Best New Horror 27

by Stephen Jones

  Her toes bounced gently off the toes of the dead man.

  Her revulsion was immediate. Serena scrabbled back onto the sand. Every part of her dripped, even the parts that hadn’t been in the water. She was sweating heavily. Shaking. She got to her feet and started to run. Her sandals weren’t very well-equipped for this sort of business, so eventually she tossed them aside and ran on her bare feet the way she had when she was twelve years old. The rocks cut her feet to ribbons but she kept running.

  “Mom,” she screamed, “Mom!”

  No one answered her.

  “Mom!”

  Still no one. She squeezed her eyes shut.

  “They’re all dead! You can come out now!”

  But for one brief second she thought she heard something in reply, something like heavy breathing, and she almost wept in relief. That was it then. Her mother had just been waiting for them to die, and now that they were gone she would reveal herself and take Serena home.

  “Mom!” she screamed again.

  In the silence that came after her screaming she realised it wasn’t heavy breathing at all. It was the sound of the waves beating against the shoreline, and it wasn’t even that sound. It was the sound of the silence between the beats. The sound of the great lung of the ocean inhaling.

  Her own lungs were heavy now. The black air was too thick to breathe properly. She couldn’t get enough oxygen and so, slowly, her frantic pace stumbled to a crawl. She wandered directionless, completely adrift.

  Then there were lights in the distance—like a constellation, some sort of hope in the darkness. She tried to remember what else she had read in the guidebook about Carcosa. Who else lived on the island? What language did they speak? She couldn’t remember. She hadn’t cared at the time. She hadn’t even wanted to come here, not to fucking Carcosa, dead Carcosa, lost Carcosa…

  She knew she was leaving a bloody set of footprints behind her, but she didn’t care. There were lights ahead. That was something.

  Lights and then sounds. A series of dense bass notes that reverberated through the rock, shook her ankles, shook her knees, sent her pelvis swinging.

  She hadn’t expected to find a party here. In fact, it was just about the last thing she had expected to find, but even from a distance, she could recognise the pattern of the flashing lights, the way the earth shook and jived.

  Something about it all—the loss of her mother, the horror of the dead bodies, those dark, insectoid stars—began to crack her up, and between the cracks the single word “Party!“ rose out of her subconscious. Instinct kicked in. Even though she was soaked from the waist down and barefoot, there was a subtle but electric transformation taking place. She knew it. This was where she was supposed to be. This was always the place she was supposed to be. Maybe it was fucking Carcosa, but it was also fucking Carcosa, baby, or it could be—she thought—it could be, just like Mykonos, just like Paris, everywhere had a nightlife, right?

  The music was loud, and she couldn’t understand the language of the people around her. That didn’t matter. What mattered was the way she smiled, that glow she had, how she could make soaked cut-offs seem like that’s the way they were supposed to be worn. She glinted and glimmered in the darkness. She was like a gem.

  “Hey,” she said to the dark-haired man at the bar. He had long hair and teeth white like bleached bone. His arms were ripped and bulging, and for one brief moment the shape of his muscles reminded her of the pockets coming out of the dead man’s pants, filled up with air, bulbous. She didn’t care though. She let her finger touch his finger. She paid with the dead man’s money, which turned out to be hundred dollar bills. That didn’t matter because the bartender said she didn’t need to pay anyway.

  “Fuck it,” she said, flashing a smile at him. “It’s a tip.”

  She went out onto the dance floor, trailing blood-stained footprints behind her. Her feet slid, and she made that seem cool too. Pretty soon there were men all around her, exactly the way she wanted there to be. One of them was pressing up against her from behind. She could feel his erection pressing against her ass. His hands touched her wrist. His hands touched her neck.

  “See, I come back,” he said, and Serena recognised the voice, the slight hiss of it. Nameless the Sailor. He had come back for her after all. Fucking perfect. Everything would be all right. This was all as it was supposed to be.

  “What happened to everyone?” she asked him.

  “Threw them overboard,” he said and started laughing. She couldn’t tell if he was serious or not. She liked the feel of him against her, and she pressed herself hard against his crotch. He smelled like cigarettes. He looked dirty, but dirty in a kind of hot way.

  “Why did you do that?” Serena asked him over her shoulder. She was trying hard to concentrate, but something inside her was heating up like a pot with the lid clamped down, first steam frothing at the edges, then the hissing as it hit the metal plate and vaporised instantly. That’s how she felt. She was the pot. She was the boiling water. She was changing inside.

  “The cameras,” he said, still smiling, “you know, click click.” His teeth bit together as he made the noises.

  “They were doing it wrong, huh?” she whispered, and she knew she was onto something there. Them with their stupid cameras. Their fat, sausage fingers, their eyes wanting to devour Carcosa, their disappointment…

  “Wrong.” He brought his mouth close to her ear and the way he said it made it seem sexy. He was sliding his hands down her hips, underneath the belt of her jeans. “Ha.”

  Serena arched her hips against him. It seemed as if he was everywhere now and the feel of his hands against her made her wet. She wanted to fuck him. She wanted to fuck him oh so badly but whenever she turned he turned too and so they were dancing like that, movement for movement as if they were already fucking and she just hadn’t noticed when they started.

  “And my mother?” she managed to ask him, the breath coming like liquid out of her mouth.

  “Not her,” he said. “Not your mother. Come.”

  Suddenly his arms were like cabling and he was leading her off the dance floor. She stumbled, big smears of blood painted the tiles, but no one else seemed to notice. When she looked behind herself she could see every place she had been. She could see the pattern of her dancing, and where Nameless had stood behind her. The sight was shocking. It pulled her back into herself. She grew afraid of him, his gargantuan presence, larger than life. It was as if he slipped out of his body and into something more suited to himself. Reverse evolution. He looked as if he had only recently crawled his way out of the ocean.

  But it was not only him. It was everyone. They were massive, towering creatures with slab-like faces and jutting jaws, composed of a soft jelly that shook and quivered to the music. Their bodies glistened. They left their own trail as they moved, thin threads of silk that criss-crossed the stonework. They were beautiful in the way that strangers are beautiful, soft-shelled creatures.

  Here it was, the filthy romance of the world. Here was everything. Everything.

  For a brief instant she wanted to touch them: wanted it painfully, wanted it more deeply than she had ever wanted anything before in her life. They had stripped her down to pure craving. The air was hot in her lungs, everything was hot, and she knew how easy it would be to strip off her shorts, her soaked top, to move naked amongst them. To feel their bodies pushed up against her, the raw, manic energy of it.

  Their bodies were so soft, softer even than the bodies of the tourists floating in the water. Serena did not know where they had come from, but she knew, instinctively, that they were weak. She knew this because she was good at sensing weakness. She knew it the way her mother knew it. She knew they were reaching for her the way she had reached for her mother’s hand, fumbling around in the darkness, wanting someone to hold. And knowing that made her powerful. It made her disdainful. It made her hate them a little bit for being so fucking weak that they would want her. They were as soft damageable
as newborn’s skull.

  Nameless tugged her forward.

  To see her mother.

  To see her mother now.

  This was what her mother had wanted. This. Carcosa. This was what she had been looking for all this time.

  She loved these fucking things.

  “Your mother?” said Nameless, but Serena could feel that his grip had grown spongy. She brushed it off without any problem at all. “Please?” he looked hurt. Bewildered. A kicked puppy.

  “Just fuck right off, would you?” Serena said. “My mother’s fucking dead.”

  Serena followed the trail of her blood away from the party.

  Eventually the noises grew quiet around her. The lights grew dim. As midnight devoured the rocks and pillars, the crumbling foundations, Serena came to the shore. The bodies were still there. A whole crowd of them had gathered. They made her feel worshipped, the way they clustered around her. She decided she liked them better like that. She liked them better than she had liked them while they had been alive. What a fucking drag they had been then.

  She gathered up the cameras one by one. Most of the cameras were busted or drenched. A few shed sparks when she clicked the power buttons. Only one worked, it was practically antique, mechanical. There were canisters of film, little plastic waterproof jars, tucked away. Serena had never used a camera like this, but it felt right, somehow, holding this ancient thing, spilling its guts out. She wanted to know what it was they had seen. What had drawn them to this place. She peered at the frames one by one. She expected to see the crumbling rocks. Stupid German faces smiling blandly into the camera, dumb piggy eyes, not knowing how close they were to death, how it would be such a small push to send them overboard…

  She laughed at what she saw. Just fucking laughed.

  Night washed in. The darkness was nearly complete. Serena sat down heavily amidst the stones and the shells, and, making a necklace of the film, one long winding ribbon of pure black, she settled down to wait for the light to find her.

  NICHOLAS ROYLE

  THE LARDER

  NICHOLAS ROYLE has won three British Fantasy Awards. He is the author of seven novels, including Counterparts, Antwerp, Regicide and First Novel, and a short story collection, Mortality. He has also edited twenty anthologies and is series editor of Best British Short Stories for Salt Publishing.

  A senior lecturer in creative writing at the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University, and head judge of the annual Manchester Fiction Prize, he also runs Nightjar Press, publishing signed, limited-edition chapbooks.

  Recent stories have appeared in Dead Letters (Titan Books), Being Dad (Tangent) and Stories (PowWow Festival of Writing). His latest publication is In Camera (Negative Press London), a collaboration with artist David Gledhill.

  “This story was commissioned by Ellen Wiles for Ark,” explains the author, “an ‘experimental project to push the boundaries of live literature into immersive theatre and live art’. I performed it at ‘A Literary Bestiary’ at Swiss Cottage Library, northwest London, in collaboration with flautist and project leader Ellen Wiles, who played excerpts from Messiaen’s ‘Le Merle Noir’ during natural breaks in the reading. It was later published in The 2nd Spectral Book of Horror Stories edited by Mark Morris.”

  NOT LONG AFTER we got together, she mentioned that when she was a child her older sister had taken her treasured copy of the Observer’s Book of Birds and destroyed it. She could still picture the two thrushes on the cover.

  I tried some second-hand bookshops, but could only find a later edition, so, although I knew it would be easy to locate online, I decided to give her my own, featuring on the dustjacket what I knew, more precisely, to be a pair of fieldfares. I had bought it second-hand a year earlier, having decided to start collecting the Observer’s books, but only those of a particular vintage, reissues from the late 1950s and early ‘60s.

  A week after I had given it to her, I found myself briefly on my own in her kitchen and happened to spot the book lying on the worktop. I picked it up and noticed that the front jacket flap had been inserted between two pages—between the garden warbler and the Dartford warbler—like a bookmark.

  I heard the creak of a loose floorboard on the landing outside the kitchen and immediately put the book down again and knelt to get the milk out of the fridge. As she entered the kitchen, I saw her eyes flick to the book momentarily.

  “Cup of tea?” I offered.

  “Thanks.”

  While the kettle was boiling, I visited the bathroom. I heard her leave the kitchen. When I came out, I saw that the book had gone from the worktop.

  As I was pouring the tea, she re-entered the kitchen and stood behind me. I turned around.

  She was standing very close. I handed her one of the mugs.

  “Thank you,” she said as she took a sip.

  “You’re welcome.”

  She didn’t back away.

  “I like your flat,” I said.

  “Good,” she said. “I want you to feel at home.”

  She took another sip of her tea and I tried my own, but it was too hot.

  “Where do those doors lead?” I asked, inclining my head towards two doors off a narrow vestibule leading to the bathroom.

  “The green door leads outside,” she said. “Back yard. There are steps down. It doesn’t get much use over the winter.”

  “It’s spring now,” I pointed out.

  “Shall we go and sit in the sitting room where we can be more comfortable?” she said.

  “Okay,” I said and followed her, with a backwards glance at the other door, which had been stripped and coated in wood stain.

  The walls of the sitting room were bare apart from a framed pastel of heathland dotted with clumps of gorse.

  “I know I’ve asked you before,” I said. “Is that of somewhere in particular?”

  “The New Forest,” she said.

  “Ah yes, that’s where you’re from, somewhere down there.”

  Later, she was in the kitchen preparing a snack for us to have before we went out for a drink. She sang to herself as I listened from the bedroom. She had a lovely, rippling singing voice with just an occasional harsh, almost scolding, note to it. I saw the book by her side of the bed and picked it up. The jacket flap remained in the same place. This uncommon little warbler is the only resident bird of its family, I read from the description of the Dartford warbler. It is found only in a few southern counties. I scanned down the page. HAUNT. Gorse bushes and copses. Then, hearing her approaching from the kitchen, I put the book back down, making sure the flap stayed in the same place.

  We saw each other only once a week, as we lived in different cities. On a Monday or Tuesday, I would catch a train and we would spend the night together.

  The following week, I arrived in the afternoon while she was still at work. I made a pot of tea and while it was brewing I looked idly around the kitchen, pretending to myself I wasn’t looking for the Observer’s Book of Birds. I looked at the door to the back yard; it was actually painted the greenish blue of a small number of British birds’ eggs—heron, dunnock, redstart, whinchat. (I had recently acquired a fine copy of The Observer’s Book of Birds’ Eggs.) There was a key in the lock. I looked at the door next to it, which did not have a key in its lock, but then maybe it wasn’t locked.

  I poured out the tea, then went over and grasped the handle of the wood-stained door. I turned the handle. The door was locked. I moved to my right and unlocked the greenish blue door. Wooden steps led down to another door at the bottom. I went down, unlocked that door and found myself in a yard no more than six feet square. There was a little round table and two chairs. It was a fine day, warm enough to sit outside. I went back upstairs for my tea.

  There wasn’t much else in the yard. A washing line hung down from a hook. Its other end lay coiled on the concrete flags next to a hefty stone around which I noticed a number of smashed snails’ shells. I sat and drank my tea until the sun disappe
ared behind a cloud and I went back inside.

  When she came home we went out to the pub. I watched her as she walked to the bar for our second round. She was wearing a deceptively simple dress that flattered her. She had wide hips and narrow ankles; her bare arms tapered to slender wrists and long, elegant fingers that rested on the edge of the bar the way they might settle on a piano keyboard.

  I smiled at her as she returned with our drinks.

  Later, in the flat, I leaned back against the kitchen sink and she pressed into me. I threaded my arms around her waist and kissed her.

  “I sat in the yard this afternoon,” I said.

  “Really?” she said, returning my kiss.

  “Yeah. It’s nice.”

  She laughed.

  “What’s that other door?” I asked, indicating with a nod the one I meant.

  “That’s the larder,” she said, pulling away from me and taking both my hands in hers. “Shall we go to bed?”

  “I can’t think of a good reason not to,” I said and let her lead me out of the kitchen. I had only a very limited view from behind, but her expression looked strangely fixed and almost alien as her sharp features cut through the still air. We both in turn stepped on the loose floorboard.

  In the middle of the night I woke with a pounding head. She stirred as I got up, but her breathing remained slow and steady.

  I found some paracetamol in the bathroom and gulped two down with a glass of water. Sensing that I would struggle to get back to sleep, I went into the sitting room. On the coffee table was the Observer’s Book of Birds. I picked it up. There was enough light from the streetlights, the blinds having not been lowered. The flap had been moved on by a single page to the thrushes—mistle thrush and song thrush. My eyes moved over the text until they snagged on a short paragraph towards the bottom of the page devoted to the song thrush: FOOD. Worms, slugs, snails, grubs and insects; also berries. The bird smashes the snail-shells on a stone known as an “anvil”.

  The following week the papers were talking about a heatwave. She texted me, saying did I fancy meeting her by the canal and we could walk back up towards her neighbourhood, perhaps getting something to eat.