The Mammoth Book of Terror (67 page)

Then, abruptly, I was up, snatching my keys off the hook next to the kitchen sink and fleeing toward our car, while that incomplete tune whirled in my head and the whole last night with Ash
spilled in front of my eyes in kaleidoscopic broken pieces. I don’t remember a single second of the drive down the freeways, couldn’t even tell you whether there was traffic, because
all I was seeing were the homeless men and the sores on their arms and the way their mouths moved as they chanted their rhyme. Then I was seeing the ray flapping in midair, lifted out of the waves
just as we passed, as though the whole scene had been triggered by our passing. The disappearing blonde children, the arcade machine attendant’s graceful shuffle and the sound he made. The
rose-petal poker chips. The tinkling machines. The glide of the rollergirl, and the skater kid’s moonwalk, and the American flag man. And the poodle-skirt women’s perpetually smiling
faces. Most of all, their faces, and it was their laughter I was hearing as I skidded into that giant, empty parking lot and jammed my car to a stop and leapt out, hoping, praying.

Even the streetlights were gone, and the dark pier jutted crookedly over the quietly lapping water like the prow of a beached ship. No magician’s hat. Nothing on the pier at all. Overhead,
I saw stars, faint and smeared by the smog, as though I were viewing them through a greasy window. Behind me, the new old city, safely shut down and swept clean for the night, rocked imperceptibly
on its foundations. A wind kicked up, freezing cold, and I clamped my arms to my chest and crouched beside my car and wished I’d remembered a jacket, at least.

Finally, I let myself think it. Sortwhatl’d been hoping. Which had been what, exactly? That I’d find the auctioneer still here? That the movers would still be emptying the last
pieces out of the warehouse, and maybe I could . . .

“What?” I said aloud, and slammed my palms against the pavement and scraped them badly.
Do what
? Pick up my friend’s body like a cigar store Indian, tie him to the top
of the car, bring him to our house, which he’d never seen, and prop him on our little porch in our choice of vests? Maybe bring along a poodle-skirt woman so we could make set-pieces?

Staggering to my feet, I took a huge breath and let the ocean air cut my lungs. In my pocket, I realized, I’d jammed the newspaper article, and I removed it now, uncrumpled it, ripped it
to pieces, and set the pieces flying. Rebecca could never see that article, could never know what I was thinking. It was bad enough – it was flat, fucking murder – that we’d left
Ash down here. I didn’t even want to imagine how she’d react when she realized what really might have happened to her father.

How did it work, I wondered? Were Rooff s ghosts, or machines, or whatever they were,
selective
about the company they brought him? Had they let us go, or had we refused? Had Ash known,
before it was too late, that he had a choice? Had the rest of them – the rollergirl, the flag man, the kid, maybe even Rebecca’s father – chosen to stay, because it was bright and
musical and happy in there, and smelled of the sea?

It was almost light when I fumbled my car door open and collapsed back into the driver’s seat. I could be wrong, I thought. I could go home right now and find Rebecca with the kitchen
phone dangling from her ear, smiling in the way she didn’t anymore as Ash told her where he’d vanished to this time and she spooned minced carrots to our child. But I didn’t think
so.

Not until I was off the freeways again, just pulling into our little driveway, did it occur to me to wonder where, exactly, Rooff s last merry-go-round stopped. At the edge of the white curtain?
Or at the end of the pier? The ray could have been part of it, and the fishermen, and the beggars, too. Or maybe they’d just wanted to be.

I stepped out of the car, felt the stagnant L.A air settle around me. The rising sun caught in my neighbor’s windows, releasing tiny prisms of colored light, and somewhere down the street,
wind-chimes clinked, though there was little wind. And the feeling that whispered through me then was indeed magical, terrible, and also almost sweet. Because I realized I might be underestimating
the power of Rooff s last carousel, even now. We could be on it, still – Rebecca, me, the whole crazy, homogenizing coast – bobbing up and down in our prescribed places as our parents
die and our friends whirl past and away again and the places we love evaporate out of the world, the way everyone’s favorite people and places inevitably do. Until, finally, we are just our
faces, smiles frozen bright as we can make them, hands stretching for our children because we can’t help but hope they’ll join us, hope they’ll understand before we did that there
really may be no place else to go or at least forgive us for not finding it. Then they’ll smile back at us. Climb aboard. And ride.

KIM NEWMAN HAS WON
the Bram Stoker Award, the British Fantasy Award, the British Science Fiction Award, the Children of the Night Award, the Fiction
Award of the Lord Ruthven Assembly and the International Horror Critics Guild Award.

His novels include
The Night Mayor, Bad Dreams, Jago, The Quorum, Back in the USSR
(with Eugene Byrne),
Life’s Lottery
and the acclaimed
Anno Dracula
sequence –
comprising the title novel, plus
The Bloody Red Baron
and
Judgment of Tears
(aka
Dracula Cha Cha Cha
)
. An English Ghost Story
is currently being developed as a movie
from a script by the author, while
The Matter of Britain
is another collaboration with Byrne.

As “Jack Yeovil” Newman has published a number of novels loosely inspired by the heroic fantasy “Warhammer” and Apocalyptic “Dark Future” role-playing games.
These include
Drachenfels, Beasts in Velvet
and
Genevieve Undead. Silver Nails is
a recent collection of five stories set in the Games Workshop universe and featuring the
author’s recurrent character, vampire heroine Genevieve Dieudonne.

Under his own name, Newman’s extremely clever short fiction, which is often linked by recurring themes and characters, has been collected in
The Original Dr Shade and Other Stories,
Famous Monsters, Seven Stars, Unforgivable Stories
and
Dead Travel Fast. Where the Bodies Are Buried
contains four interconnected novellas, and
Time and Relative
is a prequel to
the BBC-TV series in Telos Publishing’s “Doctor Who Novellas” series. Newman has also edited the alternate history music anthology
In Dreams
with Paul McAuley.

As the author recalls, “Once, long ago and far away, John Skipp and Craig Spector edited an anthology called
The Book of the Dead
, of mostly fine stories set more or less in the
world of George A. Romero’s ‘Living Dead’ films. It was so well-received that the editors produced a further volume,
Still Dead.
Then, remembering that there were three
Romero dead movies, they set out to do a third volume, which may well have been called
Deader Than Ever
or
Deadest Yet.

“Since, in my other life as a movie critic, I had written extensively about Romero in my book
Nightmare Movies
, I was pleased to be asked by John to come up with something for this
third book. I did a little rewriting at Craig’s suggestion, got paid (as I remember it) and waited for the story to appear.

“Years passed. I’m not really privy to what happened, but various publishers and editors fell out with each other and, though the third dead book nearly happened at least twice (I
once received page proofs of the story) it never managed to stumble into print. If you’ve been picking up recent anthologies of original horror stories, you’ve already read quite a few
ship-jumping tales from the collection (Douglas E. Winter’s wonderful ‘The Zombies of Madison County’ is one).

“For a while, Amerikanski Dead’ was due to come out as a chapbook – but that never quite happened either. Then, with the bogus Millennium looming, I was asked by Al Sarrantonio
if I had anything he might look at for what was then called
999: The Last Horror Anthology
, intended to be one of those genre-summing, uber-collection doorstops that the field needs every so
often to stay alive. I dug out this, and it wound up as the lead story in the somewhat more modestly-titled
999: New Stories of Horror and Suspense.
For that appearance, the story lost its
subtitle (a quote from Jean-Luc Godard) to keep the list of contents tidy, but I’m restoring it here.

“Though the rising of the dead is supposed to be a global phenomenon, Romero’s movies –
Night of the Living Dead
(1968),
Dawn of the Dead
(1979) and
Day of the
Dead
(1984) – are all about America. One or two of the stories in the dead collections are about foreign parts (Poppy Brite’s ‘Calcutta, Lord of Nerves’) and Clive
Barker was connected with a comic book spin-off that had dead folks (including the Royal Family) in London. But Romero’s films belong now to the era of the superpower face-off, and I thought
it would be interesting to see what might be happening in the then-Soviet Union during the time between
Dawn
and
Day
and, more importantly, what it might
mean.
The title is a
riff on
The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue
, the British release title of the Spanish-Italian movie
No profanar el sueno de los muertos
(1974) – known in America as
Don’t Open the Window
or
Let Skeping Corpses Lie
(rarely has one film had so many great titles).

“The business about reconstructing faces from skulls is mentioned in Martin Cruz Smith’s
Gorky Park
, but I remembered it from a 1960s BBC-TV science documentary
(
Tomorrow’s World?
) in which the skull of Ivan the Terrible was used as a template to recreate his head. For Rasputin details, I drew on Robert K. Massie’s
Nicholas and
Alexandra
, Sir David Napley’s
Rasputin in Hollywood
and various unreliable movie and TV performances by whiskery scenery-chewers like Lionel Barry-more, Boris Karloff, Tom Baker
and Christopher Lee.”

Legs boiled from steam, face and hands frozen from winter, he wandered through the station. The cavernous space was subdivided by sandbags. Families huddled like pioneers expecting an attack by
Red Indians, luggage drawn about in a circle, last bullets saved for women and children. Chirkov spat mentally; Amerika had invaded his imagination, just as his political officers warned. Some
refugees were coming from Moscow, others fleeing to the city. There was no rule. A wall-sized poster of the New First Secretary was disfigured with a blotch, red gone to black. The splash of dried
blood suggested something had been finished against the wall. There were Amerikans in Borodino. Seventy miles from Moscow, the station was a museum to resisted invasions. Plaques, statues and
paintings honoured the victories of 1812 and 1944. A poster listed those local officials executed after being implicated in the latest counter-revolution. The air was tangy with ash, a reminder of
past scorched earth policies. There were big fires nearby. An army unit was on duty, but no one knew anything about a timetable. An officer told him to queue and wait. More trains were coming from
Moscow than going to, which meant the capital would eventually have none left.

He ventured out of the station. The snow cleared from the forecourt was banked a dozen yards away. Sunlight glared off muddy white. It was colder and brighter than he was used to in the Ukraine.
A trio of Chinese-featured soldiers, a continent away from home, offered to share cigarettes and tried to practise Russian on him. He understood they were from Amgu; from the highest point in that
port, you could see Japan. He asked if they knew where he could find an official. As they chirruped among themselves in an alien tongue, Chirkov saw his first Amerikan. Emerging from between
snowbanks and limping towards the guard-post, the dead man looked as if he might actually be an American. Barefoot, he waded spastically through slush, jeans-legs shredded over thin shins. His
shirt was a bright picture of a parrot in a jungle. Sunglasses hung round his neck on a thin string. Chirkov made the Amerikan’s presence known to the guards. Fascinated, he watched the dead
man walk. With every step, the Amerikan crackled: there were deep, ice-threaded rifts in his skin. He was slow and brittle and blind, crystal eyes frozen open, arms stiff by his sides.