The Year's Best Horror Stories XXII

COMPANIONS by Del Stone Jr.

Manion was dreaming again.

He and Nina and another couple he didn’t know and a real estate agent were standing in the formal dining room of a magnificently expansive house in the countryside, a house most people would call a mansion, a house of such rarefied gentility that even within the skewed perspective of this dream, Manion knew he did not belong here and had no business posing as a buyer.

The room stretched to the horizon on one end; on the other, a pair of double-wide carved oak doors opened to a landing at the foot of a spiral staircase. The room looked through a battery of French windows into the leafless, wintery woodlands outside; slanting bars of sunlight brought airborne layers of near-motionless dust into glaring contrast.

The agent was going on about the lost art of woodworking, her hands fluttering in the sunlight, the shadows of her hands capering against the opposite walls, larger and darker than life, when Manion turned his eye to Nina, shoving his own hands into his pants pockets and simply watching, admiring. Her hair blazed in the sun, showing bronze and copper threads that appeared and disappeared within a burnt-orange cascade of lazy curls. Her hair seemed alive. Individual strands rose and fell in the still air as if Nina herself were the source of a very small, discrete center of convection.

That was when Manion heard the laughter.

It began upstairs, slithering down the staircase like fog in a horror movie, slow and very low in the throat but gaining in volume and tittering up the scale of octaves until it became a shrieking cackle that seemed to rub cold fingers against the knobs of his spine, leaving a trail of gooseflesh. Nina turned to Manion and her eyes had narrowed to a feral squint.

The agent giggled nervously. She said in a flustered voice, “Oh, don’t pay any attention to that. It’s just the demon. All old houses are inhabited by ghosts… or demons.”

Inhabited. And as the agent blathered on, the words skidding off her tongue like cars wrecking on an icy overpass, Manion turned to the wall, where the fresco of their shadows stretched to the ceiling, and saw…

… something. A shimmering blur of black silhouettes, as if the image had been liquified by twisting thermals, and from Nina’s shadow sprouted a set of horns, an arching of leathery wings… and the shadowy hint of a penis.

Then the laughter spiraled out of control and Manion jerked awake and raised himself from the pillow, his heart thudding in his chest and ears, his lungs aching for the lack of a breath.

The bedroom door was swinging open.

He’d closed and locked it the night before, and now it was opening, as if somebody had just walked out of the room.

He did not move. He did not want to think about moving. Because if he moved, he’d do it this way: reach with his right hand, over his hip, to the half of the mattress behind him, feeling for Nina. And if she were there, asleep, he might die of fright, right here in the bedroom.

The toilet flushed and he heard Nina’s familiar morning smoker’s hack, and the air gushed out of his lungs, the sheets ungluing themselves from his clammy flesh, and he collapsed back to the mattress in a fever of relief.

He took three deep breaths, the way the psychiatrist had instructed him to do, and felt the rumble of fear ease out of his muscles, subsiding to a growl, then only the suggestion of a throb, like a cold engine finally throttling down to an idle. Then a strange thought occurred to him:

I have had that dream before…

And his heart began to race anew. He thought, Is it starting again?

But he could not remember enough to answer.

Nina? No, not Nina.

Yet here she was, pacing the Aztec glyph-pattern throw rug he’d bought in New Mexico, her arms jittering like bat wings, her lip curling to expose her teeth, the canines jutting like fangs. He wondered how she didn’t cut her lips on those fangs. He wondered why he hadn’t noticed them before.

“Jesus, is it asking so much?” she shouted, stalking to the edge of the rug, spinning on her heel, stalking back, hands landing on hips, then flying up, fangs sliding out of then back into her mouth.

“All I want is a little consideration. All I want is to feel like I’m a part of—of—” her arms spread as if she were soaring on her frustration, “whatever plan it is you’ve got for the future. I mean, honest to God, Manion. I feel like a frigging appliance around here. Turn me on when you need your coffee brewed or your dishes washed, turn me off when you’re done.” She stopped in front of him, her burnt-orange hair undulating like a flame, and glowered at him. “It doesn’t work that way, Manion. You have to contribute to this relationship.”

Her words weren’t the salient issue. Manion had heard them before, many times; he knew the litany by heart. It was the way she said them. It was the anger that gave rise to her words, and the glimpses of what lay behind her anger, that loomed in Manion’s thoughts. The way she moved her arms. The way she showed her teeth. Subtle clues as to what was going on here.

He’d seen this before, as he’d seen the dream, only this feeling was more touchable than a vague sense of deja vu. This was a memory. This had actually happened. If only he could remember.

Nina stood before him, her bonfire hair eclipsing the late afternoon sunlight and glowing in a corona that was hot and bright and suffocating. Yes, that was the word. Suffocating. She was suffocating him.

“Is any of this getting through to you?” she asked. She licked her lips. “Is it?”

Manion thought, Her tongue… how like a snake’s tongue. But he nodded and said, “Yes, it is. It’s getting through.”

He spotted the bulge at her crotch.

He knew he was close to remembering.

Nina was packing.

Manion has seen women pack before. They pack like they were taking bits and pieces of you and throwing them against the wall and smashing them into smithereens, and screaming at the top of their lungs, “You CREEP! I HATE your fucking GUTS, you BASTARD!” and lots of other unladylike things. Only Nina was shouting, “Why didn’t you TELL me! For God’s sake, all you had to do was TELL me—all this time I thought we had something going, that we were doing something for ourselves, and now THIS—” She clenched the rolled-up magazine in her fist, her fingers curling like daggers, or claws, around the glossy color photo of a penis. Manion wondered if her penis looked like the one in the photo. She blew out a breath of disgust and he half expected the magazine to burst into flames. She slung it against the wall, where it slapped and fell dead to the floor, then resumed cramming her things into her bags: clothes, flat onyx mascara cases, bottles of fingernail polish, pentagram pads of Post-It notes, a Depression-glass handcream jar filled with souls—God, Manion had seen this before, too, but where? When? He couldn’t pin down the memory, and maybe that was Nina’s doing. Why should she want him to remember? Better for her if he didn’t. Better for her if he let her suffocate him, put him in her jar and move along to collect some other dumb bastard.

But Manion was no dumb bastard. The memory was very close to him now. He could feel it breathing down his neck, the hairs at the base of his skull standing erect as his excitement dovetailed with these events. Everything was falling into place, and he was beginning to sense the rightness of it all, and he was beginning to understand what he should do.

—as she snatched snakeskins of jockstrap pantyhose from the shower curtain rod—

—as she opened the medicine cabinet and raked prescription bottles of sulfur and brimstone into her bag—

—as she threw open the closet door and came out with armfuls of—Christ, Manion couldn’t think of words to describe them—the skins of her dead.

This girl, Nina, with the huge erection straining beneath her jeans, was not what she had seemed.

Manion knew what to do. Manion knew what do.

He knew what to do.

Digging. In the dark. Away from the city, away from everyone, where two roads converged and where his memory lay, fully restored, like a box he’d packed off to the attic a long time ago and then couldn’t remember precisely where he had put it. He knew it was there… the rest would require a little digging.

Which is what he was doing.

He had been here before, five times in all, and he even remembered their names: Clara, who he called “Little Bo-Peep,” because she liked curls and ruffles; Maggie, who French-inhaled cigarettes and watched him with Natalie Wood eyes; Kathy, the tomboy with skinny but wellmuscled legs; and Donna, who studied aerospace engineering at college and competed in water ski competitions.

He remembered them all and everything that had passed between them, the dreams, the fights, the discoveries and angry departures. Every time the same. He remembered them as he would remember Nina and the changes that had brought them all to this place: the dark woods near a lonely country intersection where he had stopped that first time, because the man had made him stop, the man who had climbed into his car at a gas station downroad with a story about a sick wife and baby at a house trailer somewhere out there. They’d stopped and Manion had asked him which way, and the man had said This way and when Manion looked at him he was clenching a tiny gun, a lady’s gun, really, and Manion’s blood had run cold because the man was taking off his trousers and ordering Manion to do the same, and—and—

Manion remembered the shame, the shame that burned him inside out, but what he remembered most, and what his mind flinched away from on an almost instinctual level, was the glow of pleasure spreading through him as the man grasped his ankles and raised them and knelt at Manion’s upturned ass and began to push inside, pushing pleasure into him and shaking him with a sinister, giggling grunt and suffocating him with not only his weight but his will, the waves of pleasure breaking over Manion’s disgust and drawing him down, farther down into the places within himself he’d refused to explore.

The man had finished and Manion’s shame re-emerged, freshly scoured and sharp, and Manion had knocked the gun from his hand and snatched it up and put a bullet through the man’s skull with a ladylike pop.

Dead.

It was months later that Manion began to remember… the man’s batlike wings, his horns, his serpent’s tongue darting between his blistered lips. The realization came as almost a relief. It was exactly what Manion needed. An explanation. Not the explanation the psychiatrist had given him. None of that crazy business about symbols and disowning ideas about himself. This was a logical explanation, a rational explanation…

… for the pleasure. The torment. The women who were not women, the shadows of their penises visible only in dreams, slowly rising through his memory to emerge in the cold night out here, in the woods by the intersection where all this had begun, where he brought them to die again. Again.

Not dead. Yet.

“But you will be!” Manion shouted at the spot where he’d buried the man. He thought he heard a muffled gurgle of laughter. He thought he heard the leathery flutter of wings, the hiss of tongues.

From all of them.

Manion kept digging.