Borderlands Read online

  "Doesn't he need his car to drive home?" Mrs. Grace saw fit to ask as her husband was about to leave.

  "He isn't going home. Tomorrow we'll drive him up to Canada and dump him there in the woods. I don't even want that son of a bitch in the same country."

  When he heard his car being driven away, Tim looked at Mrs. Grace. He gathered himself, tried to clear his throat and speak. But the old woman rose from her seat and approached him. She had the roll of tape in her hand.

  "I don't want to see you," she said. "I don't even want to hear you, and I sure don't want you looking at me."

  Ah, no, Tim thought as he saw her yank a length of tape from the roll. She bit it loose, and he noticed a couple of fugitive sesame seeds clinging to her dentures. She slapped the tape over Tim's mouth to keep him from talking. Then, at a more leisurely pace, Evelyn's mother began to wrap the rest of his head in tape. He thrashed his body as wildly as possible, but he couldn't stop her, and when his head was done she proceeded on down around his arms, eventually securing his knees. It was a big roll of tape, and Mrs. Grace used all of it.

  "Now, that's better," she said.

  Grotesque, Tim thought, grotesque. He pictured himself as a kind of slapdash mummy, rotting away in the Canadian woods. Say, fifty yards from a back road—the Graces wouldn't be able to drag him any farther than that—but would he ever be found? It was such an outrageous and unreal image that Tim was, even now, incapable of feeling mere panic or terror. Instead, his mind was overwhelmed by a profound sense of exasperation.

  If only his story had been true, and he and Evvy had been in love for a while. Then he wouldn't be where he was now, and Evvy would still be alive—because Tim never would have walked away from her. He never would have settled for an unhappy ending with Evvy, not in real life.

  Tim's lungs felt like they were being clamped in a waffle iron, the oxygen slowly burning out of them. The last conscious thought he had was a rich and vivid recall of the last conscious smell he had experienced, Evelyn Grace's cunt.

  BY THE LIGHT OF THE SILVERY MOON

  Les Daniels

  Les Daniels is something of a rarity. Unlike most writers who have only recently turned to HDF as a viable means of making a living, Daniels has always been a horror writer; i.e., way back, before it was fashionable (read: profitable), before Stephen King reinvented the whole genre. He lives in Rhode Island, but was born in Connecticut, and is currently investigating the old saw about life beginning after the age of forty. Regardless, he is a down-to-the-bone New Englander, and for twenty years has been writing fine, regional novels of horror in the tradition of Lovecraft, but without all the excess verbiage.

  He also writes with a wry sense of humor and a sometimes savage wit. He reports he sold every short story he's ever written, but adds he's only written five. So what. Stats are stats, and when you're batting a thousand, you're doing great. Daniels' story for Borderlands is another one of those pieces I included so as to vary the mix, to keep things from getting too damned bleak. Well, almost.

  He had no name (few wolves do) and little enough of memory. And when he remembered anything at all, it was not the cold sharp air of the forest piercing his nostrils, nor the musky scent of frightened prey, for there is no need to recall what is so often there. Instead his recollections were of stranger scents: flaming bits of bodies with the blood burned out of them, and beings trapped in rolling iron boxes, each one spewing forth cloud upon cloud of deadly fumes instead of sweetly pungent droppings. These odors haunted him, along with visions of pale hairless things that staggered on their fat hind legs, their paws wrapped in dried skins stolen from other creatures. Such things were monstrous, as were the celebrations in airless wooden boxes that did not move, where there was nothing to breathe but smoking weeds and the stink of fermented fruits and grains. There might be howling in such a box, but it came from another box, and it was marred by the sound of lightning forced through scraping metal wire, and wind forced through dried dead reeds.

  He dreamed of these things when the moon was round, and had he been able he might have spoken of them to his fellows in the pack. Yet he was grateful that he had no words and wondered why he knew of them at all. They were one of his dreams.

  He slept in a den with his mate and her pups; he coupled with her when she gave him the scent; yet still he dreamed of nuzzling loins that reeked of mint or even strawberry. Horror possessed him. He trembled and howled, and all the more because his tiny forebrain knew as much of the truth as it could contain: when the light in the sky became a circle, he became a man.

  He whimpered and snuggled into the musty fur of his mate, wondering all the while if it was her beauty or his own bestiality that was only a fragment of his troubled sleep. He wondered where he was.

  Then he was free, loping through the snow in the deep track that had been plowed for him by a wandering moose, hearing nothing but the whisper of the wind and the touch of his feet on the ice beneath them. Hunger bit at his belly, almost like another animal attacking him; perhaps that was what had started the dreams and then driven him out into the night. His pack was starving, all of them, and they could not range free from the den while the pups were new. They would not survive much longer without food, and so he hunted, on and on for more than a dozen miles, pausing only to mark the trail with his leg lifted.

  It was when he lowered his leg that he realized the change was coming, for the pads on his foot turned suddenly tender, and the cold cut through them. He had lost the talent, which all wolves possess, of regulating his own body temperature, and by this sign he could tell that he was turning into a monster.

  He began to shiver in the frigid air, rearing up on his hind legs to snap at nothing, a growl in his throat as he felt his teeth drawn painfully back into his head until he had only thirty-two little stumps, hardly enough to fill the muzzle being crushed back into his face. Everything was pulling back into him and everything was agony; he experienced each individual hair as it was absorbed into his stinging flesh.

  And then he bloated, bulking up into a pink and swollen thing more than twice his proper weight, a thick and weak and hairless thing that feared the gentle dark. It fled shaking and screaming through the snow, and it took him with it.

  With feeble, bleeding, clawless forepaws, the man he had become turned over a rock made slippery with a transparent glaze, and found the cache of clothes beneath it. He could not remember how they came to be there, but when he crawled into them the cold could not hurt him as much. Everything about him had changed except his hunger. He staggered on in search of food, his numb feet stuffed into the skin of slaughtered cows.

  Much of the night had given way to his slow progress through the snow before he topped a rise and let his eyes confirm the truth his ears and nose had told him long ago: he was about to enter the other world. Below him was an endless stream of poison gas, floating over a strip of ground that looked like a dry river bed, and through that raced a succession of the iron boxes with humans caught inside. These beings seemed to be following the moon the way he was; in fact, each one of their boxes was in pursuit of two bright yellow disks of light that it could never catch. He saw that much almost at once, but decided he would follow the lights too. This was what men did. Perhaps there was food at the mouth of the empty river.

  Dragging his feet through the piles of the gray slush that spattered at him, he paced behind the headlights (he began to know their name), staying carefully to one side as it came back to him that cars could kill.

  Finally he realized where they were going. It was not the moon they were pursuing after all, but a big red star whose outline glowed against the sky. There were red squiggles beside it, and somehow he knew that they meant "red star" too, although that made no sense when the red star was right there beside them anyway. And they didn't look like what they said; they looked like splashes of blood on black snow.

  Then he saw that the Red Star was another box, but so much bigger than the others that he could not look
around it. Most of it seemed to be made of ice: it glistened in vast sheets, and light came shining through to fall on him. The cars opened, and those who had been caught inside rushed away like sensible creatures but then gravitated at once toward the giant trap that looked like fire enclosed in ice. He sensed their hunger, and despite his fear he followed them. A good hunter could steal food even from a snare.

  He was startled by the glare inside, brighter than sunlight and colder than moonlight. He closed his eyes against it as death filled his nostrils. Hundreds of animals had perished here, and their bodies had not been consumed. The overwhelming sense of slaughter and of waste filled him with dread even as he felt himself begin to drool.

  Someone shoved against him; he snarled and raised his upper lip before he remembered that he had no fangs to bare. Dozens of humans had gathered here, but they were not a pack. Each one was like a lone wolf without a territory of its own; each one was angry and aggressive and afraid. They had hold of other little boxes that moved like the cars did, and they pushed them at each other as they passed. Some of them put things in these small boxes, and just the sight of that made his head swim. Everything in this world was inside something else; nothing ran free.

  The noise he had dreamed about washed over him again: wires and reeds and skins struck by sticks, with the scraping of hair against gut wailing over them. He found himself humming along with it against his will; he was becoming more like the humans with every minute he spent among them. He took a shopping cart and did with it what the others were doing. The light was so intense it almost blinded him, just as darkness would blind a man, and the music made him deaf. Only the stubby pink nose he had been cursed with told him anything at all. It spoke of meat.

  He was in an aisle filled with meat. The floors were meat and the walls were meat, and they stretched out before him as far as his dazzled eyes could see.

  The sight should have brought him joy, but there was terror in it, too, the terror that only excess can bring. Had there ever been a time when so many animals had died at once? What could have killed them all, and what had stopped it from eating them? The fur on his back would have stood on end if it had not vanished hours ago.

  He could smell cattle and sheep and pigs, chickens and turkeys and ducks, a few kinds of fish he recognized and many more that he did not. He could smell hundreds of dead creatures, thousands of them, and on each of them was the stench of decay. This was not fresh meat, still quivering with the hot pulse of blood; this was something sliced and drained and spoiled.

  It was cold, too. He felt the chill of death seep into his hand as he clutched involuntarily at part of a cow. The meat had already been chewed up, like what he regurgitated to feed his cubs, and it was enclosed in transparent ice like the stuff that made up the walls of the Red Star. With trembling fingers he dropped it into his cart. Nearby lay pigs which had been masticated and then stuffed into their own intestines, even though such parts of an animal were not good to eat. He passed them by, but he could not resist the chance to sweep three chickens into the cart, even though they were as cold and hard as stone.

  Then he was on a rampage, grabbing with numb fingers at the ribs of a hog, the leg of a lamb, the brain of a calf. He snatched at a cluster of chicken livers, still swimming in chilled blood, and felt the sticky liquid squirt out over his hand. He licked at it and saw a female staring at him. He growled at her.

  It was time to go, time to escape with this meat before he joined it in those frigid walls that surrounded him. Panic surged through him when he saw that the way out was blocked, and then he recognized the checkout line for what it was. This standing in a row was something only humans did, and he was delighted by his cleverness in understanding it. Perhaps he would get away after all.

  He followed a metal cage that had been loaded with the icy fragments of dead animals. Humans stood before him and behind him, similarly laden, their wire traps having captured creatures that were already corpses, but it was not this ugly image that made him shiver. Instead, he was possessed by the idea of taking these broken bodies to a place where he could expose them to a flame and watch the fat and juices flare into the sky, leaving him nothing but a dried husk to chew. The very thought made him gag, but he knew he would carry out this mad plan unless something stopped him. He tried to hold on to a picture of his pups, waiting in the burrow he had dug with his own paws, but somehow they seemed very far away, and he knew that they might die without seeing any of this meat he had hunted down for them.

  Squinting against the glare around him, he watched those ahead of him file out into the night. Some sort of ritual seemed to be involved. They had to pass before a young female, hardly more than a cub herself, and they had to let her touch each one of their treasures as they greeted her. And there was something else. Each one made an offering to her, passing her something that looked like a green leaf, and sometimes more than one. But where could they have found green leaves in the winter? At this time of year they were scarcer than prey. His twitching hands were empty, and the clothes he wore began to itch. He laid out his catch before the female and allowed her to touch it.

  "Forty-two forty-nine," she said.

  He had no idea what these sounds meant. She looked at him. He suddenly felt dizzy.

  "Forty-two forty-nine," she said.

  He thought of green leaves, and of summer, and of plentiful game. He dropped to his knees.

  The human behind him saw what was happening and sprinted for the dairy section at the back of the store.

  The cashier leaned over her register to get a better look just as he rose again on his hind legs. His slavering jaws closed on her face.

  He fed, and not on putrid, juiceless carrion. He experienced the taste of living blood splashing in his mouth, the feel of hot flesh throbbing against his tongue. The purity, the truth of it. His throat was full.

  He shrugged off the last of his clothing and ran. The Red Star opened up its glistening wall of ice and set him free. He danced around a stream of rolling traps and capered across the unbroken snow until he reached the shelter of the trees.

  The chunks of the young cashier were safe inside him, ready to be coughed up when he was home at last. His children would eat tonight.

  A YOUNGER WOMAN

  John Maclay

  Sometimes the best horror stories are the ones based on ideas or premises which at first glance seem to be totally harmless. Such is the case with the utterly prosaic male fantasy John Maclay brings to life (well maybe not life…) in the story to follow.

  Maclay, for many years, was well known as a specialty publisher in Baltimore—a career capped by the extremely successful series anthology, Masques, edited by J. N. Williamson. But in the last few years, short stories under the Maclay byline have appeared in some of the small press magazines, and as time passes, an impressive body of work accumulates. "A Younger Woman" is easily the finest example of John Maclay's promise as a writer.

  He was going to do it; this time he was really going to do it. The realization sent a thrill through Jack's forty-two-year-old body as he pulled the Chrysler convertible into the driveway of the Baltimore apartment building on a spring evening that was too beautiful for words. Before, when he'd dreamed about it during the long nights at home with Meg, there had been a pocket of fear underneath. And on the two occasions when he'd stormed out of the house, suitcase in hand, after one of her "mads" or stony silences, he'd only spent the night in a hotel to crawl back the next day after work. But now the fear was gone, and the dream was firmly and forever in place.

  The Chrysler and the evening hour confirmed it. Before, in case the car be spotted or Meg grow suspicious of his being out late, Jack had never driven to Marcia's apartment and never visited in other than daytime. Instead, he'd arrived by bus or cab, by some circuitous route he and his lover had laughed at, as well as the excuses they'd given for being out of their offices. Their hour of stolen passion, that of a married, middle-aged man and a twenty-two-year-old single woman,
had been sweet, at first even more sweet for being stolen. Marcia had even bought black curtains so they could pretend it was all night. Yet gradually, the dream they created with their bodies had grown, had stretched beyond the boundaries of that hour and that bedroom. And they'd come to know they had to take it there, in reality.

  Jack sat behind the steering wheel for a moment, going over it once more in his mind. His wife entering menopause, growing querulous, conservative…old, while he was feeling younger than ever. His having come to rely on Meg over the years, but that slowly changing to a feeling of being dominated, having his manhood threatened, despite his position as a successful attorney. The felt need, during those long nights at home and though there was still sex, to be free again, coupled with the sudden, little-boy fear of being so. And the caring almost too much—"What will Meg do? Totally unfair! "—yet the inner voice—"It's nature. I don't make the rules."

  At first, there had been no focus for his feelings—but then there had. An innocent walk, one day three months ago, to a rival law firm to drop off some papers. The secretary who took them from him—and the way their eyes met. Marcia was tall, almost his height, and was dressed in a blue and white striped blouse and gray skirt which showed off a beautiful figure. She had a wide, open face, short, feathery blonde hair, and a broad smile with pink lips and perfect teeth. Her voice was small, weak, almost a giggle—but, judging by her position with the firm, she was smart enough. And the chemistry, the way her pale eyes met his.

  The inner voice, Jack's true one, had spoken; it was almost as if he were listening to himself. He'd asked Marcia out for a quick drink after work, and she'd accepted. Then there'd been another one, the next day. Then lunch—and, as they both obeyed an unspoken need, separate cabs to her apartment. Where he'd really found out what was happening: their first embrace, his body feeling at last the power of his years, while he sucked hungrily at the fountain of youth of her lips…their clothes falling away, she breathing in his ear about his maturity, his mastery, while his eyes and hands marveled at the flawless smoothness of her flesh…her body, big, perfectly formed, sexually powerful, breasts high and round like a picture, blonde hair below like a fantasy, yet above all, young, young…and their first time, which took him into a new or forgotten world. And after which, when he cried into her shoulder, he'd had to explain why.