The Year's Best Horror Stories 11

“Stay?”

“With me. Like a family.”

“Never go home?” he asked.

“This can be your home.”

There was an awful look on her face. Buckeye didn’t like it. “I could come visit,” he said. “It’s just that right now I’ve got to leave and—”

“No!” Her head rose off the pillow. Her yellow eyes turned ugly—like Ol’ Yeller’s eyes right before they shot him.

And suddenly he remembered the key and the three friends waiting outside.

“I gotta go.”

He turned and ran toward the stairs, stopping once to see if she was following. She wasn’t. Her head had fallen back again. Her eyes were shut. But he was scared now. The woman was nuts.

He ran down the stairs, looking for the other kids, looking for the girl who’d promised to find the key. But they weren’t in the hall. They weren’t in the kitchen, either.

“Hey!” he shouted.

No answer. Only his own echo in the lonely house.

There was a door open by the stove—a door with steps leading down. They’d gone to the basement. He leaned inside the door and fumbled for a light. There was no switch on the wall. He looked around. Above his head a dirty string dangled from a bare bulb. He pulled. The light came on. And below him, at the bottom of the stairs, was another string—another bare bulb.

He moved down. “Hey, you guys. You down here? What’re you doing in the dark any—?” He pulled the second string. The second light came on, and at first he thought the basement was empty.

Then he saw them. All in rows. Ten neat little mounds rising out of the basement floor.

And on one of them was the key.

He walked toward it, head spinning. You should see the basement… I try so hard and they get like this…

He fell, dropping to grass-stained knees. What kind of crazy woman would…?

His hands shot toward the key, sinking past it, clawing at the soft mound of dirt. They say they don’t want to stay and I have to make them…

And then he saw.

And then he was up, running, stumbling, falling up the stairs, through the hall. There were no pictures on the wall. No kids in the kitchen.

He tripped and skidded into the dark living room. The moon was up, glowing thinly through the trees, through the window.

He pulled himself up and ran. Scared. Thinking of the woman. Thinking of her coming down the stairs. Thinking of her grabbing him as he squeezed through the window, holding him with cold dead fingers, pulling him, dragging him to the basement. Oh, God, please, this is Buckeye talking. Get me out of here and I’ll be Pope… anything you want… just get me out of here!

He was halfway through, struggling, pulling, praying he wouldn’t get stuck. And then he was falling, tumbling. The ground raced up. He hit and rolled, losing his wind, but scrambling up anyway—scrambling to his feet and running down the hill.

The creek was cold. He splashed through the deep part, forgetting the stones.

They hadn’t waited. None of them. Not even Max—big-talking Max who wasn’t afraid of anything. They’d all gone home. Or maybe they’d been back there hiding, waiting for him to come through the window so they could jump out at him. Maybe they were still back there, wondering what had happened…

It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. There was only running. There was only getting away from the house.

He ran past Lanny’s tree fort and then down the hill to the highway and then across the field to home. His stomach hurt. His chest hurt. His clothes were wet from the creek and there were splinters in his hands from falling in the house.

But he didn’t stop. He kept seeing the little face in the shallow grave. The little eyes that hadn’t closed. The little nose. The dark hair. She wasn’t so pretty after lying in the dirt all that time.

And then he was on his street. He was turning the bend, climbing the walk. Home. The door. He fell against the screen, forgetting the key, pounding, kicking…

The television was on inside. Laughter. A family show. Happy people. Happy endings.

His mother moved toward the door. “You’ve done it this time, Sean. It’s after nine. Don’t you know there’s crazy people out…”

But he didn’t hear. There was only the little girl looking at him from the dirt halo. There was only the sound of his own screams.

ROUSE HIM NOT by Manly Wade Wellman

Manly Wade Wellman is generally considered to be the dean of American fantasy writers. Born May 21, 1903 in the village of Kamundongo in Portuguese West Africa (now Angola), Wellman’s career seems almost the romanticized ideal of a writer’s life. After boyhood visits to London, Wellman moved to the U.S., where he attended prep school in Utah, played football for Wichita University, and received a degree from Columbia. Early jobs ranged from harvest hand to bouncer in a Prohibition Era roadhouse, but Wellman was working as a reporter in Wichita when he quit his job in 1930 to begin his career as a professional writer—moving to New York in 1934 in order to be closer to his markets. His first professionally published story appeared in the May 1927 issue of Thrilling Tales, where he was billed as “The King of Jungle Fiction.” Later that same year Wellman first appeared in Weird Tales, where some fifty of his nearly 300 stories were published. Although he is best known as a science fiction and fantasy writer, Wellman’s 75 books have ranged from mystery to mainstream, civil war history to regional history, and include numerous juveniles.

Wellman has written a number of series centering upon occult investigators, beginning with Judge Pursuivant (1938) and followed by John Thunstoe (1943), both in Weird Tales. His best known character is John (no last name, just plain John), a balladeer with a silver-string guitar who wandered through the Southern Appalachians via the pages of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction during the 1950s. The John stories were collected in Who Fears the Devil? (Arkham House, 1963), while the Pursuivant and Thunstone tales were gathered together in Lonely Vigils (Carcosa, 1981). In recent years Wellman has again begun to write new stories and novels about John the Balladeer, and it was inevitable that he would revive Judge Pursuivant and John Thunstone as well. “Rouse Him Not,” a new John Thunstone tale, was published in Kadath, an English- language amateur magazine from Italy. It would have been perfectly at home in an issue of Weird Tales forty years ago.

Wellman’s seventy-fifth book, due from Doubleday later this year, is What Dreams May Come, a new John Thunstone novel set in England. He is currently at work on his seventy-sixth book, also for Doubleday, The Voice of the Mountain, the fifth of his new novels about John the Balladeer. A sixth novel in the series is under contract. Since 1951 Wellman has lived in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a town he now calls home. At 80 years of age and with several other books under contract, Manly Wade Wellman is himself a legendary figure—and a very active legend, at that.

The side road in from the paved highway was heavily graveled but not tightly packed except for two ruts. John Thunstone’s black sedan crept between trees that wove their branches together overhead. Gloom lay in the woods to right and left. Once or twice he thought he heard a rustle of movement there. Maybe half a mile on, he came to the house.

It was narrow and two-storied, of vertical planks stained a soft brown. A tan pickup truck was parked at a