The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 12 by Stephen Jones

Author:Stephen Jones [Jones, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780337128
Publisher: Carroll & Graf Publishers
Published: 2001-12-15T07:00:00+00:00

It was the day which would eventually turn into the night of Halloween that the seller of skeletons came to our town. Obviously intended as decorations for the traditional celebration of good-natured horror, they were immediately more interesting than those plastic or cardboard types which the five-and-dimes sold. They weren’t flat, for one thing, but had three dimensions, having been molded out from an intricate form of papier-mâché perhaps. The skulls in particular were startling, almost an origami of macabre beauty. These were nothing mass-produced in some far-off Oriental country, created by near-slave labor who didn’t even know what Halloween was.

Simonville was not a big place and the foundling strings of bones soon found niches in front yard trees and on broad, covered porches. The mayor, who ran into the skeleton-seller outside of the luncheonette where he habitually went each noonday, even bought twenty-six to be hung about the park – twenty-six being twice thirteen and somehow appropriate for the light-hearted festival of modern Samhain.

I lived in an apartment so there was no place where I might have put one up. But I noted the skeleton-seller as he took the wheelbarrow from his pickup truck and peddled his bones from place to place. I followed him when he had sold them all, curious as to where he would go. Did he have relatives in Simonville? Would he sleep in his truck that night or in the park where so many of his wares would be shaking in the branches?

He journeyed to the edge of town where the old surgical instrument factory used to be, before the recession and the popular advent of lasers overcoming more antique steel. The building had been empty for twenty years and the overall appearance of it used to cause embarrassed townfolk to insist on its demolition. One day soon, the city fathers kept promising. If the land sold that would be done. Eventually people just stopped complaining. Every window had been broken by children and the glass spiked like the fangs in deformed jack-o-lanterns. The roof sagged like a broken back and had gaping holes in places where the weather had free access to the rooms below. The grounds had grown up with weeds.

He parked his truck and got out and walked over to me. I was, of course, mortified that he’d noticed I was following. But I’d meant nothing unfriendly in it. I always had all day with nothing to do but walk the town, and there was only so much in such a small, unchanging place to keep me from boredom. I hadn’t been able to work since the fire. If it hadn’t been for the disability checks, what would I have done? I walked Simonville from one end to the other and had done so for years, for so long that nobody even stared at me anymore, having become as used to my scars as they were accustomed to the eyesore of the former instruments factory.

“Yes, this is where I will be

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