Best New Horror 27

by Stephen Jones

  Shadow walked back into the hall, stood by the bathroom door, called Oliver’s name. “Can you hear me? Are you okay?”

  Nothing. No sound from inside.

  Shadow looked at the door. It was solid wood. The house was old, and they built them strong and well back then. When Shadow had used the bathroom that morning he’d learned the lock was a hook and eye. He leaned on the handle of the door, pushing it down, then rammed his shoulder against the door. It opened with a noise of splintering wood.

  He had watched a man die in prison, stabbed in a pointless argument. He remembered the way the blood had puddled about the man’s body, lying in the back corner of the exercise yard. The sight had troubled Shadow, but he had forced himself to look, and to keep looking. To look away would somehow have felt disrespectful.

  Oliver was naked on the floor of the bathroom. His body was pale, and his chest and groin were covered with thick, dark hair. He held the blade from an ancient safety razor in his hands. He had sliced his arms with it, his chest above the nipples, his inner thighs and his penis. Blood was smeared on his body, on the black and white linoleum floor, on the white enamel of the bathtub. Oliver’s eyes were round and wide, like the eyes of a bird. He was looking directly at Shadow, but Shadow was not certain that he was being seen.

  “Ollie?” said Moira’s voice, from the hall. Shadow realised that he was blocking the doorway and he hesitated, unsure whether to let her see what was on the floor or not.

  Shadow took a pink towel from the towel-rail and wrapped it around Oliver. That got the little man’s attention. He blinked, as if seeing Shadow for the first time, and said, “The dog. It’s for the dog. It must be fed, you see. We’re making friends.”

  Moira said, “Oh my dear sweet God.”

  “I’ll call the emergency services.”

  “Please don’t,” she said. “He’ll be fine at home with me. I don’t know what I’ll…please?”

  Shadow picked up Oliver, swaddled in the towel, carried him into the bedroom as if he were a child, and then placed him on the bed. Moira followed. She picked up an iPad by the bed, touched the screen, and music began to play. “Breathe Ollie,” she said. “Remember. Breathe. It’s going to be fine. You’re going to be fine.”

  “I can’t really breathe,” said Oliver, in a small voice. “Not really. I can feel my heart, though. I can feel my heart beating.”

  Moira squeezed his hand and sat down on the bed, and Shadow left them alone.

  When Moira entered the kitchen, her sleeves rolled up, and her hands smelling of antiseptic cream, Shadow was sitting on the sofa, reading a guide to local walks.

  “How’s he doing?”

  She shrugged.

  “You have to get him help.”

  “Yes.” She stood in the middle of the kitchen and looked about her, as if unable to decide which way to turn. “Do you…I mean, do you have to leave today? Are you on a schedule?”

  “Nobody’s waiting for me. Anywhere.”

  She looked at him with a face that had grown haggard in an hour. “When this happened before, it took a few days, but then he was right as rain. The depression doesn’t stay long. So, just wondering, would you just, well, stick around? I phoned my sister but she’s in the middle of moving. And I can’t cope on my own. I really can’t. Not again. But I can’t ask you to stay, not if anyone is waiting for you.”

  “Nobody’s waiting,” repeated Shadow. “And I’ll stick around. But I think Oliver needs specialist help.”

  “Yes,” agreed Moira. “He does.”

  Dr. Scathelocke came over late that afternoon. He was a friend of Oliver and Moira’s. Shadow was not entirely certain whether rural British doctors still made house calls, or whether this was a socially-justified visit. The doctor went into the bedroom, and came out twenty minutes later.

  He sat at the kitchen table with Moira, and he said, “It’s all very shallow. Cry-for-help stuff. Honestly, there’s not a lot we can do for him in hospital that you can’t do for him here, what with the cuts. We used to have a dozen nurses in that wing. Now they are trying to close it down completely. Get it all back to the community.”

  Dr. Scathelocke had sandy hair, was as tall as Shadow but lankier. He reminded Shadow of the landlord in the pub, and he wondered idly if the two men were related. The doctor scribbled several prescriptions, and Moira handed them to Shadow, along with the keys to an old white Range Rover.

  Shadow drove to the next village, found the little chemist’s and waited for the prescriptions to be filled. He stood awkwardly in the over-lit aisle, staring at a display of suntan lotions and creams, sadly redundant in this cold wet summer.

  “You’re Mr. American,” said a woman’s voice from behind him. He turned. She had short dark hair and was wearing the same olive-green sweater she had been wearing in the pub.

  “I guess I am,” he said.

  “Local gossip says that you are helping out while Ollie’s under the weather.”

  “That was fast.”

  “Local gossip travels faster than light. I’m Cassie Burglass.”

  “Shadow Moon.”

  “Good name,” she said. “Gives me chills.” She smiled. “If you’re still rambling while you’re here, I suggest you check out the hill just past the village. Follow the track up until it forks, and then go left. It takes you up Wod’s Hill. Spectacular views. Public right of way. Just keep going left and up, you can’t miss it.”

  She smiled at him. Perhaps she was just being friendly to a stranger.

  “I’m not surprised you’re still here though,” Cassie continued. “It’s hard to leave this place once it gets its claws into you.” She smiled again, a warm smile, and she looked directly into his eyes, as if trying to make up her mind. “I think Mrs. Patel has your prescriptions ready. Nice talking to you, Mr. American.”

  IV. The Kiss

  Shadow helped Moira. He walked down to the village shop and bought the items on her shopping list while she stayed in the house, writing at the kitchen table or hovering in the hallway outside the bedroom door. Moira barely talked. He ran errands in the white Range Rover, and saw Oliver mostly in the hall, shuffling to the bathroom and back. The man did not speak to him.

  Everything was quiet in the house: Shadow imagined the black dog squatting on the roof, cutting out all sunlight, all emotion, all feeling and truth. Something had turned down the volume in that house, pushed all the colours into black and white. He wished he was somewhere else, but could not run out on them. He sat on his bed, and stared out of the window at the rain puddling its way down the windowpane, and felt the seconds of his life counting off, never to come back.

  It had been wet and cold, but on the third day the sun came out. The world did not warm up, but Shadow tried to pull himself out of the grey haze, and decided to see some of the local sights. He walked to the next village, through fields, up paths and along the side of a long dry stone wall. There was a bridge over a narrow stream that was little more than a plank, and Shadow jumped the water in one easy bound. Up the hill: there were trees, oak and hawthorn, sycamore and beech at the bottom of the hill, and then the trees became sparser. He followed the winding trail, sometimes obvious, sometimes not, until he reached a natural resting place, like a tiny meadow, high on the hill, and there he turned away from the hill and saw the valleys and the peaks arranged all about him in greens and greys like illustrations from a children’s book.

  He was not alone up there. A woman with short dark hair was sitting and sketching on the hill’s side, perched comfortably on a grey boulder. There was a tree behind her, which acted as a windbreak. She wore a green sweater and blue jeans, and he recognised Cassie Burglass before he saw her face.

  As he got close, she turned. “What do you think?” she asked, holding her sketchbook up for his inspection. It was an assured pencil drawing of the hillside.

  “You’re very good. Are you a professional artist?”

  “I dabble,” she said.

  Sha
dow had spent enough time talking to the English to know that this either meant that she dabbled, or that her work was regularly hung in the National Gallery or the Tate Modern.

  “You must be cold.” he said. “You’re only wearing a sweater.”

  “I’m cold,” she said. “But, up here, I’m used to it. It doesn’t really bother me. How’s Ollie doing?”

  “He’s still under the weather,” Shadow told her.

  “Poor old sod,” she said, looking from her paper to the hillside and back. “It’s hard for me to feel properly sorry for him, though.”

  “Why’s that? Did he bore you to death with interesting facts?”

  She laughed, a small huff of air at the back of her throat. “You really ought to listen to more village gossip. When Ollie and Moira met, they were both with other people.”

  “I know that. They told me that.” Shadow thought a moment. “So he was with you first?”

  “No. She was. We’d been together since college.” There was a pause. She shaded something, her pencil scraping the paper. “Are you going to try and kiss me?” she asked.

  “I, uh. I, um,” he said. Then, honestly, “It hadn’t occurred to me.”

  “Well,” she said, turning to smile at him, “it bloody well should. I mean, I asked you up here, and you came, up to Wod’s Hill, just to see me.” She went back to the paper and the drawing of the hill. “They say there’s dark doings been done on this hill. Dirty dark doings. And I was thinking of doing something dirty myself. To Moira’s lodger.”

  “Is this some kind of revenge plot?”

  “It’s not an anything plot. I just like you. And there’s no one around here who wants me any longer. Not as a woman.”

  The last woman that Shadow had kissed had been in Scotland. He thought of her, and what she had become, in the end. “You are real, aren’t you?” he asked. “I mean…you’re a real person. I mean…”

  She put the pad of paper down on the boulder and she stood up. “Kiss me and find out,” she said.

  He hesitated. She sighed, and she kissed him.

  It was cold on that hillside, and Cassie’s lips were cold. Her mouth was very soft. As her tongue touched his, Shadow pulled back.

  “I don’t actually know you,” Shadow said.

  She leaned away from him, looked up into his face. “You know,” she said, “all I dream of these days is somebody who will look my way and see the real me. I had given up until you came along, Mr. American, with your funny name. But you looked at me, and I knew you saw me. And that’s all that matters.”

  Shadow’s hands held her, feeling the softness of her sweater.

  “How much longer are you going to be here? In the district?” she asked.

  “A few more days. Until Oliver’s feeling better.”

  “Pity. Can’t you stay for ever?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You have nothing to be sorry for, sweet man. You see that opening over there?”

  He glanced over to the hillside, but could not see what she was pointing at. The hillside was a tangle of weeds and low trees and half-tumbled dry stone walls. She pointed to her drawing, where she had drawn a dark shape, like an archway, in the middle of a clump of gorse bushes on the side of the hill. “There. Look.” He stared, and this time he saw it immediately.

  “What is it?” Shadow asked.

  “The gateway to Hell,” she told him, impressively.

  “Uh-huh.”

  She grinned. “That’s what they call it round here. It was originally a Roman Temple, I think, or something even older. But that’s all that remains. You should check it out, if you like that sort of thing. Although it’s a bit disappointing: just a little passageway going back into the hill. I keep expecting some archaeologists will come out this way, dig it up, catalogue what they find, but they never do.”

  Shadow examined her drawing. “So what do you know about big black dogs?” he asked.

  “The one in Shuck’s Lane?” she said. He nodded. “They say the Barghest used to wander all around here. But now it’s just in Shuck’s Lane. Dr. Scathelocke once told me it was folk memory. The Wish Hounds are all that are left of the wild hunt, which was based around the idea of Odin’s hunting wolves, Freki and Geri. I think it’s even older than that. Cave memory. Druids. The thing that prowls in the darkness beyond the fire circle, waiting to tear you apart if you edge too far out alone.”

  “Have you ever seen it, then?”

  She shook her head. “No. I researched it, but never saw it. My semi-imaginary local beast. Have you?”

  “I don’t think so. Maybe.”

  “Perhaps you woke it up when you came here. You woke me up, after all.”

  She reached up, pulled his head down towards her and kissed him again. She took his left hand, so much bigger than hers, and placed it beneath her sweater.

  “Cassie, my hands are cold,” he warned her.

  “Well, my everything is cold. There’s nothing but cold up here. Just smile and look like you know what you’re doing,” she told him. She pushed Shadow’s left hand higher, until it was cupping the lace of her bra, and he could feel, beneath the lace, the hardness of her nipple and the soft swell of her breast.

  He began to surrender to the moment, his hesitation a mixture of awkwardness and uncertainty. He was not sure how he felt about this woman: she had history with his benefactors, after all. Shadow never liked feeling that he was being used; it had happened too many times before. But his left hand was touching her breast and his right hand was cradling the nape of her neck, and he was leaning down and now her mouth was on his, and she was clinging to him as tightly as if, he thought, she wanted to occupy the very same space that he was in. Her mouth tasted like mint and stone and grass and the chilly afternoon breeze. He closed his eyes, and let himself enjoy the kiss and the way their bodies moved together.

  Cassie froze. Somewhere close to them, a cat mewed. Shadow opened his eyes.

  “Jesus,” he said.

  They were surrounded by cats. White cats and tabbies, brown and ginger and black cats, long-haired and short. Well-fed cats with collars and disreputable ragged-eared cats that looked as if they had been living in barns and on the edges of the wild. They stared at Shadow and Cassie with green eyes and blue eyes and golden eyes, and they did not move. Only the occasional swish of a tail or the blinking of a pair of feline eyes told Shadow that they were alive.

  “This is weird,” said Shadow.

  Cassie took a step back. He was no longer touching her now. “Are they with you?” she asked.

  “I don’t think they’re with anyone. They’re cats.”

  “I think they’re jealous,” said Cassie. “Look at them. They don’t like me.”

  “That’s…” Shadow was going to say “nonsense”, but no, it was sense, of a kind. There had been a woman who was a goddess, a continent away and years in his past, who had cared about him, in her own way. He remembered the needle-sharpness of her nails and the cat-like roughness of her tongue.

  Cassie looked at Shadow dispassionately. “I don’t know who you are, Mr. American,” she told him. “Not really. I don’t know why you can look at me and see the real me, or why I can talk to you when I find it so hard to talk to other people. But I can. And you know, you seem all normal and quiet on the surface, but you are so much weirder than I am. And I’m extremely fucking weird.”

  Shadow said, “Don’t go.”

  “Tell Ollie and Moira you saw me,” she said. “Tell them I’ll be waiting where we last spoke, if they have anything they want to say to me.” She picked up her sketchpad and pencils, and she walked off briskly, stepping carefully through the cats, who did not even glance at her, just kept their gazes fixed on Shadow, as she moved away through the swaying grasses and the blowing twigs.

  Shadow wanted to call after her, but he instead he crouched down and looked back at the cats. “What’s going on?” he asked. “Bast? Are you doing this? You’re a long way from home. And why w
ould you still care who I kiss?”

  The spell was broken when he spoke. The cats began to move, to look away, to stand, to wash themselves intently.

  A tortoiseshell cat pushed her head against his hand, insistently, needing attention. Shadow stroked her absently, rubbing his knuckles against her forehead.

  She swiped blinding-fast with claws like tiny scimitars, and drew blood from his forearm. Then she purred, and turned, and within moments the whole kit and caboodle of them had vanished into the hillside, slipping behind rocks and into the undergrowth, and were gone.

  V. The Living and the Dead

  Oliver was out of his room when Shadow got back to the house, sitting in the warm kitchen, a mug of tea by his side, reading a book on Roman architecture. He was dressed, and he had shaved his chin and trimmed his beard. He was wearing pyjamas, with a plaid bathrobe over them.

  “I’m feeling a bit better,” he said, when he saw Shadow. Then, “Have you ever had this? Been depressed?”

  “Looking back on it, I guess I did. When my wife died,” said Shadow. “Everything went flat. Nothing meant anything for a long time.”

  Oliver nodded. “It’s hard. Sometimes I think the black dog is a real thing. I lie in bed thinking about the painting of Fuseli’s nightmare on a sleeper’s chest. Like Anubis. Or do I mean Set? Big black thing. What was Set anyway? Some kind of donkey?”

  “I never ran into Set,” said Shadow. “He was before my time.”

  Oliver laughed. “Very dry. And they say you Americans don’t do irony.” He paused. “Anyway. All done now. Back on my feet. Ready to face the world.” He sipped his tea. “Feeling a bit embarrassed. All that Hound of the Baskervilles nonsense behind me now.”

  “You really have nothing to be embarrassed about,” said Shadow, reflecting that the English found embarrassment wherever they looked for it.

  “Well. All a bit silly, one way or another. And I really am feeling much perkier.”

  Shadow nodded. “If you’re feeling better, I guess I should start heading south.”

  “No hurry,” said Oliver. “It’s always nice to have company. Moira and I don’t really get out as much as we’d like. It’s mostly just a walk up to the pub. Not much excitement here, I’m afraid.”