The Best Horror of the Year – Volume One

Da

"The penguins," Derrick said, engrossed in his rant, "they are birdies like the canaries. They die and people say, 'This is of the global warmings! Stop the global warmings of the factories and the cars and the coal that is burning! The penguins are dying!' And the government says, 'Pay not the attention to these stupid penguins! Don't look at them! They are trouble makers!' And so the governments are putting the penguins in the prisons, you see?"

"Derrick," I said. "I don't know who you are or

what you are"-I could admit this, to myself, at least-"but I am taking my son and leaving. If you attempt to follow me, I will kill you."

"But we have the bargains," Derrick said. "We must set the penguins free, and I will save you the child support."

"No," I said. "We have no bargain."

I expected some reaction, but my words seemed to deflate him somehow. His hands dropped to his sides and he stared at the floor.

I turned away and walked back toward the door of the Reptile House. When I reached the door, I looked back. He was gone.

The security guard's ravaged body no longer lay in the shadow of the door.

I carried my son out of the building and past the statue of a smiling hippopotamus and out the gate. I unlocked the car door and put him in the passenger seat. I pulled the seatbelt across his chest and snapped it into its latch. I got the scraper out of the glove compartment and scraped ice from the windshield. I noticed that the sky was full of cold light, but finding myself in what appeared to be the afternoon of a different day did not strike me as remarkable.

Da

"Dad, who were you talking to?" Da

Victoria was angry. She'd tried to call me on my cell, and when I told her I'd discontinued the service, she said, "If this arrangement is going to work, I need to get ahold of you. The roads are bad. I was worried."

And for a time, I remembered none of this. And why should I remember a thing that never happened? Had it happened, had my son actually disappeared, Victoria and Evil Ed would certainly have refreshed my memory.

I drank more, every day, sometimes passing out in the afternoon, and then getting drunk all over again in the evening.

Evil Ed told me about a drink taking a drink, and it sounded familiar. One time, I woke to find the television on, not unusual in itself, but this time cartoon penguins were tap dancing, and I was filled with improbable terror, caught in the sheets, falling out of bed. Unable to find the remote, I crawled to the television and slapped the power button, saving myself from… from what? Not for the first time, I thought, "Maybe I need to stop drinking."

In the newspaper, a photo of someone named Calvin Oster surprised me with another frisson of déjà vu. He had been a security guard at the Hillary Memorial Zoo in West Orange and, it appeared, a victim of gang violence. That explained it: I had, no doubt, seen him at the zoo and-what an amazing magpie, the mind-recorded his image without knowing it. That did not, however, account for my certainty that no i

Then, one day, somewhere between Thanksgiving and Christmas, somewhere in a stew of bad weather and strangers and a mugging (my own) that I tried to prevent, being too drunk for discretion's better part, I woke in a hospital ward with a bandaged arm and an I.V.

"How am I doing?" I asked a large, truculent nurse wearing green scrubs.

"Depends," she said. "That cut on your arm ain't nothing. But you got bad alcoholism. You been thrashing around considerable, plain out of your mind, and there's an orderly here name of Joshua, real big boy, six feet ten inches. He don't want to come round you. He says you got a demon, need to be exercised."

"What do you think?" I asked.

"I think I should have learned computers, stayed clear of all the misery and blood of this here nursing profession. An alcoholic ain't nothing but a sorry tale unfolding, lessen he gets sober. There's a fellow came in asking about you. I see him sometimes at the meetings they bring here on Tuesdays and Thursdays. He says he'll be back. Hope you don't owe him money."

"Why's that?"

"I wouldn't want to be crosswise of him is all. He got an evil eye on him."

Sure enough, Evil Ed visited me. We went down in an elevator to the second floor and listened to some guy tell his story, how drink had ruined him but then he had embraced the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, sobered up, and was now the president of a bank.

"What did you think about that?" Evil Ed asked.

"I don't know," I said.

"You could do a lot worse than that answer," he said. He said he'd come around some more.

When the hospital discharged me, I started going around to AA meetings with Evil Ed. I drove. Evil Ed said he didn't want to take his car; it might get stolen, whereas no one would covet my ratty Escort, which was true I guess but hurt my feelings.

We went to a lot of AA meetings, traveling around to church basements and storefront clubs. Some of the neighborhoods were rough, and the AA meetings reflected that, with drunks sleeping it off on ratty sofas and old winos trying to steal a couple of bucks from the coffee-money can. One time a furious fight erupted between two members over which of the AA founders was wiser, Dr. Bob or Bill W. Sometimes I was the only white guy in the room, which didn't bother me particularly since I often thought I was the only guy on the planet. There are levels of alienation, and mine was way beyond racial.

I wanted to drink, but I didn't. Evil Ed couldn't always make it to a meeting, and I started going to meetings by myself. I went to a meeting every day, sometimes two, sometimes three. There was a club called "The Into Action Group" that was within walking distance of my apartment, so I went there a lot.

And if I got restless, I could always go down to the bar and talk to Evil Ed. He was almost chatty on the subject of alcoholism.

"Drinking has got consequences," he said. "You get a tattoo when you're drunk, it's still there in the damned morning. I been sober nine years, and people say, 'You should get that tattoo removed or inked up so it's different,' but I say it's a reminder of the consequences of drinking, and anything that reminds me why I don't want to go drinking again is a good thing."

One day I saw a help-wanted sign on the door of a print shop, and I walked in, talked to the manager, and got a job on the graphics side, not quite the art director position I'd left at BC Graphics, but it paid the rent and required me to get up in the morning.

A couple of days before Christmas, Evil Ed's sponsor was celebrating at a big speaker's meeting, and we went and listened to him tell how he'd wound up in AA and how come he hadn't had a drink in thirty-two years. He was a small, India-ink-colored old man with white hair, and he wore a three-piece suit. After the meeting, Evil Ed and I went to a party someone was throwing for him.

I was feeling my usual alienated, awkward self, so I found a place on the sofa, out of the way of all the hilarity. The television was on, and the station was showing an old Jimmy Stewart movie called