The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 10

Steve Rasnic Tem What Slips Away

Two of his neighbors have died in as many weeks. Another has lost his mind, or his past, Taylor’s not sure which.

The fellow at the end of the street electrocuted himself while rebuilding his roof: a raised hammer, a cable shedding black insulation and hung too low. The man’s wife says he had no business up there in the first place — he was always doing too much, remodeling the house every few years whether it needed it or not, and besides he had no depth perception.

Walter across the street had been another weekend remodeler. He was putting in a new tub on the second floor, the good-for-nothing son-in-law helping him carry the thing. Walter had a heart attack, but if that hadn’t killed him the torturous fall through water-rotted flooring would have. Now the son-in-law lies out on a towel each day beside a blue cooler full of cold ones.

Taylor has never met the fat man who wanders up and down their street in overalls, but he’s been told the poor fellow owned the big green Queen Anne — worked at fixing it up most every day of his adult life, and after forty years the bank took it away. A fall down the stairs on moving day and something important must have slipped away, because the fat man no longer knows his own name.

Some days their street smells like a kid’s birthday party. Other days it’s a dead mule washed up along the Mississippi.

Many nights Taylor wakes up from some bad dream of the past and the fear is so strong in him he can smell it coming out of his pores, a smell like the solvents he uses to strip decades off the woodwork and clean his tools: a rotten soup of ancient tint and discoloration. “It’s two a.m. in the Bluff City,” the radio tells him, and sometimes it tells him the day and sometimes the year and he decides to take it at its word because right at this moment he has no clue. The bedroom’s been torn up for over a year, walls demolished down to studs and the original knob-and-tube wiring, exposing the rusted narrow pipes used to supply the gas lights of the last century, and then it’s three a.m. in the Bluff City, then four, and staring out his window — the casement gone, paint flakes working their way under his fingernails — all he can see moving on this street in midtown Memphis is someone else’s memories, shadows walking with the power of regret, and “it’s a killer out there,” the radio reminds him. “The hottest summer in years. Mr J. T. Reynolds of our fair city died of heatstroke this afternoon, trying to put in a new attic exhaust fan, they tell me. Those old houses, well, you just gotta watch your step. Best take it easy, friends.”

Taylor looks out over the dark trees to another row of street lamps. J. T. Reynolds had a pretty little house a block away. And that makes four. What’s that smell? he thinks, his face flushed with damp heat and something else. What’s that smell?

It’s just another one of those things that slips away, he decides, stumbling down steps with no railing, grabbing a beer out of the greasy brown ice box, and so many things just slip away. You don’t think about them for a time and before you know it they’re gone, and will no longer hold in the mind however much you try. You cannot will some things to stay.

Like some smells, he thinks, going out to the porch, stepping around what is missing from the porch, the things he’s torn away. Taylor cannot remember the smell of his mother’s perfume, although he recalls it as a dramatic fragrance he’d been exposed to, surely, every day of his life from birth until his twenties. He would have been twenty-three, maybe twenty-four, when he’d finally left, only to return here years later to discover that his mother’s smell had slipped away from this house, gone into the dark with her lace doilies, flowery dresses, and white bowls full of jelly beans.

Angela’s smell, now that was something else. Like lemons, something to do with the lotion she likes so much. And the kids, hair and faces scented like sunlight in sheets, Beth’s with a touch of strawberry, Andy’s lemony like his mother’s. Angela promised to bring them by for a visit — “Not that you’ll notice” — but he hasn’t laid eyes on them in months, and can count on their remembered smells only to suggest a child’s revenant in their darkened rooms.

His kids had hated all the remodeling as much as his ex — no, he wouldn’t call her that — Angela had. Beth said she had “visitors” in her room, splinter people with doorknob eyes. Andy just said the shadows were all funny and he hated the holes in his walls. Angela said this was no way for kids to live.

Taylor talked to them about how important a sense of history was, how their house had stood when Memphis was an important slave market, and about the underground railroad, and the thousands who had died in the yellow fever epidemics, some in this very neighborhood, how 70,000 lay buried under the shady trees of Elmwood Cemetery.

“I hate his tree,” Beth suddenly cried, pointing out the window at the distorted bark of a century-old oak. “He’s always making faces at me!”

“You’re always telling them the worst things about the past,!’ Angela accused him, the day she took their kids away.

It occurs to him now he might turn the power back on to that part of the house. He completed the new wiring only a few weeks after Angela made her escape — his kids straining to see him through the back window as the taxi sped off. But filling those empty rooms with bright, new light would only make him feel worse.

An aroma of licorice stains the air behind him, coming from that section of the porch he’d took out last week. He found his dad’s old cigarette lighter on the exposed ground, nested in a paste of black leaves and rotting rags — the old man must have lost the thing, what? a good thirty years ago. Taylor should know — his father was so sure he’d stolen it he’d whipped him ‘til he bled, the memory of that time stinking of leather, warm piss.

As the memory strides around him, grey porch wood creaking under its prodigious weight, Taylor takes another swig from his Blue Moon Ale, refusing to turn around, to grant that grim-faced recollection the satisfaction of his fear.

“Daddy?” Stupid thing to ask, but he’s almost finished the bottle, so what better time to ask a dead man questions?

His father doesn’t answer, but that smell of licorice — the old man gnawed it constantly — permeates the muggy air. Suddenly Taylor feels nauseated by it, tosses the rest of the bottle into the weedy lawn.

“I’m going to finish this place,” he speaks through the stench. “You didn’t get it done, Grandpa didn’t get it done. I’m getting it done.” His head swims in the heat. A shadow floats across his vision, brown and slightly distorted, as if seen from inside an amber beer bottle. It’s a killer out there. “Once Angela sees how it turns out, she’ll understand better. People are going to read about it in the paper.” The house settles around him, groaning in its disordered sleep. I’ll wake you yet, he thinks. But a house this old should be done with all its settlings, and Taylor sniffs the air with unease. A few remaining wheaty fumes of beer. The irises from next door smelling a little like orange blossoms, sausage and red beans cooking a few doors down the street. The straggly surviving azaleas in his own yard have no smell, although a lot was promised by the showy pink flowers of months back. He has a vague memory that azaleas smelled when he was a kid, smelled like flannel comfort and a lukewarm bath after supper, but now he can’t be sure.

“Taylor? That you on those rickety old steps?”

He watches Jack Rayburn stumble out of the weeds crowding the front gate. “They ain’t rickety. Rebuilt ‘em last month.”

“Well, I sure wish you’d trim this monkey jungle back a tad. ‘Bout to scratch hell out of me.”

“Too much hell to scratch out, Jack. Least in my lifetime.”

Jack chuckles and sits down beside him. Taylor didn’t want company tonight, but he finds he’s glad to see his old friend.

“Here, brought you a Moon Pie.” Jack slaps the disk of chocolate-covered cardboard into Taylor’s hand. “Got it at the Circle K at Madison and McLean. I think that lady clerk is a man, what you think?”

“I think I wish my daddy’d lived long enough to buy cigarettes there. He might’ve asked that lady out.”

“Well, here’s to the sonovabitch!” Jack takes a big bite out of a Moon Pie of his own.

“Jesus, Jack. Ain’t it a little hot for that crap? Here, let me get you a beer.”

“It’s four in the morning, Taylor boy. Having spent a goodly part of this fine evening at Betty Boop’s Karaoke Club, I’m disinclined to imbibe further. Sorry you declined to join me, you inimical bastard.” Jack wiggles the remaining bit of Moon Pie. “Breakfast time.” He chews sloppily, frothing his lips white and brown. “Don’t. tell. me,” he says around another bite. “You’re working this late?”

“Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I think of a way to figure out doing a thing, and I like to start it, right then.” He tries to move his head away from Jack’s sickly sweet, Moon Pie smell. “Used to drive Angela crazy.”

“Unreasonable woman. She and the kids back, yet?”

“No. I haven’t heard from her.”

“Course not. If she was here, you wouldn’t be out on the porch drinking, and thinking up additional ways to torment this ancient southern structure.”

“Leave it, Jack. You’ll see, it’s going be a showplace.”

“I used to hear your daddy say that all the time, when we were kids, every time I came over. He’d sit in a broke-down davenport over, there where once-upon-a-time you had a porch, with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, and tell both us kids his big plans for his ‘showplace.’ Never saw him lift a hammer.”

“Tell me you never saw me with a tool.”

“Oh, you’re way different from your daddy. Beer in one hand, hammer in the other.” Jack finishes his snack. “You know you keep on like this, you’ll end up like Bobbie Thompson.”

“Wait. what’s happened to Bobbie?”

“I’m sorry — I thought you knew. Chimney fell on him out in that old shack of his. I kept telling him to hire a mason, but I guess he wanted to save some money and fix the brickwork himself. It was that old and crumbly stuff, should’ve been torn down a long time ago. This remodeling business -1 don’t know -1 think it’s for the birds.”

And that’s five. It’s a killer, friends.

Despite his declared misgivings Jack eventually accepts a beer, and then a couple more. Taylor stops himself after six — the more he drinks the sharper the fragrance of licorice, seasoned by a bitter cigarette smoke slipping out from under the steps.

“Before Daddy died he said this place was starting to look like an Orange Mound crackhouse. Said the whole neighborhood was going that way. He acted like it was my fault.”

“Your daddy’s idea of beautiful was that velvet portrait of Elvis as bullfighter hanging in The Lamplighter. You should’ve gotten Angela and the kids out of here a long time ago.”

“This place has been in the family almost a century and a half — you don’t just leave a home like this.”

“History’s a bitch, Taylor. After all those folks died in the yellow fever epidemics, what did the good citizens of Memphis do? Twenty-five thousand of them left. You’re always talking about the importance of history — can’t you learn from what they did? You’re the one drug me up to Elmwood to see the long mass grave where they buried some of ‘em. All those bodies with no names.”

“But that’s what I mean. I want to make a name for myself. If I restore this house good enough, maybe somebody will remember me.”

“History feeds on names, my friend. That’s pretty much all that making a name is worth. The past is a damned monster, or at least it can be. Better to have your children remember you, and their children if you’re lucky enough to live that long. Jesus Christ, Taylor, you gave up your kids for this goddamn house! You let your future slip away for a past that wasn’t all that great to begin with.”

The stench of cigarettes burns Taylor’s eyes. What other reason does he have to be crying? “I don’t know how to explain it any better. The past is just so much bigger a place to live in, you know? It’s so big it’s hard to think of much else sometimes. Like the Mississippi — you live by it long enough you don’t believe you’re thinking about it much at all when in fact it waters just about every sensation you have. It’s down in your bowels and in your walk — the pull and the flow and just the sheer size of it locks you into its rhythm.”

They talk into the new perfumes of morning, another night slipping away almost without Taylor noticing its passage.

Some time around dawn Taylor wakes up to light and air like the inside of a yellow bottle, and although he can sense the heat he cannot feel its presence. Jack lies only a few feet away, stretched out on his back in the weeds. The recollection of week-long summer sleepovers, a smaller but no less ornery Jack refusing the offer of ratty old blankets, hangs a smile on Taylor’s stiffened face. “Hey, Jack, come on. We’re too old for this shit.”

He nudges Jack with his boot. Brownish air drifts through the yard, and now his mouth tastes of stale cigarettes. He wipes his face with a hand sore with morning, attempts to loosen his tongue.

“Come on, Jack. I got beds inside. Things look pretty messed up, but I still got beds.”

Licorice and beer, cigarettes and azaleas. Taylor lifts his head and stares around the yard. Fragrance has come back to the azaleas, but was that the way they used to smell? Like garbage and exhaust and lettuce gone to black soup at the back of the refrigerator? Shadows shift across the yard and shift again, and he supposes the sun must be rising awfully fast to create such a dramatic change. Light suddenly knifes his eyes, a crack in his yellow bottle. “Jack? I can’t stay out here, Jack.”

He rises and goes to his friend, who stares up at him with wide eyes and a nosebleed, his face more yellow than Taylor’s morning. “Jack!” His mouth is open but he doesn’t say anything. Taylor can see that his friend’s gums have been bleeding, and there’s a web of bloody vomit on the chin. “Jack,” he whispers softly, but his friend is gone into a yellow fever dream. The past is a monster, Taylor boy. “Damn, Jack. You’re number six,” he says, and staggers back. Something’s here, he thinks,something vast and old as the river.

The house reels behind him, and when he turns around he throws his hands up over his face, sure it’s going to topple onto him. Windows swim in amber heat. Shingles flutter away like paper. Out of the door a boundless shade like a nicotine stain oozes across the missing boards and down the steps, through the weeds and out the gate, a faint hint of dead fish and stagnant water in its wake.

“It’s slipping away, Jack, it’s slipping away!” he cries and stumbles after, hands held out like a needy child.

But sometimes it just gets away from you. Sometimes it all just slips away. And chasing the past is like trying to recapture the breath that’s just left you, stinking of loss and regret, now floating out beyond the gate, now out on the river, making its own way to the sea.