The Year's Best Horror Stories 21 by Karl Edward Wagner

Author:Karl Edward Wagner [Wagner, Karl Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-07-13T23:39:58+00:00

Dirty yellow light. No more straps, no feeling at all. Chanting all around me, from me, through me. Over and over, words whose meanings I don’t know. I can’t stop chanting.

Below me, she crouches over the body still tied to the plank. She lifts her head from her feasting and smiles with her bloody mouth.

“Too long since blood has sated me! You have your reward, little thief!”

I am first among her new worshipers, in a new row on the wall.

AND SOME ARE MISSING by Joel Lane

The first time, it was someone I didn’t know. Inevitably. I’d gone out to use the phone box, around eleven on a Tuesday night. This was a month after I’d moved into the flat in Moseley. I phoned Alan, but I don’t remember what I said; I was very drunk. Coming back, I saw two men on the edge of the car park in front of the tower block I lived in. It looked like a drunk was being mugged. There was one man on the ground: gray-haired, shabby, unconscious. And another man crouching over him: pale, red-mouthed, very tense. As I came closer, he seemed to be scratching at the drunk’s face. His hand was like a freeze-dried spider. I could see the knuckles were red from effort. With his other hand, he was tugging at the man’s jacket.

Too far gone to be scared, I walked toward them and shouted, “What are you going?” The attacker looked up at me. His eyes were empty, like an official behind a glass screen. I clenched my fist. “Fucking get off him. Go on …” He smiled as if he knew something I didn’t. Then he got up and calmly stalked away into the darkness behind the garages. The man on the ground looked about fifty; from his clothes and stubble, he could have been a vagrant. There were deep cuts on his face, slowly filling up with mirrors of blood. He was sweating heavily.

I ran back to the phone and called an ambulance. Then I went back to the injured man and dabbed uselessly at his face with my sleeve. Now the shock was wearing off, I needed to go to sleep. I looked at my wristwatch; it was past midnight. There was no blood on my sleeve. I looked again at the drunk’s face. It was pale with sweat and blurred by a grayish stubble. But there were no wounds. Jesus, I thought, I’ve started to hallucinate. It’s strictly Diet Coke from now on. Leaving him for the ambulance, I struggled into the building. Living on the top floor meant I didn’t have to keep count. The next thing I knew, my alarm clock was ringing. I didn’t remember setting it, let alone going to bed.

The flat’s okay, though it costs more to rent than a poorly furnished studio flat should. At least it’s pretty secure. You’d need wings or a sledgehammer to break in. Before I paid the deposit, I asked if there was a phone point; the landlord showed me where it was.

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