Best New Horror 27

by Stephen Jones

  That night another storm came up from the south, crotchety and fevered. When lightning pierced the hot sky it had the look of bruised flesh being punctured by needles. The heat, the anxiety of the sky, infected the old house. It groaned in what sounded to Mawde like dread.

  Her cousin Jeryl slept in a bed on the other side of the room, but had fallen asleep soon after the curtains had been drawn, and did not wake, even when flickering storm light illumined the room. The unseen inhabitants of the house—vermin and insects—were skittish, pattering behind the walls and in the cavities above the ceilings, below the floors. Mawde lay awake, thinking of the centipede her cousin had killed, how the halves had curled in on themselves. The creature had felt pain, and it had been so big. What if…?

  No, Mawde told herself, no. It was an insect. Didn’t have feelings.

  The rain, when it came, was of the kind that Mawde’s grandmother often referred to as “the tears of the world”—that is, a deluge beyond measure. Even through the curtains, the stormlight now seemed watery, running down the walls of the room, threading between the somehow sickeningly large roses of the wallpaper. Despite the rain, the air was hot and Mawde’s body felt sticky and uncomfortable beneath her light summer blanket.

  She drifted in and out of sleep, images flickering across her mind’s eye, her head aching. She dreamed of earthy tunnels and myriad feet in the dark. On her hands and knees she crawled through the dirt, then it was as if she slithered along it on her belly, and the scent of loam and rot was like the sweet hearth of home. She was comfortable in this dream, neither scared nor excited, simply…doing her business.

  Then, as dreams do, the world shifted, and she was standing barefoot in the middle of her bedroom with the watery light over the walls and the blanket-cocooned hump of her cousin’s shape in the bed before her.

  Was this a dream?

  “Jeryl?” Mawde breathed.

  The hump in the bed twitched and a strange little sleeping-noise came out of the blankets, such as a slumbering dog might utter, as it ran across its dream-fields.

  Mawde went to the bed and placed a hand on her cousin’s shoulder, shook it. “Jeryl?”

  Another noise came out, like dead branches rubbing together, or a bowl of dried peas being thrown down the stairs. Dream-Mawde pulled back the blankets, saw what lay there. A centipede, cut in half, the size of an eleven-year-old girl, the parts curled in on themselves. But the face between the feelers at the head was Jeryl’s, and now she looked up at her cousin with all the pain of the world, its deluge of tears in her eyes.

  Mawde woke with a cry. She felt sick, wanted to vomit, but then the feeling passed. She sat up, glanced fearfully at the bed to her right. “Jeryl?” she murmured. And then louder: “Jeryl!”

  “Wassamatter?” came a grumpy reply.

  “I had a dream,” Mawde said.

  Jeryl sat up in her bed too, scraped hair from her eyes. “You’re awake now. Open the curtains.”

  Mawde shuddered. “No!”

  Jeryl expressed a disappointed sigh and clambered from her bed, went to the window.

  “Why?” Mawde asked.

  “There might be angels in the windows,” Jeryl said. “I see them a lot at home, especially when I wake up from a dream.”

  Mawde had not heard Jeryl mention this before. “You see them?” she asked timorously.

  “Yes, they fill the window, very tall. They tell me things, but I never want them to step out and get into the shadows. It’s important to keep them where they are, because then you can see them. They can’t hide and whisper things.”

  An angel is a kind, beautiful creature, Mawde thought, but in that moment the idea of seeing one seemed the most terrifying thing possible.

  But all that was in the window was the fluid mosaic of running water and Jeryl’s face, half-asleep, dripping with the light.

  The storm passed away moodily to the north, and summer returned in its wake. The morning was magnificent, inviting, and any echoes of the disturbing dream and its unsettling aftermath faded from Mawde’s mind.

  Now the weather was better, the cousins could ride their bicycles out into the country lanes around Mawde’s home, which were empty of traffic during the week, except for the occasional farm vehicle or someone riding a horse.

  No longer required to wear what Jeryl referred to as “stupid doll dresses”, they were attired in shorts, T-shirts and pumps, riding their bikes from village to village. In nearby Elmslane was a tiny shop that sold ice cream, which they always aimed for before returning home for the day. In every village, Jeryl was drawn to the moss-robed old churches, looking for ghosts or evidence of people being buried alive. She would examine headstones for mysteries. “Look, this woman died two days before her baby, and she wasn’t much older than us. The father killed the baby because it had killed her. That’s obvious.”

  Ever since Jeryl had started visiting her cousin in the holidays, one of her favourite pastimes was to hide and frighten people, especially those who came to tend graves. As graveyards were often thick with yew trees—Jeryl’s favourite kind—she would order Mawde to climb into the branches and stay very still. A woman might come, or an elderly man, and then Jeryl would coo something sinister, such as, “Nooo, nooo, tooo soon”. Or simply hoot like an owl or utter a sound like an exclamation from a startled dog or cat.

  They were rarely caught, and if the victim did spy them, the girls would throw themselves from the tree and run off like deer. Mostly, the people would pay no attention, but it was satisfying when a frightened face looked up, glanced around themselves, hurried away. Then the cousins would giggle uncontrollably. “Let’s go to the next place,” Jeryl would say.

  But that day, the graveyards were empty of sport and Jeryl became restless. She suggested a visit to another of their haunts.

  At the western end of Dappleheath, Mawde’s home village, was a row of old houses with long gardens. At the bottom of these summertime jungles was a “no-man’s-land” that didn’t appear to belong to anybody. This was a narrow ribbon of woodland—holly, birch, thick stands of elderberry, some domesticated fruit trees that had perhaps escaped the gardens—through which a stream ran. On the other side of the trees was a school playing-field that seemed inordinately huge and was rarely used. Not that Mawde ever saw it that often in term-time; her school was somewhere else.

  After heavy rain, one section of the stream would swell to fill a shallow sandy pool. Naturally, as the pool’s width varied, and offered on some occasions a greater challenge, Jeryl liked to take a run and jump it. Mawde was afraid of getting wet, even though the water was hardly treacherous and less than three inches at its deepest point. There was simply something disturbing about the way it was so important to Jeryl that they succeeded in their jumps; as if, should they fail, some calamity would happen.

  Today, of course, after the storm, the waters would be engorged and swift—as much as they ever could be—and Jeryl was eager to see how wide the pool would be.

  Mawde liked the wood, even if she didn’t enjoy the jumping that much. There was such a variety of life within it, as if it were a miniature, and therefore magical, ancient woodland. Rabbits braved the boundary between this small wilderness and the shorn playing-field. A woodpecker lived there; always heard, sometimes seen. The petals of flowers—periwinkle, forget-me-not, campion—seemed more vivid there amid the emerald forest grass that was springy underfoot. Mawde liked to think it was a sanctuary for benign magical creatures, but to Jeryl it was the fortress of capricious fairies, who would steal babies, swap them for a blackened tree stump. They could suck out a beautiful girl’s youth, or curse a man to fall in love, then go blind, mad. Jeryl searched for the spoor of these beings relentlessly.

  On that day, as Jeryl rooted in the soft, dark earth, like a terrier rummaging for a buried bone, Mawde wondered why—for her—angels were golden and good, and fairies were simply aloof and mysterious, yet for Jeryl these creatures were always cruel and vengeful, full of hate for
humanity.

  “Look at this,” Jeryl said, wonder in her voice. She had uncovered something beneath a stone, perhaps evidence of a fairy atrocity.

  But before Mawde could come to look, a harsh male voice rang out. “Hoi! Get out of there! This is private property! Gerrout!”

  The cousins stared at each other in alarm, before jumping to their feet. Mawde had a glimpse of an unfriendly male face—elderly—staring over the fence at the bottom of the nearest garden.

  “Don’t you come back here, you little pests!” he roared as Jeryl and Mawde scampered away. “Private property, you hear?”

  Usually, when caught out, and a swift retreat was called for, Jeryl laughed and poked fun at whoever had yelled at them, but this time, when they emerged through a hole in the fence by the lane, where their bicycles lay hidden in the long grass and cow parsley, Jeryl’s face was pinched.

  “Stupid old git,” Mawde offered, hoping Jeryl would then smile and say something even more insulting.

  “I’ll get ‘im,” Jeryl said simply, not even with darkness in her tone, just stating a simple fact. She lifted her bicycle from the grass. “No one uses that land. It’s wild. No one should stop us.”

  “How will you get him?” Mawde asked.

  Jeryl said nothing . She mounted her bike and jerked her head to indicate Mawde should follow.

  They went to another woodland place they liked—a copse of oaks and beeches in a hollow in the middle of a hay field. But sometimes other children were there, which neither Mawde nor Jeryl liked particularly. Today, mercifully, they had it to themselves.

  Jeryl was still not speaking, despite Mawde’s efforts to lighten the atmosphere. Jeryl simply rooted, clawing at sodden dead wood and beneath the bracken. She turned over a large log that had to be pulled forcibly from the earth, making a sucking sound. Beneath, the ground teemed with insect life—woodlice, beetles, centipedes. “Oh, look,” Mawde murmured. “So many of them.”

  Jeryl stood up; then, methodically, she began stamping on the tiny creatures, grinding her foot against the soil, all the time making a soft, grunting sound.

  “Stop it,” Mawde said. “Stop, Jeryl.”

  Jeryl wouldn’t stop, and for the first time, Mawde ran away from her cousin, out of the shade of the wise oaks, across the sun-soaked hay field, and went home alone.

  Jeryl did not reappear until teatime. To protect her cousin from any parental chastisement, or indeed herself for leaving Jeryl alone in the copse, Mawde hid in the garden until she heard the whirr of Jeryl’s bicycle wheels on the gravel of the drive. Then, Mawde ran from her hiding place, across the lawn.

  At that moment, Mawde’s mother came out the house, no doubt to advise them their tea was ready. She caught sight of Jeryl, muddied and unkempt, then glanced briefly at her tidier daughter. “What have you been doing?” she snapped. “Where have you been?”

  Jeryl stared defiantly, shrugged.

  Horrified at what this insolent response might evoke in her normally fair-minded mother, Mawde said, “We went fishing and Jeryl fell over in a muddy place.”

  “Mud?” said Mawde”s mother in a voice that might easily have been saying “entrails?” so disgusted was her tone. Mawde realised then—one of the chiming epiphanies of childhood—that although her mother considered nature beautiful and to be respected from a distance, in her view no girl had any place getting into it and letting it dirty her.

  “Get changed,” she said severely to Jeryl. “And wash yourself as best you can. Bath later.” She turned to Mawde, “As for you, young lady…”

  “I’ll wash and change too,” Mawde said, even though she wasn’t very dirty. She ran after Jeryl, who was stomping into the house.

  In the bathroom, Jeryl was still quiet, although she hummed to herself softly. “Are you all right?” Mawde asked.

  “Of course,” Jeryl answered.

  “Jeryl…” Mawde began. She knew she had to speak, say something, but the words were reluctant. “You shouldn’t kill things like that.”

  Jeryl flicked a sharp glance at her. “They don’t mind dying for me. They expect it.”

  “Dying for you…?”

  “How else can I tell them what I want? Beetles don’t have brains, but they have eyes. You have to show them.” Jeryl threw water over her face, rubbed mud from her arms.

  Mawde remembered her dream then, the insect Jeryl in the bed, cut in half. “You’re wrong,” she said.

  Jeryl expressed a contemptuous snort. “You don’t know anything. Keep your trap shut.”

  The look in Jeryl’s eyes was frightening, so cold and dark, like winter earth; small scuttling things moving behind it. A distinct thought formed in Mawde’s mind: don’t make her angry with you.

  “Sorry,” she said, and went to the bath where she washed her hands. She didn’t want to share the sink Jeryl was using.

  That night, Mawde slept deeply and did not wake. To her, it was an ordinary night and the morning that followed it equally ordinary. Jeryl seemed brighter now, for which Mawde was grateful. The sullen, quiet Jeryl frightened her; she’d never been like this on previous visits.

  While they were washing-up for Mawde’s mother after breakfast, a knock came at the back door. Friends and family never used the forbidding front door, which was rarely opened. This visitor came right inside without waiting to be invited—a friend of Mawde’s mother called Mrs. Cherry. She had a sickly son, who went to the same school as Mawde and was excused sports and swimming.

  After the ritual offering of tea, and with Mrs. Cherry established at the kitchen table, the woman lit a cigarette, inhaled purposefully and on her exhale, announced with relish, “The Hensons had dreadful trouble last night.”

  “Who?” asked Mawde’s mother.

  “Live in End Lane, the one with the green door.”

  “Oh…yes…I don’t know them personally. What trouble?”

  Mrs. Cherry chewed her words with satisfaction before sharing them. “Vandals got in their garden. Made a terrible mess. Ruined it, you know. Ruined it! Even the greenhouse gone. It’s just a mud patch now, I heard. And you know what?”

  “What?”

  “They didn’t hear a thing. Got police round now, of course.”

  “How dreadful…”

  Mawde’s head had begun to buzz. She felt strangely dizzy and disorientated. End Lane…the wood at the back of the houses where she and Jeryl had been yesterday. She knew her face had gone bright red, and that it was important her mother didn’t notice this.

  Jeryl was still washing dishes in a serene manner, as if her mind was far away, as if she hadn’t heard.

  “Susan Ross just told me that May Henson’s kitchen was absolutely crawling with beetles this morning. Unearthed, I expect. They were in everything.”

  Mawde put away carefully the last dish she was drying. “Can we go now, Mum?”

  Mawde’s mother nodded distractedly. “Yes, sweetheart. Don’t be late for lunch.”

  Outside, as the cousins walked to the shed where the bicycles were stored, Jeryl was again quiet, although she was smiling—a private expression she clearly had no intention of sharing.

  Mawde wanted to say something, ask something, desperately, but was afraid to do so. She sensed endings and change, the summer fading, without understanding why.

  At the shed, as she wrestled with the padlock—unlocked but as recalcitrant as if it were stuck fast—she said, “Wonder if it was the man who shouted at us…whose garden was wrecked?” She glanced up at her cousin.

  Jeryl stared back for a moment, the put out her tongue. Mawde jumped backwards. There was a centipede on Jeryl’s tongue, still and wet, just lying there. Jeryl uttered a squawk of laughter, then spat. Mawde winced away.

  “Told you,” Jeryl said.

  After that summer, the cousins grew apart. Further details of the holiday became blurred in Mawde’s mind, but then perhaps Jeryl had returned home only a couple of days after the garden-wrecking incident—a crime for which no one w
as ever caught.

  Later that year, Mawde overheard a couple of whispered, coded conversations that her mother held on the phone with friends. Listening carefully from concealment, Mawde deciphered Jeryl had been in severe trouble at school. Phrases such as, “difficult child” and “a bit touched” were breathed down the line. Mawde gleaned that for Jeryl a new and different kind of school had been in order; her mother and father had moved a couple of hundred miles away to be near her.

  There had been no further holiday visits, and the relationship between Mawde’s mother and her sister inexplicably cooled. Mawde couldn’t divine the reason, and her mother kept her secrets until she died, quite young.

  Mawde had no idea where her aunt lived, and any questions made to her father resulted only in “Let it lie, Mawde. They don’t want us contacting them.”

  Jeryl became a childhood memory; a strange yet intriguing girl. Mawde never spoke about her, and eventually forgot her, except for moments during summer storms, when she lay awake in the dark at night and heard insects in the walls.

  Then, by chance, many years later when Mawde was in her late thirties, her work brought her into contact with Meredith Jones, a woman who’d known Jeryl as a child. Mawde had even met her a couple of times at gatherings of Jeryl’s family, not that she recognised Meredith’s grown-up face, and—unlike Mawde—she had married, so her name was different.

  After an office meeting, as both women were putting away their laptops, Meredith said, “You’re not the Mawde Emsley who’s a cousin of Jeryl Ashman, are you?”

  “Yes, I am,” Mawde said, surprised. In an instant, the past came hurtling back and she felt faintly disorientated. She smelled earth.

  “You probably don’t remember me,” Meredith said. “I was a friend of Jeryl’s.” She laughed. “Well, went to the same school, and was invited to birthdays and so on, but Jeryl didn’t really have friends, did she?”