Year's End: 14 Tales of Holiday Horror
Year’s End
Edited by J. Alan Hartman
Copyright 2012 by
Appointment in Time, James S. Dorr
Doll, Richard Godwin
Jack’s Month, Nicky Peacock
A Night in the Pampas, John Stewart Wynne
Deadly Secrets, Steve Shrott
Trigger, Leah Givens
The Story of Myrtle Roady, George Seaton
Midnight Whispers, Kathryn Ohnaka
Contract Fulfilled, Jeremy K. Tyler
Mixology, Betsy Miller
Whatever It Takes, Byron Barton
The Rat, Steve Bartholomew
Missing Pieces, Ali Maloney
Token Lesbians, Foxglove Lee
Cover Copyright 2012 by Ginny Glass and Untreed Reads Publishing
The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold, reproduced or transmitted by any means in any form or given away to other people without specific permission from the author and/or publisher. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Other Anthologies by Multiple Authors and Untreed Reads Publishing
The Killer Wore Cranberry
The Killer Wore Cranberry: A Second Helping
Year’s End
Edited by J. Alan Hartman
Introduction
I must admit, I’ve always approached New Year’s Eve with a bit of trepidation. Where other people gathered together for raucous parties and proceeded to get blitzed into a drunken stupor, I couldn’t help but sit home and wonder where in the hell the previous year went and what I could have done differently.
Watching the ball drop in Times Square seems so exciting for all of the people who are gathered there, but for me there was something ominous about it at the same time. Watching the glittering orb sink to the bottom of its tower made me a little bit edgy. What if something went wrong when it hit bottom? What if it wasn’t timed properly? What if there was no point in making New Year’s resolutions because there was a chance that there wouldn’t
be
a New Year?
OK, I’ll admit it. I’m a pretty maudlin kind of guy at times. Still, I figured I couldn’t possibly be the
only
person in the world that found New Year’s Eve a little creepy and maybe not as joyous as everyone else did. Maybe there were others out there who felt a bit like I did.
Fortunately, I was right. They’re called “horror authors.” I proposed the idea of
Year’s End
, a short story anthology dedicated to New Year’s Eve gone horribly wrong, and wonderful horror authors showed up with champagne, streamers and a bit of terror to usher in the end of 2012.
The tales to follow are a bit more psychological in horror than gory, something for which I’ve always had a preference in the stories I read. What’s particularly exciting for me with this anthology is that not only do I have the opportunity to work with many current Untreed Reads authors, I also became exposed to the works of writers brand new to me. It’s a chance to ring out the old and ring in the new with familiar faces and new faces alike.
So do your best to keep your clock from reaching midnight. Stay sober in case there’s something evil approaching in those final hours of the year. Don’t make any resolutions, as there may not be a New Year in which to keep them. Who knows? Maybe I was right all along trying to hide from the ball drop.
J. Alan Hartman
Editor-in-Chief
Untreed Reads Publishing
November 2012
Appointment in Time
James S. Dorr
The Englishman was shown to the chair, the first of four he would sit in that day. This one, more a wide bench really, he shared with his escort, two members of the 17th Fusiliers in full dress uniform despite the beastly heat—even on the last day of December! He, a civilian, wore a black morning coat buttoned over a pale yellow waistcoat, grey wool pinstriped trousers, a starched white shirt and a Windsor tie, with polished boots, lavender gloves and a tall-crowned bowler completing his attire. This was, after all, not England he found himself in, where full formal evening wear might have been called for.
He had, however, been chosen in England for the important role he was to play before he had even boarded the steamship out, a special arrangement commemorating the love that remained, the continuation of British ways, even though the land he was in now no longer retained its colonial status. It was out of this love, as that between a now grown child and its parent, that the ceremony continued virtually unchanged, just as it had from the earliest times, to guarantee prosperity for the year to come for what remained of a once far-flung empire. And it was only in this land that it could be conducted, with its unique mix of ancient gods and shamanistic culture alongside the modern customs of the West—the latter exemplified by the high clock tower they had even now started to ascend.
One of the soldiers, their uniforms modeled on those of the British they’d recently replaced, steadied the Englishman as the chair left the ground. “You be okay, Sir?” he asked.
The Englishman looked up first, craning his neck, to see the first puffs of steam high in the air from the vents in the roof above the great clock face. He nodded, yes. He could not show nervousness even though they were fifty feet above the plaza already, even now beginning, before the sun had fully set, to attract the vanguard of what would soon be throngs of celebrants, shoulder to shoulder, packing the square.
Stiff upper lip, he thought. England expects. He hadn’t exactly volunteered for what was to happen, but as a member of the foreign service he had known that, any year, he could be the one chosen to represent the erstwhile mother country.
It was what he had been trained for, in a way. With everything else. That he had been unmarried was a factor also, allowing him more freedom when he arrived, for evenings in the capital city’s less sedate sectors. For drinking. For love. For civilized pleasures as well as those less so.
But what was civilization, he thought, except accommodation for that which was needed, even if not fully understood. To acquiesce to the local culture, even while representing his own.
The best of both worlds, yes?
Still lost in his thoughts, he felt the sudden rise as the troopers on either side stood. They were on the first ledge. “Help you, Sir?” one said as he stood up too, then let himself be led—glancing once back and down, toward the increasing crowd—through the narrow door into the tower’s clockwork filled interior.
Here the Englishman was led between the great twin boilers that powered the mechanisms above them. The tower was still lighted, the last rays of the sun shining in through open louvres that pierced its walls. He climbed the metal stairs up to the catwalk that wound around and, in some cases, through the slowly turning gear train, from flywheel to axle to crankshaft to belt to the central arbor that turned the clock’s hands, so high above and lost in shadow that he had to strain his eyes to make it out.
“This way, Sir,” a new voice said, breaking into the Englishman’s thoughts. He had to admit what he was seeing was impressive! He allowed this new person, wearing the goggles and white pressed duster of a clock mechanic, to strap him into a second chair, one he would ride alone up past the pendulum chamber, with its verge and crown wheel, its own gear train regulating the power train he had just viewed. And above it, the gong that sounded the hours, especially the twelve chimes that would sound at midnight, signifying the turning of the year. And, above that, the glint of more metal, of more machinery again hooked to pendulum and power train, to arbor and gong, for the culmination of this, the final day of December.
The technician handed the Englishman a bottle before he released the chair for its trip up. “To show our appreciation, Sir,” he said. “It’s imported Scotch whisky, from your own country. A man above will help you to a table and chair, where you can enjoy it, along with ice. Or seltzer, if you prefer. There’ll be a light supper too.”
The Englishman thanked him. He rode the chair up, then, noting how surprisingly fast it went, wondering if it, too, was connected to the main works of the clock, through yet one more gear train, or if it just had its own belt and flywheel independently taking it up and down as needed.
The chair finally stopped, hundreds of feet above where it had started, letting him off on a rough plank floor, with a crimson carpet muting its starkness. A man in a butler’s livery appeared, ironically dressed in more formal style than the Englishman himself, in a swallow-tailed coat and linen shirt with a standing collar. A second servant, head bowed, stood behind him.
The butler led the Englishman to the third chair he would sit in, this one with a comfortably padded seat and back. “Please relax as much as you can, Sir,” he said. “I and my colleague are here to serve you, in any way that we can, until it’s time to go outside.”
It was at this point the Englishman balked, if just for a moment. No, he thought. He made to turn back, to find a staircase, a ladder, anything leading down. It was all a horrible farce! But then he looked at the butler again, the calm determination on that man’s face as he nodded to his assistant.
The Englishman nodded too. What was, was, he thought as the second servant brought up a small table with a single place setting, bringing as well a bottle of water and several dishes. They left the Englishman then to his own meditations until, several hours later, they returned to lead him outside to the ledge beneath the huge clock itself.
The Englishman was tipsy by then, feeling little pain as the butler handed him a snifter. “A special drink, Sir,” he said. “Once more to show our appreciation—all England’s appreciation, as well as those of us once in its family. You know what you must expect, I trust?”
The Englishman nodded. He drank down the brandy—if he had almost had second thoughts before, it was certainly too late now. The under servant strapped him into a chair—the fourth chair that evening—that was bolted to the stone ledge it stood on.
“It wouldn’t do if you were to fall,” he said.
“No,” the Englishman said, “it would certainly not.” He gazed out into the night, drinking in the square below, now packed with cheering men and women, their eyes looking up to him. Behind him he heard the click of turning gears.
Looking up briefly, he saw the clock’s longer hand climbing to meet the hour hand at twelve. He heard the blood rushing thorough his veins and arteries—it was as if he had lived for this moment, when all eyes were on him. When time itself seemingly depended on him.
And so, let it be, he thought. He heard another click, one more minute passed, then that drowned out by the beating of his heart. Everything concentrated on one thing, the necessary. The pre-appointed. That which must be.
He felt a stirring in his stomach as, with a reverberating clang! the first stroke of the hour of midnight chimed. Driving out all other sound as spider-hands, made of articulated brass, reached out from a door in the clock face behind him and gripped him fast in the confines of his chair. With the second chime other hands reached out, divesting him of his coat and outer clothes, tattering, ripping the fabric from him. Letting it drift to the crowd beneath as, on the third chime, knife blades appeared to glint in the searchlights that trained on him from below.
He felt no pain—he was caught in the moment. Destiny could not be stopped in any event as the fourth gong sounded, starting the carving. Fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, with each of these strokes of approaching midnight an arm or a leg was torn from his body and let fall below. With the ninth chime more blades appeared as the crowd roared louder, those that had already done their work retreating back into the great clock’s interior, and with the tenth his gut was slit open, letting his entrails unfold themselves in his lap.