The Year's Best Horror Stories 11

THE SMELL OF CHERRIES by Jeffrey Goddin

Since that always-popular question: “Where do you get your ideas?” has been asked of authors probably since the first caveman started scribbling on his walls, it’s always a relief when some author manages to produce a coherent answer. “The Smell of Cherries,” according to Jeffrey Goddin, “is blatantly autobiographical, if somewhat romanticized. It derives from a period some years ago when I had to do security work to make ends meet—but it was fun. To keep myself awake on eight- or twelve-hour all-night shifts I’d fantasize about just what manner of bizarre things could take place in such a setting. On some nights the phenomenal world kicked in a few ideas of its own.”

Jeffrey Goddin is a native Indianan, born in a small town there on July 7, 1950 and currently living in Bloomington. He describes himself as a “basically rural type, fond of rare books, botany, woods, rivers, target shooting and moths.” Goddin has had other stories in small press publications such as Space & Time, November, and Potboiler; he has written a biobibliographical study of Lafcadio Hearn and professes a fondness for Edwardian/Victorian writing. At present he has more short fiction and a couple of nature essays upcoming, and there are novels in progress.

Taylor had never been in the army. Too young for Korea, he’d pulled a high number during the Vietnamese shindig. But he liked guns, and he liked excitement of the low-key variety. This might explain why he still found security work mildly interesting, even though he’d almost had his car shot up on an industrial espionage job, and had had to wrestle a coked-out robber to the floor on a pawnshop beat.

The problem with Taylor was, he was a romantic, and more or less incapable of taking orders from anyone on an eight-hour basis. This was probably the reason that what he’d regarded as merely a stopgap job on the way to better things was heading into its second year.

Now, near midnight, driving down a narrow river road on the Indianan side of the Ohio across from Louisville, he was humming softly to himself. He looked forward to a night of sipping spiced coffee and watching the perimeter of a small trucking company for intruders.

This was a holiday job. Happy Thanksgiving. He’d never done the Coleman trucking shift before. All he knew about Coleman was that they had trouble keeping guards on it. The guards got spooked, for some reason. This, too, made the shift mildly attractive.

The lights of Jeffersonville were fading in the distance. Night closed in around the inverted cones of his headlights. Skeletal November trees lined the road, with now and again a car parked by the roadside, interior lights on, kids smoking dope or drinking with the radio throbbing.

Nice, calm, dark road. But Taylor had a slight uneasiness this night, a new feeling, as if in some way he were going into battle. And a part of him liked the feeling.

He passed a stretch of river, distant lights, then the road ran back inland. Now on the left a series of large buildings came up, set well away from the road. A few, but only a few, of the buildings showed light.

Taylor remembered that Coleman’s lay along the edge of a large World War II military base, now mostly empty barracks space, a seldom-used proving ground with a skeleton administrative staff.

Almost there. He saw the red eyes of the reflectors marking the entrance to the wide staging lot, a dozen or so trailers ranged around the perimeter waiting for drivers. At the rear of the lot he recognized the El Camino of the day guard.

On a whim, he killed his lights. He accelerated a little, then let the car coast up beside the El Camino, which was facing to the rear.

It was one of those minor precognitions, like when he’d known that the next guy to walk into the pawnshop was the one he’d have to deal with. He’d also known in some strange fashion that the duty guard in the El Camino would be sleeping, and he was right.

The driver’s head was thrown back, a cap pulled across his eyes. Taylor rolled down his window, smelled the cool country air, a scent of dead leaves and earth. He was tempted to blow his horn to wake the shift cop, but he didn’t.

Funny, the man was talking to himself in his sleep. In the half-light, half-shadow of the interior, his face was contorted. He was talking quickly, then suddenly he screamed.

The man’s eyes shot open. Immediately he saw Taylor, and his hand was halfway to the gun on the seat when he recognized him.

“Snuck up on me, you bastard!”

“Any kid could have. It’s a wonder you still have tires. Must have been some dream you were having!”

Brewster laughed. “Hope I don’t have any more like it. Dreamed I was sitting right here in my Hillbilly Cadillac and some fucking monsters were creeping up on me out of the woods over there.”

Inadvertently, Taylor looked over to the darkly wooded perimeter. A full moon made the nearer trees stand out starkly, dark shadows beneath. He could almost see things moving in there.

“ ’Course, you’re the one they’re waitin’ for.”

Taylor shook his head. “Your sense of humor hasn’t improved since the G.E. job, leaving that dead cat by the first keystop…”

“Hey, it gets better.” Brewster consulted his watch. “Shit, past midnight, gotta haul, my momma’s waitin’.”

“One thing,” said Taylor, reaching for the walkie-talkie that Brewster handed him through the window, “I hear you have trouble keeping people on this shift, why?”

“Tales gettin’ to ya? Hell if I know. As far as action goes, don’t think anybody ever tried to hit this place. Nice and quiet and dead dull, out in the sticks like this. Maybe that’s it. City boys get lonesome. See ya.”

Brewster slammed the Camino into low, shot gravel across the lot as he took off. Taylor watch the red tail lights wink at the turn and disappear up the road toward Jeffersonville.

The beginning of a twelve-hour shift. A good time, as far as Taylor was concerned. He climbed out of the car, stretched, pulled out his shotgun, and walked across the loose gravel to the perimeter at the back of the lot.

To the left, the woods; to his rear, the road. Ahead was an empty field of autumn weeds, with a few desultory crickets chiming under the full moon and, very far away it seemed, the nearest of the abandoned barracks.

The night was quiet, so still. He took a deep breath of cool air, turned around.

He could see his old Chevy quite clearly in the moonlight. Someone was standing beside it.

Taylor’s nerves froze. He was an experienced guard. He had a twelve-gauge automatic shotgun with deer slugs under his arm. Yet there was something about the tall, apparently male figure beside his car that made him dizzy with fear. And there was only one thing to do about it.

He began to walk slowly back across the lot, the shotgun in his hands. It seemed to take a very long time. With each step, the figure was slightly clearer. It was a man, bareheaded, wearing a loose overcoat, facing away from Taylor, peering into the car.

Taylor suddenly remembered that, like an idiot, he’d left the keys in the ignition. All this dude had to do was climb in and drive away. He began to run, holding the shotgun across his chest.

He was quite close. The man must have heard him, but he didn’t move. Fifteen, ten yards. Taylor slowed to a walk, brought the gun up in one hand, his flashlight in the other.

“You, don’t move!” he yelled.

The figure didn’t move. Five yards, four, three. He could see the fellow clearly now, hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched into the old khaki raincoat, a bald spot on the top of his head.

“Take your hands out of your pockets, real slow, and turn around.”

Slowly the figure took his hands out of his pockets. The bare fingers that protruded from the ends of the overcoat seemed very slender, very pale.

It turned around, and Taylor shone his flashlight in its face.

He didn’t scream, but he wanted to.

There was no face.

Taylor stood frozen, motionless.

The man was gone. There was only a faint sweetish smell in the air.

“Base calling 2101. Base calling 2101.”

Taylor jerked open the door and collapsed in the front seat. He fumbled at the walkie-talkie.

“2101 receiving.”

“Everything 10-2 down on the ranch?”

“Got a spook here, otherwise 10-2.”

“Copy?”

“Spook. S-P-O-O-K. But harmless. Everything 10-2.”

“Lay off the funny cigarettes, 2101.”

But the switchboard girl giggled.

“10-4. 2101 over and out.”

Taylor put down the walkie-talkie. What the hell had he seen? He’d never seen anything like it before, even when he’d dropped acid a few times. Was his psyche gunning for him? He put the thought out of his mind.

It was a nice night. He turned on the radio low, and had a first sip of the sweet, scalding coffee. The moon was just touching the tops of the slender black trees, the paired lights of a car passed in the distance. It would be a good night, now that his unconscious had had its little fling.

Taylor had a game he played with himself on long security shifts. He’d either mentally write the novel he’d promised himself he owed the world one day, or he’d reminisce about old girl friends.

The girl friends generally came a bit more toward the early morning hours. He decided to pick up on the novel.

The last time, he’d had his protagonist traveling across Ohio in a drunken haze. Now he would stop in a small Pennsylvania town, and meet a lonely woman who ran a rooming house. She would be in her early thirties, pale, divorced, and pretty. She would invite him to dinner one night. Outside the rain would be falling softly. Inside the candlelight danced across her face, softening its lines…

Taylor heard a sound.

His preconscious heard the sound and registered it before his conscious mind. His conscious mind didn’t want anything to do with it.

Distant, but not too distant, the sound of a woman crying in pain.

He scanned the lot. The moon rode high, the small floods illuminating the terminal building. The sound seemed to be coming from the far right rear of the perimeter, where a few trailers were parked.

This is weird, but it is not as weird as it seems.

Taylor climbed out of the car, taking shotgun and flashlight. He walked quickly across the lot, the sound of his boots crunching gravel loud in the night.

It came again, the cry, louder, a catch of horrible pain in the woman’s voice. Taylor began to run.

It was coming from directly behind the line of four trailers. Instead of running between them into the darkness, he slowed and went around them to the left.

The moonlight was bright. It seemed as if that icy white moon were chilling the air. There were narrow black shadows behind the trailers, but the cries hadn’t come from there. Taylor paused to catch his breath.

The cry came again, piercing, agonized. A young woman’s voice. It sounded as if she were dying, horribly.

Beyond the edge of the lot there was a stand of dry cattails, perhaps ten yards deep, indicating swampy ground. Taylor walked cautiously toward them. A scent hit his nose, not of the swamp: a faint, sweetish scent.

He almost did not go on, for it was the same scent that he’d smelled when he saw the man by his car.

But that was insane. The cry had subsided to a horrible gasping sob. Carefully placing his feet in the soggy ground, Taylor flipped on his flashlight and pressed through the cattails.

There was a small clearing in the center of the cattails. Here he saw a pool of water a few yards across, and lying half in the greenish pool was…

The corpse of a young woman. A pale, mottled, decayed thing whose long fair hair was entangled in the weeds, and whose hands still clutched something long and dull and metal that it had plunged into its chest.

Taylor shuddered, the light shaking in his hands, the odd, sweet smell very strong.

This thing could have made no sound.

Even as he watched, it slowly straightened, and the eyes rolled open and flashed moonlight into his.

Taylor heard his own scream. The shotgun roared in his hand, and he fell back, stumbled to his feet, crashed through the cattails back to the parking lot, wiping frantically at bits of moist… something… that the blast had scattered across his face and clothes.

He stood in the open, panting, looked back, terrified that the thing would follow. The smoke of the shotgun blast hung low over the little patch of cattails. There was no sound. He forced himself to turn and walk slowly back to the car.

The walkie-talkie was calling. Taylor answered, grateful for the human voice.

“See any more spooks, 2101?”

Silence.

“2101, copy?”

“No, Base, no more spooks. Everything 10-2.”

“You kinda sound like one, 2101. Base out.”

“10-4, 2101 out.”

Taylor turned his car so that he faced the terminal, and had the swamp to his left, the entrance to his right. His back was to the woods, but at the moment he was not worried about anything that might come out of the woods.

His hands were shaking. He poured himself half a cup of coffee and filled it with bourbon from the pint he kept under the seat. For emergencies. This was an emergency.

The bourbon felt good going down. Slowly he began to relax.

He tried to consider the… things… he’d seen in a calm, rational manner. There were really only three alternatives: the most likely was that someone was playing tricks on him. Elaborate tricks, to be sure, but it was possible.

The second possibility was that his own mind was playing tricks on him. But why now? Tonight? Why not at the LSD parties of the old days, when he’d sat cool, calm, and collected while everybody else was freaking their heads off? No, that was out. He was not an unstable person.

The third alternative was that there were spooks out there. No, and no, and no. Taylor was a romantic, but he did not believe in spooks in any way, shape, or form.

He raised the doctored coffee to his lips, savoring the old bourbon. Suddenly it came to him. It was so simple!

They’d had trouble keeping guards out here before. A few had told crazy stories, but management would have put that down to boozing on the job.

Someone was going to a lot of trouble to scare the guards off. He knew there were “hot loads”—booze or electronics—here occasionally. It was one thing to tackle an armed guard, but if you could just scare him off with some Dark Shadows routine, the rest would be a piece of cake!

Tricky. Well, he’d show them a trick or two! Taylor finished the coffee and decided to take another walk back to the perimeter.

Bright light filled the car. Someone was turning in off the river road.

The big Ford passed him, heading for the side door of the terminal. Taylor was halfway across the lot when a tall man in a suede jacket and western hat climbed out.

“Don’t shoot,” he said, “I gotta piss like a racehorse.”

“Sorry, this place is—”

“It’s okay. My name’s Stahl, day dispatch here. Yours is Taylor, right?”

He produced a ring of keys from his pocket and proceeded to open the door.

“Why don’t you come in for a minute? Just don’t drop that cannon. Browning auto, isn’t it? Good deer gun, close up.”

Taylor followed the big man into a narrow paneled room with a half-window like a doctor’s office, when truckers picked up their lading bills and logged in. Stahl took off his jacket and put a tin pot on an old two-burner hotplate for coffee, then plugged in the large electric heater by the desk.

Taylor sat close to the heater. It felt good. He hadn’t realized he was shivering.

Stahl disappeared behind a door marked Private and returned a few minutes later, zipping up his trousers. In the light of a couple of bare bulbs, he looked older. Taylor placed his age at about sixty, a healthy sixty.

“So you’re the new replacement guard,” said Stahl, half to himself.

“Nope, I’ve got a regular beat over across the river, pawnshops and trucking, but they needed someone for the holidays.”

Stahl shifted a pile of papers on his desk, spooned instant coffee into a couple of cups, poured the steaming water, and handed one to Taylor.

“Well, hope you enjoy yourself out here. They kind of have a hard time keeping guards here.”

Taylor had a brief suspicion that Stahl might know something about the “tricks” someone was playing. But looking into the brown, lined face, he thought not.

“Spooks, probably,” said Taylor. “This is kind of a weird spot, what with the old barracks and all. Wouldn’t be surprised if somebody might try a few tricks to scare a guard off.”

Stahl’s eyes narrowed, his nose twitching above his close-rimmed gray moustache, as if he might sneeze.

“You seen something?”

Taylor smiled, “Thought I did see somebody around earlier, but it turned out I was wrong.”

Stahl sipped his coffee, watching Taylor closely.

“You haven’t heard the history of this place, have you?”

“Only that it was once part of the military base.”

Stahl smiled almost mischievously.

“Well, there’s a bit more to it than that. This was a real active base, on around World War II. Had two, three thousand men in training at a time. They’d work ’em up, outfit ’em, and send ’em on down to Fort Knot, Kentucky, to fly out for parts unknown.

“I’ve lived around the Valley all my life. Soldiers used to come into town on weekends, raised holy hell. But we liked ’em.”

Stahl paused, eyes distant.

“But part of the history of this place is a little darker. Between World War II and Korea, they brought in some scientists, chemists. Top secret, hush-hush kind of thing. We’d see ’em around town sometimes, but they were a pretty close-mouthed bunch, wouldn’t say what they were up to.

“They had a little factory, looked like, maybe fifty people workin’ there, sat right where this terminal is now, but nobody, I mean nobody, knew what they were makin’ in there. Most of us in town thought they were makin’ some kind of new rocket, missile, some such.

“Well, one morning early, County Sheriff, old Thompson, has been out checkin’ on a burglary. He’s driving by here, and somebody almost walks in front of his car. He yells at the guy, thinks he’s some damned drunk. Then he takes a good look at him, the blood on his clothes.

“He looks over at the factory, and sees maybe a dozen people, some of ’em lying on the ground, some of ’em just stumbling around, blood all over ’em. And he smells a smell, a funny sweet smell, real strong, that kind of makes him dizzy just to breathe it.

“Thompson’s no fool. He doesn’t even get out of the car. He heads down the road, burns rubber up to the guard post, and has ’em wake up the Adjutant.

“The Adjutant turns a dead shade of pale when he hears the Sheriff’s story, but tells him not to worry, that they’re keeping a few mental patients down by the factory, and that he’ll handle it.

“Well, I’ve known Thompson a long time. He’s like me, he can smell something fishy about a mile off. He goes back to town, wakes up his deputies, calls up the National Guard, and has a small army together when he heads back.

“By this time there’s almost no way of keeping it under wraps. The Adjutant, looking like he just wants to be somewhere else, drafts Thompson’s men and the Guard to help clean up the mess.

“That factory,” Stahl paused, “was makin’ nerve gas.”

“Jeeze!”

“Yeah, Jesus and Mary, too. They had a whole batch set up to ship off God knows where, when there was a little fire and one of the big canisters blew. They had masks, sure, but the stuff spread so fast that most of ’em didn’t have time to get ’em on.

“Well, like I was sayin’, the Adjutant got his men and us—I was there, ’cause I was in the Guard—together. We had to wear full gas suits. One thing he told us. If we smelled cherries, to get the hell out of there.”

“Cherries?” Something, a recent memory, came to the back of Taylor’s mind, did not quite surface.

“Cherries. The gas was scented with cherries so they could tell if it leaked. Lot of good it did ’em.

“When we went in,” Stahl’s voice had gone dry, “when we went in, it was… like a horror movie, or one of those pictures of hell. Some of ’em were still alive, all with blood all over ’em, theirs or somebody else’s. They looked weird, some of ’em in those white lab suits. A couple of ’em attacked us, with knives, glass, their teeth, and a few people got hurt. But there weren’t too many left.

“I mean, the people working in that factory had gone plain nuts, went at each other with chairs, nails, teeth. We found one guy disemboweled with a protractor.”

Stahl shook his head at the memory and grinned.

“Anyway, that’s the sweet story of this place. They buried a few of ’em over in that little woods across the lot, behind where you’re parked. County hassled the State until they made the Army take that factory out, and the building had one of those mysterious fires not so long after, burned it to the ground. The lot was vacant for a long time, Army sold off some land, and Coleman put in the depot here.”

Taylor’s coffee was cold. He sipped it anyway to give his hand something to do.

“Surprised you hadn’t heard that story.”

“No,” said Taylor, “but it’s one of the damndest tales I’ve ever heard.”

The story left him with an uneasy feeling, something more than just the horror of it, something he couldn’t pin down. He stood up and stretched, bumping the table with his knee. Automatically he checked his watch.

“Thanks for the coffee and the yarn, gotta get back to the dispatcher. They’ll be wondering what’s happened to me.”

“Sure thing. You be careful out there, you hear?”

Taylor laughed and closed the door.

The cold hit him like a wave, but it was stimulating. It also helped clear his mind of the thing that had been bugging him for some time.

The nerve gas had smelled like cherries. And the goddamned sweet smell that had gone along with the two bizarre incidents he’d had this morning had been, yes, the smell of cherries.

But, he told himself, there was no connection. There could be no logical connection. He’d probably imagined the smell, due to some odd mental association. It was the kind of thing that could weigh on a person’s mind—if you let it. Taylor would not be fool enough to let it.

Before he went back to his car, Taylor walked behind the trailers to the rear of the lot and on into the small stand of cattails. Outside of a few broken stems from the shotgun blast, there were no traces of the thing he’d seen. Of course there weren’t. On his way back he checked each of the trailers, but all were completely empty, or closed, with their small aluminum seals intact.

He walked through the pale moonlight, back to the old Chevy. He started the car and ran the engine for a while to get the heater up, then called in and took a mild chewing-out from the dispatcher. He let the engine run until the car was good and hot, then settled back to watch the lot.

A half hour, the moon rose a little higher in the sky, a funny moon, near full, looking as if someone had just cut a thin sliver off the edge. He saw Stahl leave the terminal and drive away, and fought down the sudden sense of loneliness.

An hour. He checked in. Everything 10-2, 10-4.

Soon it was early morning. A faint trace of frost, unpleasantly like a face, etched across the window. Taylor started the engine, turned on the defroster, melted it away.

He felt fairly confident that the trickster, whoever, had gone home for the night. Taylor slipped into a half-doze, the images of old girl friends, each with their unique, ah, qualities, coming, as inevitably they did at this hour of the morning. He heard a train pass, and perhaps did fall into a doze momentarily.

Suddenly he was wide awake. The wind had come up, the moon a shade lower. He saw something white. Something large, winged, grotesque, shuffling across the parking lot toward his car.

This was too much. He could only watch it. Suddenly it rushed forward, leaped into the air…

Taylor found himself clutching the seat, looking at the open newspaper plastered across the windshield.

The newspaper blew away. One thing about it he had not noticed. The date on the paper had been 1949. November 22, 1949, thirty-two years to the day.

Taylor sighed, reached for the whiskey under the seat. This shift had gotten on his nerves a bit, but it would only be a couple of hours until dawn.

Then he heard the footsteps. Running. From behind him, the direction of the woods, coming quickly.

And suddenly he just wanted to be out of there. His hands were shaking, but he did manage to start the car.

The footsteps came up on the passenger side.

In the moonlight he saw…

He almost collapsed with relief. The face pressed to the window was that of a young girl. A pretty young girl, smiling and shivering and pointing at the lock on the door.

He unlocked the door and pushed it open.

She tumbled into the seat with a shy laugh, bouncing up and down. She was young, perhaps nineteen, with tousled black hair and bright dark eyes. Her cloth coat, loafers, and white knee socks seemed kind of dated, somehow this only added to her charm.

“Brrrrr! Am I glad to see you! I never thought I’d find a way back to town!”

“Well,” said Taylor, “I can’t take you right back, because I’m the security cop here tonight. But I can call in and have the dispatcher call you a cab. How would that be?”

“Grrrrreat!”

“What happened, car run out of gas?”

She nodded, frowning.

“I think so. Must have bumped my head or something when it stopped.”

She rubbed her forehead briskly. “Ouch! Yep, there’s a bruise all right, funny…”

Slowly she turned toward Taylor, a look of almost theatrical surprise on her face.

“Yes! I kinda remember…”

Her voice went flat on “remember,” but he hardly noticed. This girl was pretty indeed! Maybe he could put off calling a cab for a while, say, an hour or two. It wasn’t long to dawn. She might like a little breakfast.

She was quiet, watching him with an almost embarrassing intensity. Nervously she pulled up those funny knee socks. He was not, he knew, entirely unattractive, as far as that went. Then for the first time he consciously noticed her perfume, a very faint, sweet scent. Fruity.

Cherries.

Her face contorted, maniacal, teeth bared like a beast.

Long pointed nails streaking for his face.

Cherries.

Taylor screamed and lashed out. The impact of the blow flung her across the seat, against the half-latched passenger door as he jammed the car into gear, still screaming.

The Chevy spun in a full circle in the loose gravel as he fought to straighten it out, not realizing that he had the accelerator all the way to the floor. He was vaguely aware of the passenger door swinging open and slamming shut again as it crashed against a post going through the entrance.

Taylor did not slow until a State trooper racing beside him fired a shot across the hood. By that time, he was halfway through Kentucky.

Slowly he rolled down the window. Somewhere deep inside a touch of rationality surfaced, reminding him of the size of the fine he could well wind up paying. Loss of money is always good for restoring sanity. The voice told him, gathering confidence, that he’d had one hell of a nightmare, a stupid, vivid nightmare, and that now he’d make a total ass of himself as a result.

The trooper flashed his light around the front seat.

“What’s the gun doing there?”

“I’m a security cop.”

“I’d hate to have you watching my place.”

He flashed his light back to Taylor’s face.

“Shoulda been a race driver, buddy. If you’re not sober, your ass is fried.” The cop peered closer. “Say what’s that on your face? Jesus Christ! You been makin’ out with a wildcat, or what?”

But Taylor, whose hand had lightly traced the dried blood from the five deep scratches in his cheek, had fainted.