The Best New Horror 2 (70 page)

His short fiction has recently appeared in such diverse outlets as
Omni
and the
Lovecraft’s Legacy
anthology, among his own books are
Gahan Wilson’s Graveside Manner, Is Nothing Sacred?, Nuts, Eddy Deco’s Last Caper, Everybody’s Favourite Duck
and several children’s volumes, including a series on
Harry, The Fat Bear Spy
.

Wilson reveals that he was officially declared born dead by the attending physician in Evanston, Illinois. Rescued by another medico who dipped him alternately in bowls of hot and cold water, he survived to become the first student at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago to admit he was going there to learn how to become a cartoonist.

He is well known for his wicked and perverse sense of humour, both of which you will find aplenty in the poignant little tale that follows . . .

L
ISTEN, CHILDREN!
Hear the music? Hear its bright and cheerful chiming coming down the street? Hear it playing its pretty little tune—dingy di-ding, dingy di-ding—as it sings softly through the green trees, through the blue sky overhead, as it sings through the thick, still, sultry summer heat? It’s Mister Ice Cold coming in his truck! Mister Ice Cold and his nice ice cream! Fat, round, cool balls of it plopped into cones! Thick, juicy slabs of it covered in frozen chocolate frosting and stuck on sticks! Soft, pink, chilly twirls of it oozed into cups!

The music’s coming closer through the heat—dingy di-ding, dingy di-ding—and excitement starts stirring where all was lazy and drowsy just a sweaty blink before! Bobby Martin’s no longer lying flat on the grass, staring up at a slow-moving summer cloud without seeing it at all; he’s scrambled to his feet and is running over the thick summer grass to ask his mother—nodding on the porch over a limp magazine almost slipped from her fingers—if he can have enough money to buy a frozen lime frog. And Suzy Brenner’s left off dreamily trying to tie her doll’s bonnet over her cat’s head (much to the cat’s relief) and is desperately digging into her plastic, polka-dot purse to see if there’s enough change in there to buy her a cup of banana ice cream with chocolate sprinkles. Oh, she can taste the sweetness of it! Oh, her throat can feel its coolness going down! And you, you’ve forgotten all about blowing through a leaf to see if you can make it squeak the way you saw Arnold Carter’s older brother do it; now you’re clawing feverishly with your small hands in both pockets, feeling your way past that sandy shell you found yesterday on the beach, and that little ball chewed bounceless by your dog, and that funny rock you came across in the vacant lot which may, with luck, be full of uranium and highly radioactive, and so far you have come up with two pennies and a quarter and you think you’ve just touched a nickel. Meantime Mister Ice Cold’s truck is rolling closer—dingy di-ding, dingy di-ding—and Martin Walpole, always a show-off, wipes his brow, points, and calls out proudly, “I see it! There it is!”

And sure enough,
there it is
, rolling smoothly around the corner of Main and Lincoln, and you can see the shiny, fat fullness of its white roof gleaming in the bright sun through the thick, juicy-green foliage of the trees, which have, in the peak of their summer swelling, achieved a tropical density and richness more appropriate to some Amazonian jungle than to midwestern Lakeside, and you push aside one last, forgotten tangle of knotted string in your pocket and your heart swells for joy because you’ve come across another quarter and that means you’ve got enough for an orange icicle on a stick which will freeze your fillings and chill your gut and stain your tongue that gorgeous, glowing copper color which never fails to terrify your sister!

Now Mister Ice Cold’s truck has swept into full view, and its dingy di-ding sounds out loud and clear and sprightly enough, even in this steaming, muggy air, to startle a sparrow and make it swerve in its flight.

Rusty Taylor’s dog barks for a signal, and all of you come running quick as you can from every direction, coins clutched in your sweaty fingers and squeezed tightly as possible in your damp, small palms, and every one of you is licking your lips and staring at the bright blue lettering painted in frozen ice cubes that spells out
MISTER ICE COLD
over the truck’s sides and front and back, and Mister Ice Cold himself gives a sweeping wave of his big, pale hand to everyone from behind his wheel and brings his vehicle and all the wonders it contains to a slow, majestic halt with the skill and style of a commodore docking an ocean liner.

“A strawberry rocket!” cries fat Harold Smith, who has got there way ahead of everyone else as usual, and Mister Ice Cold flips open one of the six small doors set into the left side of the truck with a click and plucks out Harold’s rocket and gives it to him and takes the change, and before you know it he has glided to the right top door of the four doors at the truck’s back and opened it, click, and Mandy Carter’s holding her frozen maple tree and licking it and handing her money over all at the same time, and now Mister Ice Cold is opening one of the six small doors on the right side of the truck, click, and Eddy Morse has bitten the point off the top of his bright red cinnamon crunchy munch and is completely happy.

Then your heart’s desire is plucked with a neat click from the top middle drawer on the truck’s right side, which has always been its place for as long as you can remember, and you’ve put your money into Mister Ice Cold’s large, pale, always-cool palm, and as you step back to lick your orange icicle and to feel its coolness trickle down your throat, once again you find yourself admiring the sheer smoothness of Mister Ice Cold’s movements as he glides and dips, spins and turns, bows and rises, going from one small door, click, to another, click, with never a stumble, click, never a pause, click, his huge body leaving a coolness in the wake of his passing, and you wish you moved that smoothly when you run over the gravel of the playground with your hands stretched up, hoping for a catch, but you know you don’t.

Everything’s so familiar and comforting: the slow quieting of the other children getting what they want, your tongue growing more and more chill as you reduce yet another orange icicle, lick by lick, down to its flat stick, and the heavy, hot summer air pressing down on top of it all.

But this time it’s just a little different than it ever was before because, without meaning to, without having the slightest intention of doing it,
you’ve noticed something you never noticed before. Mister Ice Cold never opens the bottom right door in the back of the truck.

He opens all the rest of them, absolutely every one, and you see him doing it now as new children arrive and call out what they want. Click, click, click, he opens them one after the other, producing frozen banana bars and cherry twirls and all the other special favorites, each one always from its particular, predictable door.

But his big, cool hand always glides past that
one door
set into the truck’s back, the one on the bottom row, the one to the far right. And you realize now, with a funny little thrill, that you have never—not in all the years since your big brother Fred first took you by the hand and gave Mister Ice Cold the money for your orange icicle because you were so small you couldn’t even count—you have never
ever
seen that door open.

And now you’ve licked the whole orange icicle away, and your tongue’s moving over and over the rough wood of the stick without feeling it at all, and you can’t stop staring at that door, and you know, deep in the pit of your stomach, that you have to open it.

You watch Mister Ice Cold carefully now, counting out to yourself how long it takes him to move from the doors farthest forward back to the rear of the truck, and because your mind is racing very, very quickly, you soon see that two orders in a row will keep him up front just long enough for you to open the door which is never opened, the door which you are now standing close enough to touch, just enough time to take a quick peek and close it shut before he knows.

Then Betty Deane calls out for a snow maiden right on top of Mike Howard’s asking for a pecan pot, and you know those are both far up front on the right-hand side.

Mister Ice Cold glides by you close enough for the cool breeze coming from his passing to raise little goose bumps on your arms. Without pausing, without giving yourself a chance for any more thought, you reach out.

Click! Your heart freezes hard as anything inside the truck. There, inside the square opening, cold and bleached and glistening, are two tidy stacks of small hands, small as yours, their fingertips reaching out toward you and the sunlight; their thin, dead young arms reaching out behind them, back into the darkness. Poking over the top two hands, growing out of something round and shiny and far back and horribly still, are two stiff golden braids of hair with pretty frozen bows tied onto their ends. But you have stared too long in horror and the door is closed, click, and almost entirely covered by Mister Ice Cold’s hand, which seems enormous, and he’s bent down over you with his huge, smiling face so near to yours you can feel the coolness of it in the summer heat.

“Not that door,” he says, very softly, and his small, neat, even teeth shine like chips from an iceberg, and because of his closeness now you know that even his breath is icy cold. “Those in there are not for you. Those in there are for me.”

Then he’s standing up again and moving smoothly from door to door, click, click, click, but none of the other children see inside, and none of them will really believe you when you tell them, though their eyes will go wide and they’ll love the story, and not a one of them saw the promise for you in Mister Ice Cold’s eyes. But you did, didn’t you? And some night, after the end of summer, when it’s cool and you don’t want it any cooler, you’ll be lying in your bed all alone and you’ll hear Mister Ice Cold’s pretty little song coming closer through the night, through the dead, withered autumn leaves.

Dingy di-ding, dingy di-ding . . .

Then, later on, you just may hear the first click. But you’ll never hear the second click. None of them ever do.

E
LIZABETH
H
AND
lives on the Maine coast with novelist Richard Grant and their daughter Callie Anne. She is the author of the novels
Winterlong
(a nominee for the Philip K. Dick Award) and
Aestival Tide
, and is currently at work on
Waking the Moon
. Her short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies such as
The Year’s Best Horror Stories, Full Spectrum II
and
Twilight Zone
. She is a Contributing Editor to
Science Fiction Eye
and her book reviews and criticism are published in
The Washington Post, Penthouse, The Detroit Metro Times
and the feminist quarterly,
Belles Lettres
.

The powerful slice of dark fantasy which follows is based on the author’s real-life experiences on the town route in Green County, Virginia, several years ago. “Like Julie Dean,” she notes, “I ate too many Bomb Pops, smoked too many cigarettes, and met the people you’ll find in this story, including the bearded lady and Sam and Little Eva. And as anyone who’s spent much time in those mountains can tell you, some truly weird stuff happens there.”

I
MET THE BEARDED LADY
the first day I rode with Cass on the town route. That sweltering afternoon I sprawled across my mattress on the floor. A few inches from my nose lay the crumpled notice of the revocation of my scholarship. Beside it a less formally worded letter indicated that in light of my recent lack of interest in the doings of The Fertile Mind Bookstore, my services there would no longer be needed, and would I please return the
Defries Incunabula
I had “borrowed” for my thesis immediately? From downstairs thumped the persistent bass line of the house band’s demo tape. Then another, more insistent thudding began outside my room. I moaned and pulled my pillow onto my head. I ignored the pounding on the door, finally pretended to be asleep as Cass let himself in.

“Time to wake up,” he announced, kneeling beside the mattress and sliding a popsicle down my back. “Time to go on the ice cream truck.”

I moaned and burrowed deeper into the bed. “Ow—that hurts—”

“It’s ice cream, Julie. It’s supposed to hurt.” Cass dug the popsicle into the nape of my neck, dripping pink ice and licking it from my skin between whispers. “Snap out of it, Jules. You been in here two whole weeks. Natalie at the bookstore’s worried.”

“Natalie at the bookstore fired me.” I reached for a cigarette and twisted to face the window. “You better go, Cass. I have work to do.”

“Huh.” He bent to flick at the scholarship notice, glanced at yet another sordid billet: UNDERGRADUATE ACADEMIC SUSPENSION in bold red characters. Beneath them a humorlessly detailed list of transgressions. “You’re not working on your thesis. You’re not doing
anything
. You got to get out of here, Julie. You promised. You said you’d come with me on the truck and you haven’t gone once since I started.” He stalked to the door, kicking at a drift of unpaid bills, uncashed checks, unopened letters from my parents, unreturned phone messages from Cass Tyrone. “You don’t come today, Julie, that’s it. No more ice cream.”

“No more Bomb Pops?” I asked plaintively.

“Nope.” He sidled across the hall, idly nudging a beer bottle down the steps.

“No more Chump Bars?”

“Forget it. And no Sno-Cones, either. I’ll save ’em for Little Eva.” Reaching into his knapsack, he tossed me another popsicle and waited. I unpeeled it and licked it thoughtfully, applying it to my aching forehead. Then I stood up.

“Okay. I’m coming.”

Outside, on the house’s crumbling brick, someone had spraypainted
Dog Is Glove
and
You Are What You Smell
, along with some
enthusiastic criticism of the house band written by Cass himself. A few steps farther and the truck stood in a vacant parking lot glittering with squashed beer cans and shattered bottles. Before I could climb in, Cass made me walk with him around the rusted machine. He patted the flaking metal signs and kicked the tires appraisingly. The truck settled ominously into the gravel at this attention and Cass sighed. “Damn. Hope we don’t get another flat your first time out.”