The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, volume 15

John Farris Story Time With the Bluefield Strangler

Six-year-old Alison on the candy-striped swing set in the side yard of the big white house on the hill. Turning her head at the sound of tires on the gravel drive. Daddy’s home. Alison holds Dolly in the crook of one arm, holds the swing chain with her other hand. Alison has many dolls that Daddy and Mommy have given her but Dolly was the first and will always be special, in spite of wear and tear.

Alison turns her head when Daddy calls. He comes across the bright green lawn of the white house on the hill, smiling at her. Daddy smiles a lot. He doesn’t frown. One hand is behind his back. Of course he has a present for her. He brings home something every day. There is one huge tree on the lawn at the top of the hill (Alison sometimes forgets that). The leaves of the tree are dark green. They shade the swing set and play area where she spends her day. Every day. Because it never rains in the daytime on the hill with the big white house.

Daddy sets his briefcase down. Some days he wears a blue suit to work, some days it’s brown. His shoes are always black and shiny. One day Daddy had a mustache but Alison decided she didn’t like it so Daddy doesn’t wear it any more.

“Here’s my girl!” Daddy says, crouching and waiting for her to run into his arms. It’s what he says every afternoon when he comes home.

(“Where does your daddy work?” Lorraine asks Alison, and after a few moments Alison says, “In an office,” as if it isn’t important to her. “Do you know what kind of work he does?” Lorraine asks then. Alison shakes her head with a hint of displeasure. Lorraine smiles, and doesn’t ask more questions.) Alison reaches around Daddy, trying to find out what he has for her. Daddy laughs and teases for the few seconds Alison will put up with it. Then he offers her the present. It’s tissue-wrapped, and tied with a pink ribbon. Alison allows Daddy to hold Dolly, which is a special privilege on the occasion of gift-bringing, while she unwraps her present.

It’s a glass jar in the form of a girl with pigtails. Like Alison herself. And it’s filled with candy. Red candies. Daddy shows Alison how to open the jar. The glass girl’s head twists off.

Mommy comes out to the back steps of the porch and waves. “Hey, you two.” Mommy wears her blue apron. Mommy is beautiful. She is so blonde her hair looks silver in the sunlight. She wears it in a bun on the back of her head. Alison calls back, as she always does, “Daddy’s home!” (as if Mommy can’t see that for herself). And he brought me a present.” (As if Mommy couldn’t guess.) They love Alison so much. Mommy calls out, “Just one of those before supper, Alison!”

“Just one,” Daddy repeats to Alison, and she nods obediently. Daddy picks up his briefcase and walks across the lawn as if he has forgotten that he has Dolly in one hand. Alison runs after him and tugs Dolly away from him. Privilege revoked. She hugs Dolly and the glass girl against her breast and watches Daddy give Mommy a big hug. They love each other, a whole lot. Alison watches them and smiles. But then she looks up from the porch, way way up, to the third floor of the big white house and he’s up there in one of the rooms looking out the window. Alison can’t smile any more. She takes a deep breath. Big Boy is home. The day is spoiled.

(“Why haven’t you said anything to Daddy and Mommy about Big Boy?” Lorraine asks, after an unusually long, glum silence on Alison’s part. Sometimes Alison isn’t willing to talk about Big Boy. Today she shifts Dolly from the crook of one arm to another, picks at a flaking lower lip while she slides down until almost horizontal in the big leather chair in Lorraine ’s office. Staring at her feet straight out in front of her. Her shoes are red slip-on Keds sneakers. “Because they’d be scared,” Alison says finally.) After dinner. After her bath. Mommy undoes Alison’s pigtails and brushes her hair smooth down over her shoulders while Alison reads to both of them from her storybook. Daddy comes upstairs to Alison’s room with cookies and milk. Then it’s lights out and time for sleep. Mommy forgets and shuts the bedroom door all the way. Alison calls her back. The door is left open a few inches. Mommy and Daddy go down the hall to their own bedroom. Alison lies awake with Dolly on her breast and waits for Big Boy.

(“How long has Big Boy been in the house?” Lorraine asks. Alison fidgets. “A long time. It’s his house.” Lorraine nods. “You mean Big Boy was there before you and Daddy and Mommy moved in.” Alison mimics Lorraine ’s sage nod. She fiddles with her box of crayons. The lid remains closed. Alison hasn’t drawn anything today. Not in the mood. “Only nobody knew about him,” Lorraine says. “So does that mean he hides during the day?” Alison nods again. She opens the Crayola box and pulls an orange crayon half out and looks at it with one eye squinched shut. “Do you know where?” Lorraine continues. Now Alison shrugs. “Oh, in the walls.” “So he lives in the walls.” “Yes,” Alison says, turning around so that she is on her knees in the big leather chair with her back to Lorraine. Well-traveled Dolly continues to stare at Lorraine with a single button eye. The other eye is missing. Dolly has yellow yarn curls around a sewn-on face.) Tell me a story, Big Boy says. It’s always the first thing he says to Alison on those nights when he comes out of the walls. The second thing is, Or I’II go down the hall to their room and hurt them.

Alison holds herself rigid beneath the covers so that he can’t see her shudder. She looks at his shadow on the section of wall between the windows with the shades half pulled down on the tree of night and stars so bright beyond the hill where the big white house is. She doesn’t look at Big Boy’s face very often, even when he comes to stand at the foot of her bed, lean against one of the bedposts with folded arms. One hand tucked into an armpit, the other, the hand with the missing finger, on his elbow. Big Boy’s hair is dark, short, mussed-looking. He’s only fifteen, but already he has a man’s shoulders and strength.

Alison clears her throat.

There was a beautiful butterfly, Alison begins, a thrum of desperation in her heart, who — who lived in a glass jar shaped like a little Dutch girl with pigtails.

(Bluefield detective sergeant Ed Lewinski says to Lorraine, over coffee in the cafeteria of the children’s hospital, “I did a global on the street name ‘Big Boy’. Nothing turned up. No wants, no arrest record, juvenile or adult.” Lorraine sips her coffee. “What about the missing finger? That’s an interesting detail, even for an imaginative six-year-old.” But Lewinski shakes his head. He’s having a doughnut with his coffee. The doughnut’s stale. After two bites he shoves the plate away. “Maybe that wasn’t just the kid’s imagination, Doc. She could’ve seen someone on staff here at the Med who has a missing finger. That could be a traumatic thing, for a kid who may have been traumatized already.” “May have been?” Lorraine says with a wry smile. “Traumatized? Oh, yes, deeply. Alison is quite a challenge, Ed.” Lewinski nods sympathetically. “Three months, but nobody’s come forward. Kids get abandoned all the time; we have to assume that’s what happened to Alison.” Lorraine doesn’t disagree. “How long before Family Services takes over?” he asks. Lorraine says firmly, “She’s not emotionally prepared to go into a foster home. Alison shows no willingness to interact with other children here. Abandonment can crush a child. In Alison’s case her psychic refuge, her protection, is a vivid imagination. Betrayed by her real mother and/or father, she’s blanked them from her mind and created new ones — parents who adore her and never, never, would do such a terrible thing to her.” Lewinski thinks this over. “I understand her need to invent new parents. But what’s all this about ‘Big Boy’? How does he fit into her, what d’ya call it, psychological schematic?” Lorraine checks her watch, says, “Let you know when I know, Ed. I have a couple of ideas I want to explore.” They walk out of the cafeteria together. “Do something different with your hair this weekend, Doc?” “I cut it. Two weeks ago. Some detective you are.” Lewinski has a fair face that blushes easily. “Seeing our girl this afternoon? Sorry I couldn’t turn up ‘Big Boy’ for real; might’ve been some help to you. Bad for Alison, but a break for us cops.” Lorraine, already on her way to the elevators, turns and stares at him. Lewinski laughs. “I mean, Bluefield doesn’t need another teenage Strangler, no matter what his name is.”) Three a.m.

The low drone of a siren in the night. Alison wakes up on her back, looking at the flush of ambulance light on the ceiling of the small room. Dolly in the crook of a thin arm. Alison knowing instantly that she’s in the Wrong Place, where they keep the crazy children. She must get back to the White House on the Hill, to her beautiful room with wallpaper and the white cases filled with dolls and books that Daddy made for her in his workshop. But something bad has happened. Out There. On a lonely street. With trees to hide behind, shadows. The red light swirling on her ceiling, a crackle of radio voices too distant to be understood distracts her; she can’t leave the Wrong Place.

Alison trembles.

And becomes aware of someone standing in a corner opposite the iron bed in this bleak room that smells like medicines, stale peepee.

Oh no.

“Wake you up?” Big Boy says.

“What are you doing h-here? You’re never s’posed to be here.”

“Tell me about it,” Big Boy says; and he moves a couple of steps, to where the light from the single window with its chickenwire glass and shabby shade bathes his face in a hellfire glow. “But if you’re here, then I have to be here, don’t I?”

“No! I don’t know. Just go away.”

Big Boy, grinning. Closer.

“Don’t you want to know what I did tonight? Out There?”

Alison flinches, cold from terror. “No no no! Not Mommy and Daddy!”

“Whoa. I’ll never hurt them. Not as long as you tell me stories.”

“But I’m in the Wrong Place!”

“So what?”

“I can’t think of any stories here, it — it isn’t pretty and smells like peepee!”

“Oh.” He sighs, a big show of regret. “That’s too bad, Alison. I really wanted to hear a story tonight.” Big Boy shrugs, on his way to the door.

“W-where’re you going?”

“The only other place I can go,” Big Boy says with a glance over his shoulder.

“Oh no please don’t!”

Big Boy hesitates at the door.

“It’ll be dark for a few more hours. I’ll find another pretty head to twist off.”

“No no no wait!”

“Alison. It’s what I like to do.”

“Tell you — tell you a story if you don’t!”

That sly Big Boy grin. “But you said you couldn’t think of a story. Because you’re in the Wrong Place.”

“I’ll try I’ll really try!”

Big Boy considers her appeal, then nods.

“Know you will, Alison. Because the one thing you don’t want is for me to twist Mommy and Daddy’s heads off. Because without Mommy and Daddy to go to, where would you be? You’ll just have to stay with the Crazy Children forever. And nobody loves you here.”

“I’ll… try…”

“Okay, okay, Alison. Don’t cry any more. Tell you what. I’ll help you out.” Big Boy sits on the side of the bed with her. “Let me put my thinking cap on, now. Umm-hmmm. Hey, I know! I’ve got a swell idea for a story. Want me to start? Then you can pitch in.”

“Oh — kay.”

“It’s a story about… Dolly, and how she got lost.” And before Alison can react, tighten her grip on one-eyed Dolly, Big Boy has mischievously snatched her away with the hand that has the missing finger. He holds Dolly high in the air, letting her swing by a stuffed lanky leg, delightedly watching Alison’s mouth open and close in horror.

(“His name was Walter Banks,” Ed Lewinski says to Lorraine. They’ve stopped at a Wendy’s for burgers after the movie. “I heard about him from an old-timer at the jail; the case file went into dead storage twenty years ago. I thought old Eb was just yarning, so I looked up Banks in the Tribune’s morgue. Sure ‘nuff. Between 1943 and 1945 Banks may have murdered as many as eight women in Bluefield. Same m.o. every time. He broke their necks. He was all of sixteen when he started his career as a serial killer. Eighteen when he disappeared, and the stranglings stopped, about the same time as World War Two ended.” Lorraine adds ketchup to her double with cheese, takes a bite, stares thoughtfully at Lewinski until he smilingly waves a hand through her line of concentration. “Sorry,” Lorraine says. Ed says, “Your eyes turn a different color when you do that.” Lorraine nods but she’s already out of focus again, thinking. “Is there a photo of Walter Banks in the Trib’s file?” “From his high-school yearbook. I copied it for you.” “I don’t suppose you know where the Banks kid lived.” Lewinski takes an envelope from his inside jacket pocket and lays it on the table. “ Two-oh-four Columbine Street. The house is still there, but it’s badly rundown.” Lorraine gives him a questioning look. “I drove by this afternoon and took some pictures. Two-oh-four Columbine is occupied, but they all look like slackers and drifters. Take better care of their Harleys than they do their own selves.” He shakes his head before Lorraine can ask. “Yeah, Doc, I showed the present occupants Alison’s picture. They didn’t know her. But like I said: drifters.”) Six-year-old Alison on the candy-striped swing set in the side yard of the big white house on the hill. Drawing tablet in her lap, crayons in a pocket of her apron, blue like the one Mommy always wears. Alison has been drawing furiously all afternoon: bears, dragons, spaceships. But now Mommy calls from the steps of the back porch: it’s time to go shopping.

“Alison? How about some lemonade now?” A few minutes before the close of their hour together, during which Alison has been deeply involved with her artwork and uncommunicative, she sighs and closes her drawing tablet, careful not to let Lorraine see what she was working on — that’s a special intimate privilege when things are going well between them, but not today — and replaces all of her crayons in the box. She looks at the pitcher on Lorraine ’s desk. There’s nothing Alison likes more than lemonade when she’s thirsty. Lorraine pours a cupful for each of them. “Alison, I wonder if you’d mind looking at a couple of pictures for me?” Alison nods, sipping. Lorraine places one of Ed Lewinski’s shots of two-oh-four Columbine Street on the edge of her desk. Alison leans forward in her chair, needing to crane a little to see. She doesn’t touch the digital photo. Studies it with no change of expression. “Is that where you live, Lorraine?” “No. I thought you might-” “I’m glad. Because it isn’t pretty.” Alison’s nose wrinkling. “I wouldn’t live there.” There is a hint of something in the girl’s face that gives Lorraine a reason to press on. “But have you ever been to this house?” “No,” Alison says, with a show of revulsion to close the subject. “It looks like it has rats.” Lorraine smiles and withdraws the photo of two-oh-four Columbine Street. “Could be.” She replaces it with a murky copy of Walter Banks’s old yearbook photo. “Do you know this boy?” Alison stares at the likeness of Walter Banks for almost ten seconds before blinking, twice. Then she sits back in the deep leather chair and closes her eyes. “Alison?” “I have to go home now,” Alison says. A small hand twitches in her lap. There is a sighing in her throat, a windy plaintive sound. “I have to… help Mommy bake the cake. Because today is… Daddy’s birthday.”) And what a wonderful party they have, in the big white house on the hill! Surprises galore for Daddy after his special birthday dinner. And the cake, oh, oh, she can’t count how many candles blazing in thick swirls of icing. Alison did most of the frosting herself.

With tears in his eyes, Daddy gathers Mommy and Alison into his arms and kisses them both. He loves them so much. Alison knows that they are the happiest family that ever lived. If Lorraine could be there she would see that, and never ask another question. But there are barriers that Lorraine cannot cross. Alison won’t permit that. And this has made Lorraine jealous. Alison is fearful of her jealousy, afraid of what she might do. Because somehow she has found out. She knows.

“She knows who you are,” Alison tells Big Boy later, after everyone is in bed. Alison treated to a cool breeze from the open windows, nightingale’s trill, treasure-house of stars.

Big Boy is silent for quite a long time. Silence making Alison nervous. She plays with the yarn curls of Dolly’s stuffed and sewn head.

“So what?” Big Boy says at last.

“Well… I thought…”

Big Boy, arms folded, waits. Alison arranges the yarn curls this way and that.

“What?”

“You might want to… do something about Lorraine.”

Unexpectedly he grins. “Having Bad Thoughts, Alison?”

Alison thrusts Dolly away, face down, in a tangle of curls. A seam, twice restitched, is popping again where Dolly’s head joins her neck. Alison looks at it, face filled with dread. No, she doesn’t think Bad Thoughts in the big white house under the stars, because… because otherwise what good is it to be there at all? Shuddering, she recalls one of the smudgy photographs Lorraine showed her. That shabby brick bungalow with its mildew and greasy kitchen smells. It’s what Lorraine wants her to go back to, instead of to her real home, Mommy and Daddy’s clean, airy house. The place where instead of stars shining into her bedroom there were the eyes of prowling rats. She wants Alison to go back to that. Lorraine is not her friend any more, if she ever was. Alison’s heart beats furiously at the thought, she feels a flush of outrage in her cheeks. No, never! And rising blood forces a flood of tears.

“She wants to… send me back to that stinking ol’ place! And if I have to go… you’ll have to go back there too!”

Alison grabs a corner of bedsheet to wipe her streaming eyes. Big Boy sits beside her.

“There’s some snot on your upper lip,” he says.

Alison wipes it away, glaring at him.

“Well… what can you do?”

But Big Boy shakes his head.

“It’s only what you can do that matters, Alison.”

Lorraine gets up slowly from her side of the bed so as not to wake Ed Lewinski, who is sleeping on his stomach. She bends to kiss a naked shoulder, then pulls on a nightshirt from her chest of drawers before walking downstairs to the kitchen of her garden condo to get something to drink. Mouth parched from all the kissing and those other things she did with him, after more years than she cares to remember new meaning to going all the way; around the moon and back with sweet Eddie Lew. Carton of tomato juice on the top shelf in the fridge. She pours a glass, adds a squeeze from the fat plastic lime-juice container, adds Tabasco: Virgin Mary. Leans against the sink smiling to herself as she sips, probably could use a shower but relishes the smell of her lover on her still-tingling body.

The phone. It’s the hospital. Damn.)

By the time Lorraine walks into Alison’s room in the children’s wing Alison has been sedated and is half-asleep.

“Must’ve been a nightmare,” the charge nurse says. “She woke up hysterical, and what a time we had with her. She wet the bed.”

Alison’s head moves on the pillow. Her face is nearly colorless except for the small cherry bow of her mouth.

“Rats and bugs. Fights… all the time. She hurts me.”

Lorraine looks sharply at her. “How are you doing, Sweetie?”

Alison can open her milky eyes only part way. “Headache.”

Lorraine holds her hand. “Can you tell me what you were dreaming about?”

“Nuh.”

“That’s okay. We’ll talk about it later. You rest now.”

Instead of closing her eyes and subsiding into her sedative cocoon, Alison trembles.

“Where’s Dolly?”

“Oh,” Lorraine says, noting that Dolly isn’t in her usual place in the crook of Alison’s arm, “I don’t see her.”

In spite of the dockable sedative more hysteria threatens.

“Dolly!”

Lorraine glances at the charge nurse, who shrugs. Alison begins to wail. Lorraine has a quick look around the spartan room but Dolly isn’t lurking anywhere. Then she remembers: Alison wet the bed, so the sheets could’ve been changed… she questions the nurse, who nods. Possible. Dolly could’ve left the room in a wad of soiled sheets. Lorraine moves swiftly to Alison’s side.

“I think I know where Dolly’s gone. She’s not lost. I’ll bring her to you.” She holds the girl close.

“P-promise?”

“Just give me a few minutes.”

Lorraine takes the elevator to the second-basement level.

Dead quiet down there, no working in the laundry at one-thirty in the morning. The machinery of the elevator seems unnaturally loud to her ears in the quiet of the cavernous basement. Corridors criss-crossing beneath the entire hospital complex. The concrete walls are painted grey and pale green. Yellow ceiling bulbs in wire baskets. Signs point to different areas. Crematory, Electrical, Maintenance, Storage. Laundry.

The metal door, twenty feet from the elevator, is closed. Lorraine pushes it open.

There’s a windowless outer room with a couple of tables, chairs, vending machines for the laundry workers. The room would be full dark except for the illuminated facades of the machines. By their glow she sees, inside the laundry itself, a dumpster-size canvas hamper on wheels that sits beneath the drop chute. And there’s a dim light deep inside the shadowy room. She hears a lone clothes-dryer thumping dully as it makes its rounds.

Lorraine draws a breath that burns her throat, eases around the canteen tables into the laundry. The big room has glass-block windows on one wall, above the pipe complex that grids the ceiling. The one dim bulb is behind pebbled glass in an office door eighty feet away; not enough light to cast her shadow. She tries a wall switch inside the door but nothing much happens to the fluorescent fixtures overhead: a cloudy flickering in two or three of the five-foot tubes.

She draws another breath and begins to search the hamper, pulling out sheets one at a time, shaking them. There are sheets recently peed on, all right, but no Dolly.

“I think I have what you’re looking for,” he says.

Lorraine turns with a jolt that has her skin sparking.

“Who’s there?”

She hears a phlegmy chuckle, then the quavering voice again.

“It’s only me. Did I scare you?”

“Did you-? Hell, yes,” Lorraine says, shaking her head in annoyance. She is unable to tell where his voice is coming from. Next she hears a dry reedy sucking sound, like someone pulling on a straw to get the last drops from a container of soda or fruit juice. That gets on her nerves fast. “Who are you?”

“Oh — I work nights around here. Just washed my old sneakers, now I’m waiting for them to come out of the dryer.”

“What did you mean, you have what I’m looking for? How would you know why-”

She sees him then, shadowy, as he rises from a stool behind a long sorting table; his head, in silhouette against the glass of the office door, looks shaggy. “I believe you come down here for her doll. Throwed out by mistake, was it?”

“Yes. But-”

“Come and get it, then,” he says, chuckling, his amusement causing him to wheeze at the end.

“No. Bring it to me,” Lorraine says. And adds, “Please.”

“All right. All right.” Sounding a little cross. The stool legs scrape on the concrete floor. He comes toward Lorraine, slowly, soundlessly. His sneakers clunking around in the dryer. “How’s little Missy doing? She calm down some from her bad dreams?”

“Were you upstairs earlier? In the children’s wing?”

“That I was. That I was.”

“I see. But how did you know Alison’s doll was missing?”

“Oh, I know things. I know lots of things. Been here almost all my life.”

“Do I know you? What’s your name?”

At the instant she asks, the fluorescent tubes flare overhead with the violence of lightning, the laundry is garishly illuminated, and he is closer than she thought, white-haired, stooped, unkempt head thrust forward of his shoulders as he shuffles toward her. Alison’s Dolly offered in his right hand. Chuckling fit to kill, is Walter Banks. The thumping of old sneakers round and round the dryer tub is like an echo of the accelerated tempo of her heart. She stares in hammering fright at the missing finger on the veiny hand that grips the doll.

“Oh Jesus-!”

The door is only a few feet away, he is old now, and slow and obviously not strong, she can get away easily; Lorraine turns but-There is no room for her to run.

Because Alison is standing in the doorway in her nightie, arms folded, looking up at Lorraine, rigid in her purpose, baleful.

“Oh Alison! But — you can’t do this!”

Alison shakes her head slowly, unyielding. Then Lorraine feels the hand with the missing digit on her shoulder. She glances at it. Not an old man’s juiceless spidery spotted claw, the skin is smooth, unblemished, large, strong: strong enough to grind her bones. Even with a finger gone.

“Alison — God — it’s wrong — listen to me!”

Alison in a quiet kind of huff shuts the door in her face and is gone.

Big Boy bears down and Lorraine screams. He pulls her slowly around to face him. He smiles fondly at Lorraine.

“You don’t want to go yet,” he says. “It’s storytime.”