Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (12 page)

    I grinned, and grinning felt good; I'd forgotten that about bodies, that genuinely smiling actually caused chemical changes and improved the mood. "I'm at your service." I pulled the door shut and followed Sadie down the steps and up the street. I didn't bother locking the door - nobody would rob the place while I was staying there.

    "What do you know about spiders?" she said, leading me into the lobby of the apartment building. The floor was black tile with gold flecks, and there was a wall of old-fashioned brass and glass mailboxes. I liked it. The place had personality.

    "Hmm. Eight legs. Mythologically complex - sometimes tricksters, sometimes creators, sometimes monsters, depending on who you ask."

    She looked at me, half-smiling, as if she wasn't sure if I was joking. She opened a door, revealing an elevator with a sliding grate. We went inside, and she rattled the gate closed. Back in the old days there would have been a uniformed attendant to run the elevator. This must have been a classy place in its day. "Can you recognize poisonous spiders? I've heard there are some nasty ones out here, black widows and brown recluses, stuff like that. There's a spider in my tub and it's freaking me out a little."

    "It's probably gone by now, right?" The elevator rattled and hummed as it ascended.

    "I don't think it can get out. It keeps trying to climb the sides of the tub and sliding back down."

    She was standing a little closer to me than she had to. I wondered if I should read anything into that. "So you want me to get rid of it?"

    "If it was a snake or a rat or something, I'd do it myself. Most things like this don't bother me. But spiders…" She shuddered. "Especially when I don't know if they're poisonous or not. I heard the bite of a brown recluse can make your skin rot away. Bleah. Vicious little things."

    I shrugged. "They're just trying to get by. Besides, there aren't any brown recluses in California."

    She frowned. "But everybody says there are."

    "It's a common misconception. Only a handful of brown recluses have ever been found here, and they all came with shipments from the south or midwest. They aren't native anywhere west of the Rockies. Hundreds of people go to their doctors in California every year saying they've been bitten by recluses, but the bites are always from some other bug, or they're just rashes or something." The fear of brown recluse spiders in California was an oddly persistent one. I'd once seen a billboard in San Francisco, with a several-million-times-life-size depiction of a fiddleback spider, and a strident warning in Spanish. People do tend toward the fearful, even without cause.

    Sadie gave me a new, appraising look. "No shit? You're, like, a spider expert or something?"

    I laughed. How could I explain that I just had a
really good sense
for where things came from? "Nah, just something I read about. Anyway, whatever kind of spider it is, I'll take care of it for you. There are lots of black widows out here. Not to mention scorpions."

    "My hero," she said, and touched my arm. It was the first time I'd been touched in this body, other than a handshake and Miss Li's friendly embrace, and I had to stop myself from taking Sadie in my arms right then. Having a body again was wonderful. Why had I gone without for so long?

    She let me into her apartment, which was furnished in student-poverty-chic, mismatched furniture and beat-up bookcases overflowing with texts, prints of fine art hung alongside real art of the student-show variety. The apartment was big, though, for a single person in Oakland, with a nice sized living room, a little kitchen separated by a counter, and a short hallway leading to other doors. "This is a nice place."

    "I know!" she said, and I liked how sincere she sounded. "It's crazy cheap, too. I looked at a lot of apartments when I first moved here, and they were all way more than I could afford, but this one's half as much as other apartments this size. I've got a bedroom
and
an office. I guess the owner doesn't live around here, and doesn't realize how rents have gone up these past few years? I don't know, but it's my good luck."

    "You don't know the landlord?" I disapprove of absentee landlords on principle.

    "Nah, I just mail rent checks to a PO box. There's a tenant on the first floor who gets even cheaper rent than the rest of us for managing the place, making sure leases get signed, interviewing people, all that. If she ever moves out, I might try to get that gig. It can be a lot of work, though - there's a lot of turnover here. Because it's so cheap, we get plenty of people who are down on their luck, and some them just take off without paying their last month's rent. I guess that's what deposits are for, though. Two or three girls have skipped out since I moved in, just leaving their stuff here. Not that they had much. They were all on drugs, I heard. Sometimes this place is like a halfway house."

    "Huh," I said, thinking. "How are the pipes? You said Ike Train is the plumber here?"

    "Yeah. I don't know if he's a lousy plumber or if the place just has shitty pipes, but it seems like he's over here all the time - somebody's always got a leak or a bad drain or something. But, hey, at these prices, we don't expect perfection. Anyway, speaking of bathrooms…" She led the way down the hallway, opening the door onto a nice big bathroom, with an old claw-footed tub.

    I looked into the bathtub. "That," I said, "is a daddy longlegs." Specifically a
Spermaphora,
but why show off?

    "Aren't they, like, the most poisonous spider in the world? But their fangs are too short to bite humans?"

    "Another myth," I said. "They're pretty much harmless. They can bite, but it wouldn't do much to you." I reached down, picked up the spider by one of its comically long legs, and walked over to the open window. I set the spider on the sill, and it scurried off down the exterior wall. I looked back at Sadie, who stood by the door, looking at me.

    I hadn't been in a body for long, but I knew that look. "You're not afraid of spiders at all, are you?"

    "I needed
some
excuse to get you up here," she said, taking a step toward me. "I wasn't sure if you liked me, but the way you looked at me in the elevator…"

    "I guess I'm not subtle." But I
was
lucky.

    "That's okay. Games can be fun, but there's nothing wrong with the direct approach, either." She stepped in close and kissed me, putting the palm of her hand on my chest, over my heartbeat. I kissed back, my body responding in that wonderful way that bodies do.

    "Mmm," I said after a moment. "So you're a student of human sexuality, huh?"

    "Sure," she said. "But there are some things you can't get from a book."

    Afterwards, as she brewed tea in her kitchen and I sat, feeling loose-limbed and glorious, on a stool at the counter, she said, "Look, I don't want you to get the wrong idea…" She had her back turned to me, and that was too bad, because she wasn't saying anything she couldn't say to my face.

    "Don't worry," I said. "It was what it was. And it was very nice. But I don't think it gives me a claim on you. Which doesn't mean I'd object if you wanted to do it
again."

    Now she turned, and she looked relieved. "Sometimes I just want to be with somebody. You seem nice, and
god
you're pretty, but I'm not looking for a boyfriend or anything right now. I'm so busy with school, you know?"

    That gave me a little pang, I admit, because of course I wanted to be seen as irresistible boyfriend material, even though I
know
I'm no more constant than a bank of fog blowing through. But she was being honest with me, at least. A lot of bullshit in this world could be avoided if people just told the truth, however inconvenient it might be. And maybe, if I could get rid of the nastiness on this block, I could settle down here, and become more constant, and win Sadie over. I was pretty low-maintenance. Hadn't I rambled around this world enough? Maybe it was time to pick a home and stick with it for a while.

    I had an idea about the source of the badness here now, anyway. It's not like I'm a great detective or anything, but I can see how things fit together, when it's right in front of my face. I wondered why no one else had ever figured it out.

    "Want to go out again sometime?" I asked. "I haven't taken in much of the local scene yet."

    "Sure," she said, placing a cup of steaming tea on the counter before me. She looked me right in the eye. "We can do something this weekend. Or we could just stay in all weekend having sex. I've got toys in my bedroom I didn't even
show
you."

    My heart went pitter-pat, and other parts of me did other things. Having a body was so wonderful, I wasn't sure what had ever possessed me to leave my last one.

    Ike Train's back yard had a nine foot wooden privacy fence, overgrown with vines that made it seem even higher. The lock on his gate was nothing special, though, so I popped it open pretty easily that night. He had a big garden back there, lots of tomato plants, the earth all churned up. I checked his back windows again - still dark, and he was probably deeply asleep, like the rest of the block. I found a shovel and a likely mound of earth, near the back fence, and started digging. I didn't worry about Ike waking up and noticing me. I wasn't going to get noticed unless I wanted to be. I was in a body, but that didn't mean I'd given up all my powers.

    Ike had dug a good grave. I went about five feet down before I found the girl, wrapped in cloth sacks and sprinkled liberally with some kind of lye-based drain cleaner, though not enough to dissolve her body completely - that takes a
lot
of lye, even more than a plumber would have on hand. She was mostly just bones, at this point. I couldn't unwrap the burlap completely, because the lye could have burned my skin; that was one disadvantage to having a body. How many other girls were buried here? Lonely women with no families, women with drug problems who jumped at the cheap rents in the apartment house on the corner, who opened their doors to that nice plumber Ike Train and found out he wasn't so nice after all. I wondered if he lured them to his house, or somehow took their bodies out of the apartment building. I couldn't imagine how he'd gotten away with something like this - in a city, someone is
always
awake, and witnesses are a problem - but serial killers can be lucky motherfuckers.

    Well, Ike didn't have good luck anymore. Now he had me instead.

    "Here's my problem, Ike," I said, after he woke up, and realized he couldn't free himself. He tried to yell at me, but he was gagged pretty good, and still woozy from the chemicals I'd knocked him out with, and it was just muffled noise. I leaned back in the chair I'd dragged over by the couch where he was bound. "I could just call the cops, and let them know about the bodies in the backyard. I can be really convincing, especially if the cops are from around here. You'd get arrested and put away for a long time. But that would be bad for the neighbourhood. People here don't realize there's a monster like you in their midst. Everybody knows you. You've been in most of the
houses
on this street at once time or another. To find out you've been killing women and burying them in your back garden…" I shook my head. "Most of these people wouldn't trust anyone ever again. There'd be news reporters all over. Property values would plummet. People would move away. I'd hate to see that happen."

    He made furious noises. I removed the gag. He tried to bite off my fingers. I couldn't blame him. "Make a fuss and I'll knock you out again," I said. "You've got lots of nice chemicals under your sink I can mix up."

    His voice was low and intense. "You don't understand. This used to be a nice place, when I was a kid. Now all that trash lives on this street. Spies, chinks, whores and junkies. Jabbering away in Spanish and Chinese, trying to cadge change off people so they can by drugs, all that bullshit. This whole place is a toilet now. I wish I could flush them all."

    I raised my eyebrow. "What about black folks? Want to flush us too?"

    "I got nothing against black people," he said, wounded, as if I'd slandered him. "And there's decent Chinese people, like your aunt, and some Mexicans I don't mind, but the kind of garbage that rents rooms down at the castle apartments, they're just
worthless,
they-"

    "So killing them has got nothing to do with your sexual gratification, then?"

    "That's sick," Ike spat. "You're disgusting. I do what I do to keep this neighbourhood
nice,
to keep it safe. A piece of shit like you couldn't possibly understand that."

    "You're no prize yourself, Ike. You know it's all over now, right? You're finished."

    "You can't mess with me," he said, his eyes shining, as they had when I'd spoken to his deep down parts before. "This is
my
place."

    "It's my place now. And you don't have a home here anymore." I put the rag of chemicals over his face again until he passed out.

    I held a hammer in my hand with every intention of caving in Ike Train's skull, then disposing of his body out in the desert somewhere, but I couldn't do it. He was a
person.
I'd expected a monster, and yes, Ike was a monster too, but I couldn't see past his humanity. In my more natural state, without a body, I would have found executing Ike Train as simple as flicking an ant off a tablecloth. But for now I was wearing a human form, and Ike was one of my tribe, albeit a crazy, dangerous one. I couldn't smash his head in, not if I wanted to keep functioning in this body. Such an act would tear me apart. I put the hammer down.