The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror (8 page)

“Is that you, Barry?” The woman squints. Her hair is wound into filthy dreads, not all of her teeth remain and the breeze tells me she’s not washed in some time. Hillbilly vamps, who’d have thought it? Feeding on the occasional lost tourist, stray cattle, giant possums. “Aw, Barry. What the fuck happened?”

“Long fucking story. I need to use the pool,” he says shortly.

“The pool? No one’s done that in a hundred years—you dunno what’s gonna happen.” She gets a cunning look in her eye. “What’s it worth to ya?”

“How about a snack?”

Told you Barry was a nasty piece of work. But you know what, I’m less afraid of him than I am of them. One thing I do know is this: no matter how much he lies to everyone else, he’s always kept his word to my family. He said I would be safe. He’s also the only thing protecting me from the cast of a bloodsucking
Deliverance.

I’m flanked by two underfed youths with straggly beards and, if I didn’t know better, a look that says “Inbreeding keeps it in the family.” One of them carries a torch plucked flaming from the fire. They don’t need it to see, hell, they don’t need fire at all, but I recognize in the building of the bonfire a remnant of their warm days, a little thing to hang onto. A memory of
back when,
of kids playing at grown-ups, of a time when heat meant comfort, meant life. Creatures pretending one day there might be light.

The falls are a couple of minutes walk away, down a path strewn with sticks and pebbles, occasionally hidden by touchy-feely ferns. When we reach the bottom, there’s a shallow pool and a whole lot of spray where the water crashes down. One of my escorts points to a break in the foliage, right next to the cataract; the other pushes me roughly forward. My Docs slip and slide on the damp rocks. I keep my balance though; with a head in one hand, a sword in the other, and Barry cursing me the whole while it’s no mean feat. I walk around behind the curtain of wet and see an entrance, a glow coming from inside it like a jack-o’-lantern.

There are no torches here, I notice, but the walls glow. Phosphorous? I wait until we’re far enough down the tunnel for my guard of honor to not hear.

“Barry, you ungrateful bastard. I carry your sorry metaphorical arse all the way here, nearly get eaten by a mutant possum, and this is the thanks I get?” I shake him by the hair and glare into his blue eyes. “You think I’m an
hors d’oeuvre
?”

“Calm down. Wait—possum? Is that what happened to my nose? You let a possum eat my fucking nose?”

“Focus, Barry. Seriously, do you think I’m going to drop you in the all-healing, all-fixing pond so you can serve me up to that lot?” I shake him again and he winces. “Or are you gonna snack on me yourself?”

“Don’t worry about it. Once I’m whole again, no one’s going to mess with you.”

“You didn’t answer me!”

“I might need a little blood when I’m done,” he admits. I give his head a good rattle and a few choice profanities, and he yells, “Not much! Not much! Just a little to top up. I promise!”

“What are we talking? A thimbleful? A shot glass?”

“Just a—bit. Terry, I promise I won’t drain you, I won’t turn you.”

What choice do I have? The devil I know or the ones I don’t.

The pool is at the bottom of the slope, in roughly the center of a small cavern. The liquid in it is milky-white with the same sheen as mother-of-pearl, and the smell is a little like household cleaner. A bit bleachy—more
Domestos
than
Dettol.

“What’s that?” I ask, trying not to breathe too deeply.

“Stuff. You know—stuff.”

“You knew about this how?”

“Stories, Chinese whispers, old diaries—your lot aren’t the only ones who keep records, you know. Nothing precise, nothing exact, just hints.”

“You
read
our diaries?” I shouldn’t be surprised.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m a bad person. Throw me in.”

“But what if it doesn’t work?”

“Not really in a position to be picky, am I? Fountain of youth, a wellspring, a cauldron of plenty. There are legends and they all say it brings life.”

I don’t point out to Barry that strictly speaking he has been for some time well and truly beyond the usual span of any creature. Well and truly outside the spectrum of what we call “life.”

“So,” I say, “life?”

“Life. Now hurry the fuck up and toss me in.”

I walk around the edge. It’s about five meters across and bubbling enthusiastically. If I drop him, maybe he’ll just drown—this is a bit deeper than the esky—which still leaves me with a problem.

“Here’s the deal, Barry: I’ll put you in but in return you let me go. I’m no one’s lunch, I’m no one’s slave, I’m gone. I’m out. I do whatever I want.”

“Terry . . . ”

“You want life or not?”

“Yes, fuck it!” He gives a growl of frustration. “Alright. Agreed. I can find better than you at the local whorehouse anyway.”

“Touché.”

I kneel beside the pond and lower Barry in, resisting the impulse to drop him from a height to see how much of a splash he’ll make. Some of the fluid leaps up like a nipping fish and lands on my fingers. It stings like ice. I grit my teeth and keep going, don’t release the head until he is thoroughly submerged.

I try to straighten up, withdraw my arm, but I feel sharp teeth in my wrist. Barry, you bastard. That, however, is the least of my problems: the water has me. Blood spurts from my nose and turns pink as it hits the milky pond. It’s like I’m in the grip of an electrical current. It tugs at me and tugs at me until I over-balance and it pulls me beneath the surface.

I feel as if I’m dying forever.

My last sight before I’m overwhelmed is Barry’s head tossed and churned, jumping about like popping corn. Angry fingers of fluid force their way into my mouth and race down my throat, filling my lungs like inhaled fire. My skin seems to peel off, each hair follicle is a tiny pin in my scalp. Surely my eyes burst.

When it stops hurting, the water lets me go.

I crawl out and lie on the surprisingly warm rock. I’m whole, intact if somewhat soaked. I rub a hand against my shin, right where the possum bite was and feel . . .

And feel . . .

Nothing.

I roll up the leg of my cargos and strip away the bandage. There’s just a pink mark that might have been a scar but fades as I watch. The katana is where I left it, and I pick it up, prick at my finger with its sharpness. Something silver oozes out from the cut and just as quickly the opening closes over.

A great spout of water comes from the pool and a body lands not far from me, gives a displeased groan.

Barry, whole again, tall and handsome and muscular and . . .

And no longer pale as if he tries to tan beneath the moon.

He rolls on his back, coughing, making a noise like an espresso machine. He breathes. I poke at him with the katana. A tiny drop of blood blossoms on his skin and he swears. Rich, fresh, oxygenated,
living
blood.

“Oh, Barry,” I say. “You were right.”

He sits up, runs his hands over his arms and legs, wondering, not understanding. “But . . . ”

“It does give life, Barry. You’ve been dead a long time.” I can’t keep the laughter out of my voice.

“But . . . Fuck!” He stands up, pacing. “Okay. I don’t have to outrun them, I just have to outrun you.”

“Here’s the thing, Baz, I don’t think they’re going to be interested in me anymore.” I rise, do the thing with the poking and the quick silvery bleed. “Close as I can figure it, nature abhors a vacuum. The pond finished what you started, taking my blood and all, then . . . replaced it.”

I start up the path, cast a look behind, “Long time since you’ve been meat. How’s it feel?”

There was something inside the music; something that squished and scuttled and honked and raved, something unsettling, like a snake in a satin glove.

The Bleeding Shadow
Joe R. Lansdale

I was down at the Blue Light Joint that night, finishing off some ribs and listening to some blues, when in walked Alda May. She was looking good too. Had a dress on and it fit her the way a dress ought to fit every woman in the world. She was wearing a little flat hat that leaned to one side, like an unbalanced plate on a waiter’s palm. The high heels she had on made her legs look tight and way all right.

The light wasn’t all that good in the joint, which is one of its appeals. It sometimes helps a man or woman get along in a way the daylight wouldn’t stand, but I knew Alda May enough to know light didn’t matter. She’d look good wearing a sack and a paper hat.

There was something about her face that showed me right off she was worried, that things weren’t right. She was glancing left and right, like she was in some big city trying to cross a busy street and not get hit by a car.

I got my bottle of beer, left out from my table, and went over to her.

Then I knew why she’d been looking around like that. She said, “I was looking for you, Richard.”

“Say you were,” I said. “Well you done found me.”

The way she stared at me wiped the grin off my face.

“Something wrong, Alda May?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. I got to talk, though. Thought you’d be here, and I was wondering you might want to come by my place.”

“When?”

“Now.”

“All right.”

“But don’t get no business in mind,” she said. “This isn’t like the old days. I need your help, and I need to know I can count on you.”

“Well, I kind of like the kind of business we used to do, but all right, we’re friends. It’s cool.”

“I hoped you’d say that.”

“You got a car?” I said.

She shook her head. “No. I had a friend drop me off.”

I thought, Friend? Sure.

“All right then,” I said, “lets strut on out.”

I guess you could say it’s a shame Alda May makes her money turning tricks, but when you’re the one paying for the tricks, and you are one of her satisfied customers, you feel different. Right then, anyway. Later, you feel guilty. Like maybe you done peed on the Mona Lisa. ’Cause that gal, she was one fine dark skin woman who should have got better than a thousand rides and enough money to buy some eats and make some coffee in the morning. She deserved something good. Should have found and married a man with a steady job that could have done all right by her.

But that hadn’t happened. Me and her had a bit of something once, and it wasn’t just business, money changing hands after she got me feeling good. No, it was more than that, but we couldn’t work it out. She was in the life and didn’t know how to get out. And as for deserving something better, that wasn’t me. What I had were a couple of nice suits, some two-tone shoes, a hat, and a gun—.45-caliber automatic, like they’d used in the war a few years back.

Alma May got a little on the dope, too, and though she shook it, it had dropped her down deep. Way I figured, she wasn’t never climbing out of that hole, and it didn’t have nothing to do with dope now. What it had to do with was time. You get a window open now and again, and if you don’t crawl through it, it closes. I know. My window had closed some time back. It made me mad all the time.

We were in my Chevy, a six-year-old car, a forty-eight model. I’d had it reworked a bit at a time: new tires, fresh windshield, nice seat covers and so on. It was shiny and special.

We were driving along, making good time on the highway, the lights racing over the cement, making the recent rain in the ruts shine like the knees of old dress pants.

“What you need me for?” I asked.

“It’s a little complicated,” she said.

“Why me?”

“I don’t know . . . You’ve always been good to me, and once we had a thing goin’.”

“We did,” I said.

“What happened to it?”

I shrugged. “It quit goin’.”

“It did, didn’t it? Sometimes I wish it hadn’t.”

“Sometimes I wish a lot of things,” I said.

She leaned back in the seat and opened her purse and got out a cigarette and lit it, then rolled down the window. She remembered I didn’t like cigarette smoke. I never had got on the tobacco. It took your wind and it stunk and it made your breath bad too. I hated when it got in my clothes.

“You’re the only one I could tell this to,” she said. “The only one that would listen to me and not think I been with the needle in my arm. You know what I’m sayin’?”

“Sure, baby, I know.”

“I sound to you like I been bad?”

“Naw. You sound all right. I mean, you’re talkin’ a little odd, but not like you’re out of your head.”

“Drunk?”

“Nope. Just like you had a bad dream and want to tell someone.”

“That’s closer,” she said. “That ain’t it, but that’s much closer than any needle or whisky or wine.”

Alma May’s place is on the outskirts of town. It’s the one thing she got out of life that ain’t bad. It’s not a mansion. It’s small, but it’s tight and bright in the daylight, all painted up canary yellow color with deep blue trim. It didn’t look bad in the moonlight.

Alma May didn’t work with a pimp. She didn’t need one. She was well known around town. She had her clientele. They were all safe, she told me once. About a third of them were white folks from on the other side of the tracks, up there in the proper part of Tyler Town. What she had besides them was a dead mother and a runaway father, and a brother, Tootie, who liked to travel around, play blues, and suck that bottle. He was always needing something, and Alma May, in spite of her own demons, had always managed to make sure he got it.

That was another reason me and her had to split the sheets. That brother of hers was a grown-ass man, and he lived with his mother and let her tote his water. When the mama died, he sort of went to pieces. Alma May took mama’s part over, keeping Tootie in whisky and biscuits, even bought him a guitar. He lived off her whoring money, and it didn’t bother him none. I didn’t like him. But I will say this. That boy could play the blues.

When we were inside her house, she unpinned her hat from her hair and sailed it across the room and into a chair.

She said, “You want a drink?”