bitch.
Another red. He swerved right and pulled close beside the Chevy, the music from his radio pacing his pulsebeat. The faces of the girls were flushed with excitement, the driver’s red mouth cruel as she raced her engine. Laughing wildly, her friend reached across through the open window of the Camaro and caressed Sheen’s cheek. He took her finger into his mouth and bit it lightly, then leaned out of the car and met her lips with his in a bruising kiss that was broken abruptly as the blonde raced through the changing light.
Cursing, Sheen opened his four-barrel and went after them. The Chevy was a sleeper with dual pipes and big inches under the beaten metal, but the Camaro pulled even as the girls got held up in traffic. Waiting for an open stretch, he swung in close beside and reached through the window of the Chevy with both cars moving fast. Tauntingly the brunette let him touch her breast, then pulled away across the seat. The blonde cut the Chevy left and Sheen followed, his nerves tingling as his eyes flicked between the road ahead and the wicked faces beside him.
Once again he reached through the window of the other car. Something hard closed on his seeking arm. He looked across and saw a shining steel ring around his wrist, a short chain trailing from it to a similar ring around the roof column. The brunette held a key up by her face and shook it in front of him like a little bell. Leaning forward to watch, the driver smiled and trailed the tip of her tongue wetly over her lips.
It was a second before he understood. Then he felt a tear so naked that his stomach churned and his throat constricted and his skin went cold in the summer heat. He began to stop his car and hesitated, foot over the brake, realizing that he could not. As the Camaro slowed, the steel chain of the handcuffs pulled tight and sent a stab of pain lancing down his left arm. He carefully pressed the gas and matched speed with the Chevy.
The cruel smile left the face of the blonde driver and was replaced by calculation. The other watched him breathlessly. With deliberate skill the blonde swung the Chevy in slow curves from side to side, careful to let the Camaro keep pace. Sheen shouted and begged, forced to use every fraction of his skill to control the distance between the cars. His eyes flicked to the speedometer. Forty-five. The Chevy began to accelerate.
Ahead in the right lane was a slow-moving car that grew rapidly as they overtook it. Desperately Sheen swung into the Chevy, trying to force it wide to the left. Metal shrieked on metal as the doors ground against each other, but the old sedan was like a rock on the road. Pulling away, he tried to climb out his open window, almost lost the Camaro, and fought frantically to regain control. The girl with the key to the handcuffs leaned over and playfully bit one of his fingers.
Sheen never felt it. As the Chevy swerved to pass the slow car, drawing him tight against his door, time jammed like a single frame of film in a projector. He saw the looming rear of the slow car ahead; the excited, soulless faces watching him. For the first time he noticed that the line of decals under the road dust on the fender of the Chevy were tiny red hands broken off at the wrists and dripping blood.
Then time started up again and Johnny Sheen screamed.
THE DEPTHS
by Ramsey Campbell
Ramsey Campbell has been in all but one of the eleven volumes of DAW’s
The circumstances are that Campbell is perhaps the best writer of horror fiction active today, and that Campbell is very active indeed. In his twenty-year career, he has written some 175 short stories—about ten of which saw first publication this past year. Not surprisingly, there have already been four volumes of Campbell’s collected short stories. In the last few years Campbell has concentrated on writing novels, and he has not written any new short fiction since early 1980. I would hope that he finds time for new short stories before his present backlog is exhausted. If not, his five-year-old daughter, Tamsin, may have to carry on the family tradition; she may well have broken the world record for the shortest horror story with her recent remark; “When I’m dead, I’ll be hungry.” Like father, like daughter.
As Miles emerged, a woman and a pink-eyed dog stumped by. She glanced at the house; then, humming tunelessly, she aimed the same contemptuous look at Miles. As if the lead were a remote control, the dog began to growl. They thought Miles was the same as the house.
He almost wished that were true; at least it would have been a kind of contact. He strolled through West Derby village and groped in his mind for ideas. Pastels drained from the evening sky. Wood pigeons paraded in a tree-lined close. A mother was crying, “Don’t you dare go out of this garden again.” A woman was brushing her driveway and singing that she was glad she was Bugs Bunny. Beyond a brace of cars, in a living room that displayed a bar complete with beer pumps, a couple listened to Beethoven’s Greatest Hits.
Miles sat drinking beer at a table behind the Crown, at the edge of the bowling green. Apart from the click of bowls the summer evening seemed as blank as his mind. Yet the idea had promised to be exactly what he and his publisher needed: no more days of drinking tea until his head swam, of glaring at the sheet of paper in the typewriter while it glared an unanswerable challenge back at him. He hadn’t realized until now how untrustworthy inspirations were.
Perhaps he ought to have foreseen the problem. The owners had told him that there was nothing wrong with the house—nothing except the aloofness and silent disgust of their neighbors. If they had known what had happened there they would never have bought the house; why should they be treated as though by living there they had taken on the guilt?
Still, that was no more unreasonable than the crime itself. The previous owner had been a bank manager, as relaxed as a man could be in his job; his wife had owned a small boutique. They’d seemed entirely at peace with each other. Nobody who had known them could believe what he had done to her. Everyone Miles approached had refused to discuss it, as though by keeping quiet about it they might prevent it from having taken place at all.
The deserted green was smudged with darkness. “We’re closing now,” the barmaid said, surprised that anyone was still outside. Miles lifted the faint sketch of a tankard and gulped a throatful of beer, grimacing. The more he researched the book, the weaker it seemed to be.
To make things worse, he’d told the television interviewer that it was near completion. At least the program wouldn’t be broadcast for months, by which time he might be well into a book about the locations of murder—but it wasn’t the book he had promised his publisher, and he wasn’t sure that it would have the same appeal.
Long dark houses slumbered beyond an archway between cottages, lit windows hovered in the arch. A signboard reserved a weedy patch of ground for a library. A gray figure was caged by the pillars of the village cross. On the roof of a pub extension, gargoyles began barking, for they were dogs. A cottage claimed to be a sawmill, but the smell seemed to be of manure. Though his brain was taking notes, it wouldn’t stop nagging.
He gazed across Lord Sefton’s estate toward the tower blocks of Cantril Farm. Their windows were broken ranks of small bright perforations in the night. For a moment, as his mind wobbled on the edge of exhaustion, the unstable patterns of light seemed a code which he needed to break to solve his problems. But how could they have anything to do with it? Such a murder in Cantril Farm, in the concrete barracks among which Liverpool communities had been scattered, he might have understood; here in West Derby it didn’t make sense.
As he entered the deserted close, he heard movements beneath eaves. It must be nesting birds, but it was as though the sedate house had secret thoughts. He was grinning as he pushed open his gate, until his hand recoiled. The white gate was stickily red.
It was paint. Someone had written SADIST in an ungainly dripping scrawl. The neighbors could erase that— he wouldn’t be here much longer. He let himself into the house.
For a moment he hesitated, listening to the dark. Nothing fled as he switched on the lights. The hall was just a hall, surmounted by a concertina of stairs; the metal and vinyl of the kitchen gleamed like an Ideal Home display; the corduroy suite sat plump and smug on the dark green pelt of the living room. He felt as though he were lodging in a show house, without even the company of a shelf of his books.
