being a clown.

"Have you ever been to Dallas?" he asked.

"Once, I was," I admitted, not looking at him.

"It was always ugly," he said. "Now it's worse. A lot of office towers, and downtown it's boring and there are no good places to eat, if you're a vegetarian like myself."

As a matter of fact I was a vegetarian like himself. So, despite my defenses, which were big walls from here to the moon, he had somehow managed to climb over. I turned my head to give this skeletal clown of a Texan a long look, and he showed me those big teeth again. Big eyes, too. He wasn't bad looking if you like skeletons. I had to turn away so he wouldn't see my silent laugh.

"I never wanted to live in Dallas but I didn't have a choice: I was born there.

Poverty killed my mother. In Texas you either have a lot or you don't have anything. Seattle is much nicer. Even if you don't have anything, you have a lot."

That was true. There was the water, the mountains, the parks, the stores, the trees, and you could walk to everything -- or catch the bus.

"I thought it was the end for me," he said. "I always wanted to see Seattle, or else Paris, but my mother was born in Seattle and talked about it a lot. I always thought Seattle was on a map next to Paradise.

That's when I was little. I thought Paradise could be found on a map, you see. Seattle would be close by. I always thought that if someone dies and goes to heaven, it wouldn't be far out of the way to go to Seattle first."

At this point I could not help but laugh out loud, and it was no use trying to hide it. I was going to look him straight in the face to do my laughing. Only I didn't laugh. When I turned my head, there was no one sitting beside me. I looked down the aisle and up. The bus was approaching my own stop, so I had to get off. "How did he do that?" I wondered. I guessed he must have been hiding.

"Hey! Hey! You never told me your name!" he shouted several days later.

He came running down the sidewalk in my direction. His gait was awkward. He ran on his toes and leaned too far forward. His comically parted hair was sticking up in back. His big teeth smiled. His big eyes smiled. I was afraid he was going to smash right into me. "Let me take your groceries!" he said, out of breath, but I wouldn't let him take them. "You'd drop them," I said. He was so skinny I doubted he could carry anything heavier than a balloon without falling down with it. I said, "I thought only girls were anorexic."

"Boys sometimes," he said. "But I'm not. I'm just skinny."

He walked along beside me. I wasn't sure what to do. I had no particular reason to trust him. He was a stranger to me. But if he kept following me, he'd see where I lived. If I went somewhere else besides home, I'd have to carry the groceries everywhere and the milk would get warm.

"Want a picnic?" he asked.

"No."

"When was your last picnic?"

"I don't go on picnics."

"Why not?" he asked. "It's such a nice city! Lots of places to have a picnic!

Isn't life a picnic? Gee, Seattle is swell!"

He was definitely an exasperating clown. "You should be glad you live here," he said. "I am glad," I replied curtly. "You didn't tell me your name." I told him my name. "That's a nice name." "Thank you. I picked it myself." "My name is Henry." "Terrible," I said. "I know. I didn't choose it." "Change it," I said. "To what?" "Sam," I said.

"Okay, my name is Sam. Oh! Must be going. See you soon!" And when I looked around, he was gone.

You may be thinking this is an amusing story, but it isn't. Sam was a very unhappy fellow despite that he kept smiling. It made him miserable that I was smart-mouthed with him and not interested in his uninvited attention. He was in Seattle on his first trip to anywhere in the world, and on his best behavior as travelers always are, and he was hoping for a wonderful adventure, a nice romance.

But I was the only girl he had met so far and I had a smart mouth. I wouldn't even go on a picnic with him. If that's not sad, then you don't know what sadness is. Sam was very sad.

As for me, I wasn't sad in those days. That came later. Or before, I forget which. In those days I was having an affair with a shot-putter, a big young woman with a mean arm who could bench-press I forget how much, a million pounds. She was Olympics material and was supposed to go to Russia for some trials but fell in love with a country-western singer named Tasha and gave up her chances to be recognized as a world-cla.s.s athlete so she could be a go-fer for Tasha's band. Made a complete fool of herself. But it wasn't giving up much, I guess. Shot-putters don't get to be on boxes of Wheaties or pose with fancy cars. Neither do athletes who won't or can't hide the fact that they're d.y.k.es. Obviously everything I'm telling you has to be the truth, you surely realize, since even in a ghost story, n.o.body could make such things up. So, as I was saying, this was after her thing with Tasha, and I was very happy with this big-muscled girl. It didn't last a long time, but it was a nice affair and I was still in the middle of that when Sam tried to get to know me.

If I had been on the rebound maybe I would have responded. Who can be sure? As it was, I didn't need any scarecrow of a Texan for a boyfriend. Forget him, I thought.

"Hi," I said, when I saw him sitting on the outdoor deck of a cafe I often patronize.

"Hi!" he shouted in surprise. I was standing right in front of him.

"You were somewhere else," I said.

"Me? No. I've been in Seattle the whole time."

"I mean you were daydreaming."

"How do you know?"

I laughed. It was hard to make sense out of that boy.

"I don't know if I was daydreaming or not," he said. "I was sitting over there on west Queen Anne Hill waiting for the sunset a couple of minutes ago, wondering where you might be. Suddenly, here I was."

Queen Anne was pretty far away from Capitol Hill. I supposed he exaggerated how fast he covered the distance.

"I was going to have their quiche," I said. "Care to join me?"

"What's a quiche?"

I laughed again. He was a Texan after all. "Cheese and egg pie with broccoli -- at this place anyway. It used to be the 'in' food. This is the only place that still makes any. You eat cheese and eggs, don't you?"

"I used to. I don't eat anything now."

"The ultimate Gandhiist," I said. "Well, I'm going to eat."

He came in with me but didn't order anything, wasn't even acknowledged by the woman behind the counter. He sat across the table from me.

"You should order something," I said. "You're too thin. You must be anemic.

I thought all Texans had tans."

"Not me," he said.