The Year's Best Horror Stories 11

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“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.