Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (11 page)

    A pretty woman, probably half-Japanese, half-black - I'm good at guessing ethnicities and extractions, and the look is a unique one -sat on the steps of a three-storey apartment house with decorative castle crenulations on the roof, sipping an orange cream soda from a bottle and reading a slim book. There was something about her - ah, right, I got it. I was in a body again, and she was beautiful, and I was attracted.

    "Afternoon," I said, walking up to the steps and nodding a greeting. "You know Miss Li?"

    "Down on the corner?" she said. "Sure."

    "I'm her nephew. I'll be staying with her for a while, maybe a few weeks, while I get settled."

    "Nephew, huh?" She looked up at me speculatively. "By marriage, I'm guessing."

    "You guessed right," I said, and extended my hand.

    "I'm Sadie." She shook my hand. "Welcome to the neighbourhood." There was no jolt of electricity, but she wasn't giving me go-away vibes, either, so I gave it a try.

    "Are you from around here?"

    "Me? No. I'm from Chicago, born and raised. Just came out here for school."

    I grinned wider. I couldn't have a dalliance with someone from around here - it would be too easy to steer them, compel them, without even intending to, too easy to chat with their deep down parts by accident. But she had a different home, so we could talk, like people. I was a person now, for the moment, more or less. "I could use someone to show me around the neighbourhood, help get me oriented."

    She shrugged. "What do you want to know?"

    I sat down, not too close. "Oh, I don't know."
How about "Why aren't you terrified? Don't you sense the presence of somethingmonstrous in this place?"
"Who's that guy?" I pointed at a young Latino man tinkering on a motorcycle in the garage across the street.

    "Hmm. I think his name's Mike? I don't really know him. He goes on motorcycle rides most weekends."

    "Okay. How about him?" This time I pointed at a big man in an unseasonable brown coat, walking up the hill dragging a wire grocery cart behind him. He was middle-aged, and had probably been a real bruiser in his prime.

    "That's Ike Train," she said. "Nice guy, but kind of intense. He's a plumber, and he fixes stuff for people in the neighbourhood for free sometimes, but he likes to hang around and talk for a while afterward, and he gets bad BO when he sweats, so not a lot of people take him up on it. He's got a deal with whoever owns my building, though, and he does all the plumbing stuff here."

    "How about her?" I said. A woman in sunglasses, attractive in a blonde-and-brittle-and-gym-cultured way, was walking a little yip-ping dog.

    "Martha." Sadie rolled her eyes. "Put your trash cans out on the curb a day early and you'll catch hell from her. I think she's in a hurry for this neighbourhood to finish gentrifying. So why all the questions?"

    "I just like talking to you," I said, which was the truth, but not the whole truth. "Asking about people passing by seemed like a good way to do that."

    She laughed. "You never told me your name."

    Why not? No one ever even remarked on the name - except to say it was weird - unless I was on a Pacific island, and even then, it meant so many things in so many different languages, no one ever guessed. "I'm Reva," I said.

    "Interesting name. Where you from?"

    "I was born on a little island in the Pacific," I said. "You wouldn't have heard of it. But I didn't stay there long. I've lived all over since then." I thought this was going well, but we were reaching the point where the conversation could founder on the rocks of nothing-in-common. "You said you're here for school? What do you-"

    Someone shouted "Sadie!" A short man with wispy hair, dressed like an IRS agent from the 1950s - black horn-rimmed glasses, white shirt, narrow black tie - bustled over from the house across the street, an ugly boxy two-storey with heavy drapes in the windows. He reached our side of the street and said "Vocabulary word: 'Obstruction'."

    "Oh, Christ," Sadie muttered.

    "Something that gets in the
way,"
he continued. "Another: 'Obstinate'. Unreasonably stubborn; pig-headed."

    "The back bumper of my car's only in front of your driveway by an
inch,
Oswald," she said. "The car in front of me is too far back, I'm sorry, it's not like it's actually in your
way."

    "In my way, and in the
red,"
Oswald said, not even glancing at me, staring at Sadie with damp-looking eyes magnified behind thick lenses. "The police have been notified."

    "Whatever," Sadie said. "Fine, I'll move it." She stood up, glared at him, looked at me apologetically, and walked over to a well-worn black compact that was, maybe, poking two inches into the little driveway that led to Oswald's garage. She got in and drove away.

    I nodded at Oswald. "Beautiful day," I said.

    He squinted at me, then turned and went back to his house, up the steps, and through the front door.

    I glanced at the book Sadie had left on the steps. It was a monograph on contraceptive methods in the ancient world. I wondered what she was studying. A few moments later she came walking up the sidewalk and returned to her place on the steps. "Sorry," she said. "Oswald's a dick. He never even opens his garage. As far as I know he doesn't even have a car." She shook her head.

    "Every neighbourhood has a nasty, petty person or two."

    "I guess. Most people here are pretty nice. I've only been here a year, but I know a lot of people well enough to say hello to, and Oswald's the only one I really can't stand. Him and his 'vocabulary words'. Somebody told me he's an English teacher, or used to be, or something. Can you imagine being stuck in a class with
him?"

    "I'd rather not think about it. So Am I someone you'll say hello to in the future?"

    "You haven't given me a reason not to yet," she said. "Look, it's nice meeting you, but I've got studying to do."

    "What subject?"

    "I'm getting my master's in human sexuality. Which, today, means reading about how ancient Egyptians used crocodile shit and sour milk as spermicide."

    I wrinkled my nose. "Did it work?"

    "Actually, yeah. But it can't have been very much fun." She rose, picked up her drink, and went into the apartment building.

    
I love a woman who can toss off a good exit line,
I thought.

    The next morning I ran into Sadie, and she invited me to brunch at a cafe down near the lake. We ate eggs and drank mimosas on the restaurant's patio, where bougainvillea vines hung all around us from pillars and trellises. She wanted to know things about me, and I was game, telling her a few stories from my travels. She was from Chicago, so I told her about the month I'd spent there, leaving out my battle in the train yard with a golem made of hog meat. I told her a bit about my months working on a riverboat casino on the Mississippi, though I didn't mention the immortal singer in the piano bar who'd once been a pirate, and wanted to start plundering again, before I convinced him otherwise.

    "So you're basically a drifter," she said, sipping her second mimosa.

    "We prefer to be called 'people of no fixed address,'" I said.

    "How long do you think you'll stay here?"

    "Oh, I don't know," I said, leaning across the table, looking at her face, which seemed to fit some ideal of faces I'd never before imagined. "I'm like anybody else, I guess. Just looking for a place to call home."

    She threw a napkin at me, and it bounced off my nose, and I thought I might be falling in love.

    Sadie had to study, so I spent the rest of the lovely Sunday meeting people in the neighbourhood. It's not hard, once you overcome their initial reluctance to talk to strangers, and hearing I was Miss Li's nephew made most folks open up, too - the lady was well-liked. I visited the closest park, just a few blocks away, where some guys from the neighbourhood were playing basketball. I got in on the game, and didn't play
too
well, and they liked me fine. I got invited to a barbecue for the next weekend. I helped an older guy wash his car, and then spent an hour with Mike, who was rebuilding the carburettor on his motorcycle - I didn't know much about machines, but I was able to hand him tools and talk about California scenic highways. I chatted with mothers pushing strollers, young kids riding scooters, surly teens, and old people on afternoon walks.

    And every time I got someone alone, if they were from around here, I talked to their deep down parts, and I asked them what was wrong with this place.

    I didn't find out anything unusual. Oh, there were crimes - this
was
a big city, after all, even if a residential neighbourhood. There were occasional break-ins, and a mugging or two, though none right around here. A couple of car thefts. But nothing poisonously, unspeakably bad. Maybe my senses were out of whack, or I was picking up the irrelevant psychic residue of some long-ago atrocity.

    I have trouble adapting my mind to the shortness of human time scales, sometimes.

    It was late afternoon when I went past Ike Train's place. He had a tidy little house, and a bigger yard than most. His porch was shadowed, but I could see the big man sitting on a creaking wooden swing, messing with something in his hands. I was going to hello the house, but Ike hailed me first. "You're new!" he shouted. "Come over!"

    "Mr Train," I said, delighted, because I do love meeting people, especially ones who love meeting me. "I've heard about you." I passed through the bushes, which overgrew his walk, and went up to his porch. He held a little man-shaped figure made of twisted wire and pipe cleaners in his hands. He set the thing aside and rose, reaching out to shake my hand. His grip was strong, but not a macho show-off strong, just the handshake of a man who wrestled with pipe wrenches on a regular basis.

    "You're staying with Miss Li," he said, sitting down, and gesturing for me to take a cane chair by his front door. "Her nephew?"

    "I'm Reva. More of a grand-nephew from the other side of the family, but yeah."

    "What brings you to town?" He went back to twisting the wire, giving the little man an extra set of arms, like a Hindu deity.

    "I've been travelling for a few years," I said. "Thought I might try settling here." Maybe I would, for a while, if I could find a way to get rid of the bad thing making the whole street's aura stink. Being in a body again was nice, and even on our short acquaintance there was something about Sadie I wanted to know better, like she was a flavour I'd been craving for ages.

    "It's a nice enough place," Ike said.

    "So tell me," I said, leaning forward. "Are you from around here?"

    Ike's hands went still, the wire forgotten. "Oh, yeah," he said, and his voice was different now, slower and thicker. "This is my home. Nobody knows how hard I work to keep it clean, how filthy it gets. The whole fucking city is circling the drain. Dirty, nasty, rotten, wretched…"

    I frowned. That was his deep down self talking, but it didn't sound like him. "Ike, what do you-"

    "We have to twist their heads all the way around," he said, his voice oddly placid, and turned the little wire man in his hands, twisting its round loop of a head tighter and tighter until it snapped and came off in his fingers. "Break them and sweep them up. Clean up the trash, keep things clean. Yeah. I'm from
around
here."

    "Ike," I said, careful, because there were sinkholes in this man's mind, and I didn't know how deep they were, or what might be hidden inside them. "Maybe you and me can work something out."

    "No," he said, and crushed the little man. "There's nothing to work out. Everything's already been worked out." He stared at me, through me, and his eyes were wet with tears. "There's nothing you can offer me."

    I stood up and stepped back. He was from around here, I was talking to his deep down self, but Ike wouldn't work something out with me. I didn't understand this refusal. It was like water refusing to freeze in winter, like leaves refusing to fall in autumn, a violation of everything I understood about natural law. "Don't worry about it, Ike. Let's just forget we had this talk, huh?"

    Ike looked down at the broken wire thing in his hands. "Nice meeting you, ah, buddy," he said. "Say hi to Miss Li for me."

    I headed back down the street towards Miss Li's, thinking maybe Ike was crazy. Maybe he had something to do with the badness here. Maybe he
was
the badness. I needed to know more. I asked Miss Li about him, over dinner that night, but she didn't know much about Ike. He'd lived on the street longer than anybody, and his parents had owned his house before him. He was seriously from around here. So why had talking to his deep down self been so strange and disturbing?

    "Hey, Reva," Sadie said when I answered the door. "You busy?"

    It was Monday, and the street was quiet, most everybody off about their business. "Not for you," I said, leaning against the doorjamb.

    "Could you come up to my place and help me with something?"