Best New Horror 27

by Stephen Jones

  Shadow glanced back into the bar. The dark-haired woman was watching him, and she smiled warmly when he caught her eye.

  The room next door was better lit, larger, and it felt a little less like somebody’s front room. People were sitting at tables, eating. The food looked good and smelled better. The landlord led Shadow to the back of the room, to a dusty glass case.

  “There she is,” said the landlord, proudly.

  The cat was brown, and it looked, at first glance, as if it had been constructed out of tendons and agony. The holes that were its eyes were filled with anger and with pain; the mouth was wide open, as if the creature had been yowling when she was turned to leather.

  “The practice of placing animals in the walls of buildings is similar to the practice of walling up children alive in the foundations of a house you want to stay up,” explained the mutton-chop man, from behind him. “Although mummified cats always make me think of the mummified cats they found around the temple of Bast in Bubastis in Egypt. So many tons of mummified cats, that they sent them to England to be ground up as cheap fertiliser and dumped on the fields. The Victorians also made paint out of mummies. A sort of brown, I believe.”

  “It looks miserable,” said Shadow. “How old is it?”

  The landlord scratched his cheek. “We reckon that the wall she was in went up somewhere between 1300 and 1600. That’s from Parish records. There’s nothing here in 1300, and there’s a house in 1600. The stuff in the middle was lost.”

  The dead cat in the glass case, furless and leathery, seemed to be watching them, from its empty black-hole eyes.

  I got eyes wherever my folk walk, breathed a voice in the back of Shadow’s mind. He thought, momentarily, about the fields fertilised with the ground mummies of cats, and what strange crops they must have grown.

  “They put him into an old house side,“ said the man called Ollie. “And there he lived and there he died. And nobody either laughed or cried. All sorts of things were walled up, to make sure that things were guarded and safe. Children, sometimes. Animals. They did it in churches as a matter of course.”

  The rain beat an arrhythmic rattle on the windowpane. Shadow thanked the landlord for showing him the cat. They went back into the taproom. The dark-haired woman had gone, which gave Shadow a moment of regret. She had looked so friendly. Shadow bought a round of drinks for the mutton-chop man, the white-haired woman, and one for the landlord.

  The landlord ducked behind the bar. “They call me Shadow,” Shadow told them. “Shadow Moon.”

  The mutton-chop man pressed his hands together in delight. “Oh! How wonderful. I had an Alsatian named Shadow, when I was a boy. Is it your real name?”

  “It’s what they call me,” said Shadow.

  “I’m Moira Callanish,” said the white-haired woman. “This is my partner, Oliver Bierce. He knows a lot, and he will, during the course of our acquaintance, undoubtedly tell you everything he knows.”

  They shook hands. When the landlord returned with their drinks, Shadow asked if the pub had a room to rent. He had intended to walk further that night, but the rain sounded like it had no intention of giving up. He had stout walking shoes, and weather-resistant outer clothes, but he did not want to walk in the rain.

  “I used to, but then my son moved back in. I’ll encourage people to sleep it off in the barn, on occasion, but that’s as far as I’ll go these days.”

  “Anywhere in the village I could get a room?”

  The landlord shook his head. “It’s a foul night. But Porsett is only a few miles down the road, and they’ve got a proper hotel there. I can call Sandra, tell her that you are coming. What’s your name?”

  “Shadow,” said Shadow again. “Shadow Moon.”

  Moira looked at Oliver, and said something that sounded like “waifs and strays?” and Oliver chewed his lip for a moment, and then he nodded enthusiastically. “Would you fancy spending the night with us? The spare room’s a bit of a box-room, but it does have a bed in it. And it’s warm there. And dry.”

  “I’d like that very much,” said Shadow. “I can pay.”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Moira. “It will be nice to have a guest.”

  II. The Gibbet

  Oliver and Moira both had umbrellas. Oliver insisted that Shadow carry his umbrella, pointing out that Shadow towered over him, and thus was ideally suited to keep the rain off both of them.

  The couple also carried little flashlights, which they called torches. The word put Shadow in mind of villagers in a horror movie storming the castle on the hill, and the lightning and thunder added to the vision. Tonight, my creature, he thought, I will give you life! It should have been hokey but instead it was disturbing. The dead cat had put him into a strange set of mind.

  The narrow roads between fields were running with rainwater.

  “On a nice night,” said Moira, raising her voice to be heard over the rain, “we would just walk over the fields. But they’ll be all soggy and boggy, so we’re going down by Shuck’s Lane. Now, that tree was a gibbet tree, once upon a time.” She pointed to a massive-trunked sycamore at the crossroads. It had only a few branches left, sticking up into the night like afterthoughts.

  “Moira’s lived here since she was in her twenties,” said Oliver. “I came up from London, about eight years ago. From Turnham Green. I’d come up here on holiday originally when I was fourteen and I never forgot it. You don’t.”

  “The land gets into your blood,” said Moira. “Sort of.”

  “And the blood gets into the land,” said Oliver. “One way or another. You take that gibbet tree, for example. They would leave people in the gibbet until there was nothing left. Hair gone to make bird’s nests, flesh all eaten by ravens, bones picked clean. Or until they had another corpse to display anyway.”

  Shadow was fairly sure he knew what a gibbet was, but he asked anyway. There was never any harm in asking, and Oliver was definitely the kind of person who took pleasure in knowing peculiar things and in passing his knowledge on.

  “Like a huge iron birdcage. They used them to display the bodies of executed criminals, after justice had been served. The gibbets were locked, so the family and friends couldn’t steal the body back and give it a good Christian burial. Keeping passers-by on the straight and the narrow, although I doubt it actually deterred anyone from anything.”

  “Who were they executing?”

  “Anyone who got unlucky. Three hundred years ago, there were over two hundred crimes punishable by death. Including travelling with Gypsies for more than a month, stealing sheep—and, for that matter, anything over twelve pence in value—and writing a threatening letter.”

  He might have been about to begin a lengthy list, but Moira broke in. “Oliver’s right about the death sentence, but they only gibbeted murderers, up these parts. And they’d leave corpses in the gibbet for twenty years, sometimes. We didn’t get a lot of murders.” And then, as if trying to change the subject to something lighter, she said, “We are now walking down Shuck’s Lane. The locals say that on a clear night, which tonight certainly is not, you can find yourself being followed by Black Shuck. He’s a sort of a fairy dog.”

  “We’ve never seen him, not even on clear nights,” said Oliver.

  “Which is a very good thing,” said Moira. “Because if you see him—you die.”

  “Except Sandra Wilberforce said she saw him, and she’s healthy as a horse.”

  Shadow smiled. “What does Black Shuck do?”

  “He doesn’t do anything,” said Oliver.

  “He does. He follows you home,” corrected Moira. “And then, a bit later, you die.”

  “Doesn’t sound very scary,” said Shadow. “Except for the dying bit.”

  They reached the bottom of the road. Rainwater was running like a stream over Shadow’s thick hiking boots.

  Shadow said, “So how did you two meet?” It was normally a safe question, when you were with couples.

  Oliver said, “In the pub.
I was up here on holiday, really.”

  Moira said, “I was with someone when I met Oliver. We had a very brief, torrid affair, then we ran off together. Most unlike both of us.”

  They did not seem like the kind of people who ran off together, thought Shadow. But then, all people were strange. He knew he should say something.

  “I was married. My wife was killed in a car crash.”

  “I’m so sorry,” said Moira.

  “It happened,” said Shadow.

  “When we get home,” said Moira, “I’m making us all Whisky Macs. That’s whisky and ginger wine and hot water. And I’m having a hot bath. Otherwise I’ll catch my death.”

  Shadow imagined reaching out his hand and catching death in it, like a baseball, and he shivered.

  The rain redoubled, and a sudden flash of lightning burned the world into existence all around them: every grey rock in the dry stone wall, every blade of grass, every puddle and every tree was perfectly illuminated, and then swallowed by a deeper darkness, leaving afterimages on Shadow’s night-blinded eyes.

  “Did you see that?” asked Oliver. “Damnedest thing.” The thunder rolled and rumbled, and Shadow waited until it was done before he tried to speak.

  “I didn’t see anything,” said Shadow. Another flash, less bright, and Shadow thought he saw something moving away from them in a distant field. “That?” he asked.

  “It’s a donkey,” said Moira. “Only a donkey.”

  Oliver stopped. He said, “This was the wrong way to come home. We should have got a taxi. This was a mistake.”

  “Ollie,” said Moira. “It’s not far now. And it’s just a spot of rain. You aren’t made of sugar, darling.”

  Another flash of lightning, so bright as to be almost blinding. There was nothing to be seen in the fields.

  Darkness. Shadow turned back to Oliver, but the little man was no longer standing beside him. Oliver’s flashlight was on the ground. Shadow blinked his eyes, hoping to force his night vision to return. The man had collapsed, crumpled onto the wet grass on the side of the lane.

  “Ollie?” Moira crouched beside him, her umbrella by her side. She shone her flashlight onto his face. Then she looked at Shadow. “He can’t just sit here,” she said, sounding confused and concerned. “It’s pouring.”

  Shadow pocketed Oliver’s flashlight, handed his umbrella to Moira, then picked Oliver up. The man did not seem to weigh much, and Shadow was a big man.

  “Is it far?”

  “Not far,” she said. “Not really. We’re almost home.”

  They walked in silence, across a churchyard on the edge of a village green, and into a village. Shadow could see lights on in the grey stone houses that edged the one street. Moira turned off, into a house set back from the road, and Shadow followed her. She held the back door open for him.

  The kitchen was large and warm, and there was a sofa, half-covered with magazines, against one wall. There were low beams in the kitchen, and Shadow needed to duck his head. Shadow removed Oliver’s raincoat and dropped it. It puddled on the wooden floor. Then he put the man down on the sofa.

  Moira filled the kettle.

  “Do we call an ambulance?”

  She shook her head.

  “This is just something that happens? He falls down and passes out?”

  Moira busied herself getting mugs from a shelf. “It’s happened before. Just not for a long time. He’s narcoleptic, and if something surprises or scares him he can just go down like that. He’ll come round soon. He’ll want tea. No Whisky Mac tonight, not for him. Sometimes he’s a bit dazed and doesn’t know where he is, sometimes he’s been following everything that happened while he was out. And he hates it if you make a fuss. Put your backpack down by the Aga.”

  The kettle boiled. Moira poured the steaming water into a teapot. “He’ll have a cup of real tea. I’ll have chamomile, I think, or I won’t sleep tonight. Calm my nerves. You?”

  “I’ll drink tea, sure,” said Shadow. He had walked more than twenty miles that day, and sleep would be easy in the finding. He wondered at Moira. She appeared perfectly self-possessed in the face of her partner’s incapacity, and he wondered how much of it was not wanting to show weakness in front of a stranger. He admired her, although he found it peculiar. The English were strange. But he understood hating “making a fuss”. Yes.

  Oliver stirred on the couch. Moira was at his side with a cup of tea, helped him into a sitting position. He sipped the tea, in a slightly dazed fashion.

  “It followed me home,” he said, conversationally.

  “What followed you, Ollie, darling?” Her voice was steady, but there was concern in it.

  “The dog,” said the man on the sofa, and he took another sip of his tea. “The black dog.”

  III. The Cuts

  These were the things Shadow learned that night, sitting around the kitchen table with Moira and Oliver:

  He learned that Oliver had not been happy or fulfilled in his London advertising agency job. He had moved up to the village and taken an extremely early medical retirement. Now, initially for recreation and increasingly for money, he repaired and rebuilt dry stone walls. There was, he explained, an art and a skill to wall building, it was excellent exercise, and, when done correctly, a meditative practice.

  “There used to be hundreds of dry stone-wall people around here. Now, there’s barely a dozen who know what they’re doing. You see walls repaired with concrete, or with breeze blocks. It’s a dying art. I’d love to show you how I do it. Useful skill to have. Picking the rock, sometimes, you have to let the rock tell you where it goes. And then it’s immovable. You couldn’t knock it down with a tank. Remarkable.”

  He learned that Oliver had been very depressed several years earlier, shortly after Moira and he got together, but that for the last few years he had been doing very well. Or, he amended, relatively well.

  He learned that Moira was independently wealthy, that her family trust fund had meant that she and her sisters had not needed to work, but that, in her late twenties, she had gone for teacher training. That she no longer taught, but that she was extremely active in local affairs, and had campaigned successfully to keep the local bus routes in service.

  Shadow learned, from what Oliver didn’t say, that Oliver was scared of something, very scared, and that when Oliver was asked what had frightened him so badly, and what he had meant by saying that the black dog had followed him home, his response was to stammer and to sway. He learned not to ask Oliver any more questions.

  This is what Oliver and Moira had learned about Shadow sitting around that kitchen table:

  Nothing much.

  Shadow liked them. He was not a stupid man; he had trusted people in the past who had betrayed him. But he liked this couple, and he liked the way their home smelled—like bread-making and jam and walnut wood-polish—and he went to sleep that night in his box-room bedroom worrying about the little man with the mutton-chop beard. What if the thing Shadow had glimpsed in the field had not been a donkey? What if it had been an enormous dog? What then?

  The rain had stopped when Shadow woke. He made himself toast in the empty kitchen. Moira came in from the garden, letting a gust of chilly air in through the kitchen door. “Sleep well?” she asked.

  “Yes. Very well.” He had dreamed of being at the zoo. He had been surrounded by animals he could not see, which snuffled and snorted in their pens. He was a child, walking with his mother, and he was safe and he was loved. He had stopped in front of a lion’s cage, but what had been in the cage was a sphinx, half-lion and half-woman, her tail swishing. She had smiled at him, and her smile had been his mother’s smile. He heard her voice, accented and warm and feline.

  It said, Know thyself.

  I know who I am, said Shadow in his dream, holding the bars of the cage. Behind the bars was the desert. He could see pyramids. He could see shadows on the sand.

  Then who are you, Shadow? What are you running from? Where are you running to?r />
  Who are you?

  And he had woken, wondering why he was asking himself that question, and missing his mother, who had died twenty years before, when he was a teenager. He still felt oddly comforted, remembering the feel of his hand in his mother’s hand.

  “I’m afraid Ollie’s a bit under the weather this morning.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “Yes. Well, can’t be helped.”

  “I’m really grateful for the room. I guess I’ll be on my way.”

  Moira said, “Will you look at something for me?”

  Shadow nodded, then followed her outside, and round the side of the house. She pointed to the rose bed. “What does that look like to you?”

  Shadow bent down. “The footprint of an enormous hound,” he said. “To quote Dr. Watson.”

  “Yes,” she said. “It really does,”

  “If there’s a spectral ghost-hound out there,” said Shadow, “it shouldn’t leave footprints. Should it?”

  “I’m not actually an authority on these matters,” said Moira. “I had a friend once who could have told us all about it. But she…” She trailed off. Then, more brightly, “You know, Mrs. Camberley two doors down has a Doberman pinscher. Ridiculous thing.” Shadow was not certain whether the ridiculous thing was Mrs. Camberley or her dog.

  He found the events of the previous night less troubling and odd, more explicable. What did it matter if a strange dog had followed them home? Oliver had been frightened or startled, and had collapsed, from narcolepsy, from shock.

  “Well, I’ll pack you some lunch before you go,” said Moira. “Boiled eggs. That sort of thing. You’ll be glad of them on the way.”

  They went into the house. Moira went to put something away, and returned looking shaken.

  “Oliver’s locked himself in the bathroom,” she said.

  Shadow was not certain what to say.

  “You know what I wish?” she continued.

  “I don’t.”

  “I wish you would talk to him. I wish he would open the door. I wish he’d talk to me. I can hear him in there. I can hear him.”

  And then, “I hope he isn’t cutting himself again.”