Best New Horror 27

by Stephen Jones

  But when I returned, Kaayakire showed me just how deep those dead slaves had sunk their roots in Riverside’s heart: deep enough to strangle, to infiltrate, to poison, all this while lying dormant under a fallow crust. To sow death-seeds in every part of what the de Russys called home, however surface-comfortable, waiting patient for a second chance to flower.

  Inside, under a sagging double weight of floor-turned-roof, fifty years’ worth of mould spikes up the nose straight into the brain while shadows scatter from your twinned lights, same as silt in dark water. You hear the rain like someone else’s pulse, drumming hard, sodden. Tully glances ‘round, frowning. “Don’t like it,” he says. “Been more damage since my last time here: there, and there. Structural collapse.”

  “The columns will keep it up, though, no? They seem—”

  “Saggy like an elephant’s butt, that’s what they seem…but hell, your money. Got some idea where best to look?” You shake your head, drawing a sigh. “Well, perfect. Guess we better start with what’s eye-level; go from there.”

  As the two of you search, he asks about that old business, the gory details. For certainly, people gossip, here as everywhere else, yet the matter of the de Russys is something most locals flinch from, as though they know it to be somehow—not sacred, perhaps, but significant, in its own grotesque way. Tainted and tainting, by turns.

  “Denis de Russy brought Marceline home and six months later, Frank Marsh came to visit,” you explain. “He had known them both as friends, introduced them, watched them form un ménage. Denis considered him an artistic genius, but eccentric. To his father, he wrote that Marsh had ‘a knowledge of anatomy which borders on the uncanny.’ Antoine de Russy heard odd stories about Marsh, his family in Massachusetts, la ville d’Innsmouth…but he trusted his son, trusted that Denis trusted. So, he opened his doors.”

  “But Denis goes travelling and Marsh starts in to painting Missus de Russy with no clothes on, maybe more. That part right, or not?”

  “That was the rumour, yes. It’s not unlikely Marceline and Marsh were intimates, from before; he’d painted her twice already, taken those photos. A simple transaction. But this was…different, or so Antoine de Russy claimed.”

  “How so?”

  You shrug. “Marsh said there was something inside her he wanted to make other people see.”

  “Like what, her soul?”

  “Peut-être. Or something real, maybe—hidden. Comme un, eh, hmmm…” You pause, thinking. “When you swallow eggs or something swims up inside, in Africa, South America: it eats your food, makes you thin, lives inside you. And when doctors suspect, they have to tempt it out—say ‘aah,’ you know, tease it to show itself, like a…snake from a hole…”

  Tully stops, mouth twitching. “A tapeworm? Boy must’ve been trippin’, ma’am. Too much absinthe, for sure.”

  Another shrug. “Antoine de Russy wrote to Denis, told him to come home before things progressed further, but heard nothing. Days later, he found Marsh and Marceline in Marsh’s rooms, hacked with knives, Marceline without her wig, or her, eh—hair—”

  “Been scalped? Whoo.” Tully shakes his head. “Then Denis kills himself and the old man goes crazy; that’s how they tell it ‘round here. When they talk about it at all, which ain’t much.”

  “In the testimony I read, de Russy said he hid Marsh and Marceline, buried them in lime. He told Denis to run, but Denis hanged himself instead, in one of the old huts—or something strangled him, a big black snake. And then the house burnt down.”

  “Aunt Sophy’s snake, they call it.”

  “A snake or a braid, oui, c’est ca. Le cheveaux de Marceline.” But here you stop, examining something at your feet. “But wait, what is—? Over here, please. I need your light.”

  Tully steps over, slips, curses; down on one knee in the mud, cap cracking worryingly, his torch rapping on the item in question. “Shit! Look like a…box, or something. Here.” As he hands it up to you, however, it’s now his own turn to squint, scrubbing mud from his eyes—something’s caught his notice, there, half-wedged behind a caryatid, extruding from what used to be the wall. He gives it a tug and watches it come slithering out.

  “Qu’est-ce que c’est, la?“

  “Um…think this might be what you lookin’ for, ma’am. Some of, anyhow.”

  The wet rag in his hand has seen better days, definitely. Yet, for one who’s studied poor Frank Marsh’s work—how ridiculous such a thing sounds, even to me!—it must be unmistakable, nevertheless: a warped canvas, neglect-scabrous, all morbid content and perverted geometry done in impossible, liminal colours. The body I barely recognise, splayed out on its altar-throne, one bloated hand offering a cup of strange liquor; looks more the way it might now were there anything still unscattered, not sifted through dirt and water or filtered by a thousand roots, drawn off to feed Riverside’s trees and weeds with hateful power. The face is long-gone, bullet-perforated, just as that skittish Northerner claimed. But the rest, that coiling darkness, it lies (I lie) on—

  You make a strange noise at the sight, gut-struck: “Oh, quel dommage! What a waste, a sinful waste…”

  “Damn, yeah. Not much to go on, huh?”

  “Enough to begin with, certainement. I know experts, people who’d pay for the opportunity to restore something so unique, so precious. But why, why—ah, I will never understand. Stupid superstition!”

  Which is when the box in your hands jumps, ever so slightly, as though something inside it’s woken up. Makes a little hollow rap, like knocking.

  As I’ve said, little seeker, I don’t know you—barely know Tully, for all I might recognise his precedents. Though I suppose what I do know might be just enough to feel bad for what must happen to you and him, both, were I any way inclined to.

  Frank’s painting is ruined, like everything else, but what’s inside the box is pristine, inviolable. When my father-in-law disinterred us days after the murders, too drunk to remember whether or not Denis had actually done what he feared, he found it wound ‘round Frank’s corpse, crushing him in its embrace, and threw burning lamp-oil on it, setting his own house afire. Then fled straight to Kaayakire’s shack, calling her slave-name like the madman he’d doubtless become: Damn you, Sophy, an’ that Marse Clooloo o’ yours…damn you, you hellish ol’ nigger-woman! Damn you for knowin’ what she was, that Frog whore, an’ not warnin’ me…’m I your Massa, or ain’t I? Ain’t I always treated you well…?

  Only to find the same thing waiting for him, longer still and far more many-armed, still smouldering and black as ever—less a snake now than an octopus, a hundred-handed net. The weight of every dead African whose blood went to grow the de Russys’ fortunes, falling on him at once.

  My cousin’s father, my half-uncle, my mother’s brother: all of these and none of them, as she and I were nothing to them—to him. Him I killed by letting his son kill me and set me free.

  I have let myself be dead far too long since then, however, it occurs to me. Indulged myself, who should’ve thought only to indulge them, the ancestors whose scalps anchor my skull, grow my crowning glory. Their blood, my blood—Tully Ferris’ blood, blood of the de Russys, of owners and owned alike—cries out from the ground. Your blood, too, now.

  Inside the box, which you cannot keep yourself from opening, is my Tanit-Isis wig, that awful relic: heavy and sweet-smelling, soft with oils, though kinked at root and tip. You lift it to your head, eyes dazed, and breathe its odour in, deeply; hear Tully cry out, but only faintly, as the hair of every other dead slave buried at Riverside begins to poke its way through floors-made-walls, displace rubble and clutter, twine ‘round cracked and half-mashed columnary like ivy, crawl up from the muck like sodden spiders. My wig feels their energies gather and plumps itself accordingly, bristling in every direction at once, even as these subsidiary creatures snare Tully like a rabbit and force their knotted follicles inside his veins, sucking de Russy blood the way the lamia once did, the astriyah, demons called up not by Sol
omon, but Sheba. While it runs its own roots down into your scalp and cracks your skull along its fused fontanelles to reach the grey-pink brain within, injecting everything which ever made me me like some strange drug, and wiping you away like dust.

  I would feel bad for your sad demise, little seeker, I’m almost sure; Tully’s, even, his ancestry aside. But only if I were anyone but who I am.

  Outside, the rain recedes, letting in daylight: bright morning, blazing gold-green through drooping leaves to call steam up from the sodden ground, raise cicatrice-blisters of moisture from Riverside’s walls. The fields glitter like spider-webs. Emerging into it, I smile for the first time in so very long: lips, teeth, muscles flexing. Myself again, for all I wear another’s flesh.

  Undefeated, Maman. Victory. I am your revenge and theirs. No one owns me, not anymore, never again. I am…my own.

  And so, my contract fulfilled, I walk away: into this fast, new, magical world, the future, trailing a thousand dark locks of history behind.

  NEIL GAIMAN

  BLACK DOG

  NEIL GAIMAN is the author of more than thirty books and graphic novels for adults and children, including American Gods, Stardust, Coraline, The Graveyard Book and Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances.

  His most recent novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, won several awards, including being voted Book of the Year in the National Book Awards 2013.

  Gaiman’s work has been adapted for film, TV and radio. He has written scripts for Doctor Who, collaborated with authors and illustrators including Terry Pratchett, Dave McKean and Chris Riddell, and The Sandman is established as one of the classic graphic novels.

  “We first met Baldur ‘Shadow’ Moon in American Gods,” the author explains, “in which he gets caught up in a war between gods in America. In ‘The Monarch of the Glen’, a story in the Fragile Things collection, Shadow found himself a bouncer at a party in northern Scotland. He is on his way back to America, but in this story has only made it as far as Derbyshire’s Peak District.

  “I want to thank my friends Colin Greenland and Susanna Clarke for taking me to the Three Stags Head pub in Wardlow, which, cat, lurchers and all, inspired the opening, and to Colin for telling me that Black Shuck walked The Lane, when I asked him about black dogs.

  “There is one last story to be told, about what happens to Shadow when he reaches London. And then, if he survives that, it will be time to send him back to America. So much has changed, after all, since he went away.”

  There were ten tongues within one head

  And one went out to fetch some bread,

  To feed the living and the dead.

  —Old Riddle

  I. The Bar Guest

  OUTSIDE THE PUB it was raining cats and dogs.

  Shadow was still not entirely convinced that he was in a pub. True, there was a tiny bar at the back of the room, with bottles behind it and a couple of the huge taps you pulled, and there were several high tables and people were drinking at the tables, but it all felt like a room in somebody’s house. The dogs helped reinforce that impression. It seemed to Shadow that everybody in the pub had a dog except for him.

  “What kind of dogs are they?” Shadow asked, curious. The dogs reminded him of greyhounds, but they were smaller and seemed saner, more placid and less high-strung than the greyhounds he had encountered over the years.

  “Lurchers,” said the pub’s landlord, coming out from behind the bar. He was carrying a pint of beer that he had poured for himself. “Best dogs. Poacher’s dogs. Fast, smart, lethal.” He bent down, scratched a chestnut-and-white brindled dog behind the ears. The dog stretched and luxuriated in the ear-scratching. It did not look particularly lethal, and Shadow said so.

  The landlord, his hair a mop of grey and orange, scratched at his beard reflectively. “That’s where you’d be wrong,” he said. “I walked with his brother last week, down Cumpsy Lane. There’s a fox, a big red Reynard, pokes his head out of a hedge, no more than twenty metres down the road, then, plain as day, saunters out onto the track. Well, Needles sees it, and he’s off after it like the clappers. Next thing you know, Needles has his teeth in Reynard’s neck, and one bite, one hard shake, and it’s all over.”

  Shadow inspected Needles, a grey dog sleeping by the little fireplace. He looked harmless too. “So what sort of a breed is a lurcher? It’s an English breed, yes?”

  “It’s not actually a breed,” said a white-haired woman without a dog who had been leaning on a nearby table. “They’re crossbred for speed, stamina. Sighthound, greyhound, collie.”

  The man next to her held up a finger. “You must understand,” he said, cheerfully, “that there used to be laws about who could own pure-bred dogs. The local folk couldn’t, but they could own mongrels. And lurchers are better and faster than pedigree dogs.” He pushed his spectacles up his nose with the tip of his forefinger. He had a mutton-chop beard, brown-flecked with white.

  “Ask me, all mongrels are better than pedigree-anything,” said the woman. “It’s why America is such an interesting country. Filled with mongrels.” Shadow was not certain how old she was. Her hair was white, but she seemed younger than her hair.

  “Actually, darling,” said the man with the mutton chops, in his gentle voice, “I think you’ll find that the Americans are keener on pedigree dogs than the British. I met a woman from the American Kennel Club, and honestly, she scared me. I was scared.”

  “I wasn’t talking about dogs, Ollie,” said the woman. “I was talking about…Oh, never mind.”

  “What are you drinking?” asked the landlord.

  There was a hand-written piece of paper taped to the wall by the bar telling customers not to order a lager “as a punch in the face often offends”.

  “What’s good and local?” asked Shadow, who had learned that this was mostly the wisest thing to say.

  The landlord and the woman had various suggestions as to which of the various locals beers and ciders were good. The little mutton-chopped man interrupted them to point out that in his opinion good was not the avoidance of evil, but something more positive than that: it was making the world a better place. Then he chuckled, to show that he was only joking and that he knew that the conversation was really only about what to drink.

  The beer the landlord poured for Shadow was dark and very bitter. He was not certain that he liked it. “What is it?”

  “It’s called Black Dog,” said the woman. “I’ve heard people say it was named after the way you feel after you’ve had one too many.”

  “Like Churchill’s moods,” said the little man.

  “Actually, the beer is named after a local dog,” said a younger woman. She was wearing an olive-green sweater, and standing against the wall. “But not a real one. Semi-imaginary.”

  Shadow looked down at Needles, then hesitated, “Is it safe to scratch his head?” he asked, remembering the fate of the fox.

  “‘Course it is,” said the white-haired woman. “He loves it. Don’t you?”

  “Well. He practically had that tosser from Glossop’s finger off,” said the landlord. There was admiration mixed with warning in his voice.

  “I think he was something in local government,” said the woman. “And I’ve always thought that there’s nothing wrong with dogs biting them. Or VAT inspectors.”

  The woman in the green sweater moved over to Shadow. She was not holding a drink. She had dark, short hair, and a crop of freckles that spattered her nose and cheeks. She looked at Shadow. “You aren’t in local government, are you?”

  Shadow shook his head. He said, “I’m kind of a tourist.” It was not actually untrue. He was travelling, anyway.

  “You’re Canadian?” said the mutton-chop man.

  “American,” said Shadow. “But I’ve been on the road for a while now.”

  “Then,” said the white-haired woman, “you aren’t actually a tourist. Tourists turn up, see the sights and leave.”

  Shadow shrugged, smiled, and leaned
down. He scratched the landlord’s lurcher on the back of its head.

  “You’re not a dog person, are you?” asked the dark-haired woman.

  “I’m not a dog person,” said Shadow.

  Had he been someone else, someone who talked about what was happening inside his head, Shadow might have told her that his wife had owned dogs when she was younger, and sometimes called Shadow puppy because she wanted a dog she could not have. But Shadow kept things on the inside. It was one of the things he liked about the British: even when they wanted to know what was happening on the inside, they did not ask. The world on the inside remained the world on the inside. His wife had been dead for three years, now.

  “If you ask me,” said the man with the mutton chops, “people are either dog people or cat people. So would you then consider yourself a cat person?”

  Shadow reflected. “I don’t know. We never had pets when I was a kid, we were always on the move. But—”

  “I mention this,” the man continued, “because our host also has a cat, which you might wish to see.”

  “Used to be out here, but we moved it to the back room,” said the landlord, from behind the bar.

  Shadow wondered how the man could follow the conversation so easily while also taking people’s meal orders and serving their drinks. “Did the cat upset the dogs?” he asked.

  Outside, the rain redoubled. The wind moaned, and whistled, and then howled. The log fire burning in the little fireplace coughed and spat.

  “Not in the way you’re thinking,” said the landlord. “We found it when we knocked through into the room next door, when we needed to extend the bar.” The man grinned. “Come and look.”

  Shadow followed the man into the room next door. The mutton-chop man and the white-haired woman came with them, walking a little behind Shadow.