Best New Horror - 25th Anniversary Edition: Best New Horror, #2

By Roberta Lannes, Peter Straub, Elizabeth Massie and 27 more

This revised and updated second edition of Best New Horror showcases some of the very best short stories and novellas published in 1990, the year when the horror boom finally went bust. In this vilifying volume you will rediscover terrifying tales by, amongst many others, Poppy Z. Brite, Jonathan Carroll, Harlan Ellison, Elizabeth Hand, Michael Marshall Smith, Peter Straub, F. Paul Wilson, Gahan Wilson and Gene Wolfe, along with an overview of the year in horror by the editors and a nightmare necrology of those who kicked off this mortal coil during that period.

So get ready to spread your wings and take a bite out of this latest anthology of agony. And don't forget to tell your fellow fiends about our new series of Best New Horror reprints. Just let them know who sent you . . .

The Old Hag

• Language: English
• Publisher: PS Publishing
• Release date: Aug 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781848633582

Book preview

ELIZABETH MASSIE

STEPHEN

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ELIZABETH MASSIE was born in Virginia and was a teacher for sixteen years. Since 1984, her short fiction has appeared in many small press publications and anthologies such as The Horror Show , Grue , Deathrealm , 2AM , The Blood Review , New Blood , Iniquities , Bringing Down the Moon , Women of Darkness , Borderlands , Obsessions , Dead End: City Limits , A Whisper of Blood , Still Dead and Kolchak the Night Stalker: Casebook .

Massie’s novels include Sineater , Southern Discomfort , Welcome Back to the Night , Wire Mesh Mothers , Shadow Dreams , The Fear Report , Twisted Branch (as Chris Blaine), Homeplace and Julie Walker in The Phantom in Race Against Death! , along with the media tie-ins Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Power of Persuasion and Dark Shadows: Dreams of the Dark (with Stephen Mark Rainey).

She has also scripted a young people’s drug abuse drama, Rhymes and Reasons , which was produced by the PBS Network and won a 1990 Parent’s Choice Award, and is the creator of the horror cartoon Skeeryvilletown .

‘Stephen’ won the Horror Writers of America’s Bram Stoker Award and is a memorable story of twisted love and obsession that breaks all the taboos.

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MICHAEL AND STEPHEN shared a room at the rehabilitation centre. Michael was a young man with bright, frantically moving eyes and an outrageous sense of nonstop, bitter humour. He had been a student at the centre for more than a year, and with his disability, would most likely be there much longer. This was true, also, for the others housed on the first floor of the west wing. Severe cases, all of them, living at the centre, studying food services, auto mechanics, computer operating, art, and bookkeeping, none of them likely to secure a job when released because when hiring the disabled, businesses would usually go for the students who lived on east wing and on the second floors. The centre had amazing gadgets which allowed people like Michael to work machines and press computer keys and dabble in acrylics, but the generic factory or office did not go in for space-aged, human-adaptive robotics. And Michael himself was a minor miracle of robotics.

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Anne arrived at the centre late, nearly ten thirty, although her meeting had been scheduled for ten o’clock. The cab dropped her off at the front walk and drove away, spraying fine gravel across her heels. Inside her shoes, her toes worked an awkward rhythm that neither kept them warm nor calmed her down. A cool November wind threw a piece of paper across the walk before her. On its tail followed the crumbled remains of a dead oak leaf. Anne’s full skirt flipped and caught her legs in a tight embrace. It tugged, as if trying to pull her backward and away. In her mouth she tasted hair and sour fear. When she raked her fingers across her face the hair was gone, but not the fear.

The centre was large and sterile, a modern bit of grey stone architecture. The largest building was marked with a sign to the left of the walkway. ADMINISTRATIONS AND ADMISSIONS. Almost the entire front of this building was composed of plate glass with borders of stone. Anne could not see behind the glass for the harsh glare of morning sun, but in the wind the glass seemed to bulge and ripple.

Like a river.

Like water.

Christ.

Anne scrunched her shoulders beneath the weight of her coat and glanced about for a place to sit and compose herself. Yes, she was late, but screw them if they wanted to complain about volunteer help. There were several benches just off the walkway, on the lawn, but she didn’t want to sit in full view. And so she took the walk leading to the right, following along until it circled behind the main building beside what she assumed was a long, grey stone dormitory. The walk ended at a paved parking lot, marked off for visitors and deliveries. She crossed the lot, skirting cars and food trucks and large vans equipped for hauling wheelchairs, heading for a grove of trees on the other side. A lone man pushing an empty wheeled cot crossed in front of Anne and gave her a nod. She smiled slightly and then looked away.

The trees across the lot encircled a park. Picnic tables were clustered beneath the largest of the oaks, and concrete benches made a neat border about the pond in the centre. The pond itself was small, no more than two acres, but it was dark and clearly deep. Dead cattails rattled on the water’s edge. A short pier jutted into the water from the shore, with a weathered rowboat tethered to the end. Leaves were blown in spastic patterns on the black surface.

Anne sat on a bench and wrapped her fingers about her knees. There was no one else in the park. She looked at the brown grass at her feet, then at her hands on her knees, and then at the pond. The sight of the bobbing boat and the dull shimmering of the ripples made her stomach clamp. What a raw and ugly thing the pond was.

A cold thing, enticing and deadly, ready to suck someone under and drag them down into its lightless depths. Licking and smothering with its stinking embrace.

Phillip would have loved this pond.

Phillip would have thought it just right.

The fucking bastard.

If she was to go to the water’s edge, she thought she might see his reflection there, grinning at her.

But she did not go. She sat on the concrete bench, her fingers turning purple with the chill, her breath steaming the air. She did not look at the pond again, but at the grass and her knees and the picnic tables. She studied the gentle slopes the paths made about the park, all accessible to wheeled means of movement. Accessible to the people who lived here. To the people Anne’s mother had protected her from as a child; who her mother had hurried Anne away from on the street, whispering in her ear, "Don’t stare, now, Anne. Polite people don’t react. Do you hear me?

There but for the grace of God go you, Anne. Don’t look now. It’s not nice.

Anne closed her eyes but the vision of the park and the tables and the sloped pathways stayed inside her eyes. She could hear the wind on the pond.

Damn you, Mother, she said. Damn you, Phillip.

She sat for another twenty minutes.

When she crossed the parking lot again, her eyes in the sun and her hands in her pockets, her muscles were steeled and her face carried a tight, professional