Poe's children: the new horror : an anthology - By Peter Straub Page 0,28

drunk old man sprawled, surrounded by empty bottles and rubbish. He stared blearily up at Jane as she approached.

“Here,” she said. She bent and dropped the five-pound notes into his scabby hand.

“God bless you, darlin’.” He coughed, his eyes focusing on neither Jane nor the notes. “God bless you.”

She turned and walked briskly back towards the canal path. There were few waste bins in Camden Town, and so each day trash accumulated in rank heaps along the path, beneath streetlights, in vacant alleys. Street cleaners and sweeping machines then daily cleared it all away again: like elves, Jane thought. As she walked along the canal path she dropped the shoes in one pile of rubbish, tossed the sweater alongside a single high-heeled shoe in the market, stuffed the underwear and socks into a collapsing cardboard box filled with rotting lettuce, and left the jeans beside a stack of papers outside an unopened newsagent’s shop. The wallet she tied into the Sainsbury’s bag and dropped into an overflowing trash bag outside of Boots. Then she retraced her steps, stopping in front of a shop window filled with tatty polyester lingerie in large sizes and boldly artificial-looking wigs: pink afros, platinum blond falls, black-and-white Cruella De Vil tresses.

The door was propped open; Schubert lieder played softly on 32.

Jane stuck her head in and looked around, saw a beefy man behind the register, cashing out. He had orange lipstick smeared around his mouth and delicate silver fish hanging from his ears.

“We’re not open yet. Eleven on Sunday,” he said without looking up.

“I’m just looking.” Jane sidled over to a glass shelf where four wigs sat on Styrofoam heads. One had very glossy black hair in a chin-length flapper bob. Jane tried it on, eyeing herself in a grimy mirror. “How much is this one?”

“Fifteen. But we’re not—”

“Here. Thanks!” Jane stuck a twenty-pound note on the counter and ran from the shop. When she reached the corner she slowed, pirouetted to catch her reflection in a shop window. She stared at herself, grinning, then walked the rest of the way home, exhilarated and faintly dizzy.

Monday morning she went to the zoo to begin her volunteer work. She had mounted the Bhutanitis lidderdalii on a piece of Styrofoam with a piece of paper on it, to keep the butterfly’s legs from becoming embedded in the Styrofoam. She’d softened it first, putting it into a jar with damp paper, removed it, and placed it on the mounting platform, neatly spearing its thorax—a little to the right—with a #2 pin. She propped it carefully on the wainscoting beside the hawkmoth, and left.

She arrived and found her ID badge waiting for her at the staff entrance. It was a clear morning, warmer than it had been for a week; the long hairs on her brow vibrated as though they were wires that had been plucked. Beneath the wig her shaved head felt hot and moist, the first new hairs starting to prickle across her scalp. Her nose itched where her glasses pressed against it. Jane walked, smiling, past the gibbons howling in their habitat and the pygmy hippos floating calmly in their pool, their eyes shut, green bubbles breaking around them like little fish. In front of the Insect Zoo a uniformed woman was unloading sacks of meal from a golf cart.

“Morning,” Jane called cheerfully, and went inside.

She found David Bierce standing in front of a temperature gauge beside a glass cage holding the hissing cockroaches.

“Something happened last night, the damn things got too cold.” He glanced over, handed her a clipboard, and began to remove the top of the gauge. “I called Operations, but they’re at their fucking morning meeting. Fucking computers—”

He stuck his hand inside the control box and flicked angrily at the gauge. “You know anything about computers?”

“Not this kind.” Jane brought her face up to the cage’s glass front. Inside were half a dozen glossy roaches, five inches long and the color of pale maple syrup. They lay, unmoving, near a glass petri dish filled with what looked like damp brown sugar. “Are they dead?”

“Those things? They’re fucking immortal. You could stamp on one and it wouldn’t die. Believe me, I’ve done it.” He continued to fiddle with the gauge, finally sighed, and replaced the lid. “Well, let’s let the boys over in Ops handle it. Come on, I’ll get you started.”

He gave her a brief tour of the lab, opening drawers full of dissecting instruments, mounting platforms, pins; showed her where the food