The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 23 (Mammoth Books)

by Jones, Stephen

  An empty tent with the back half tore down and rain falling in – just me, Lewis and the Mizes, with me froze in place mother-naked and masked, sweat drying on my goose-pimpled everything. As he looked me right in the eye, or close enough, with his finger never straying from the trigger – stood there with his hat-brim dripping into his collar and told me, like it was some sorta damn foregone conclusion—

  “Persia . . . you’re comin’ with me now, gal. Gonna leaves these two witches to their own damnation. We’ll git married, have us some young’uns, live high; Law won’t never catch us, not if we start out runnin’ fast enough. Won’t that be fine?”

  And: Might have been, for some, was what I thought, but didn’t say; might still be, for you, with someone else. ’Cause . . . I just ain’t that gal you’re thinkin’ of, Lewis Boll. Never was. Never will be.

  I looked at him, past him. Saw the dim bronze shadow of myself in Miz Farwander’s mirror, looming over Lewis like an angry spectre, for all you could see the full range and extent of my shame. And as I kept on looking, I saw one of Her snakes – my snakes – start to move its slick green head, to rise and keep on rising like it planned to strike, flickering its impossible tongue out like a kindling flame.

  And Lewis . . .

  (oh, Lewis)

  . . . for all he didn’t see it too – for all he couldn’t’ve – he went rigid, went grey, went heavy, went dead. Stood there while the stone spread fast all over him like mould does on cheese or a blush follows a slap, ’til Miz Forza stepped forward lightsome as always, took him by the elbow and pushed him off-balance, to shatter on impact with the raw dirt floor.

  “There,” she said, clapping her gloved hands. “That’s that. And now we’re alone again at last – just the three of us.”

  Upstairs, the thunder crashed, like God Himself was breaking rocks. But Miz Farwander simply shrugged her shoulders at it with a brisk little tut-tut noise, flicking her too-long tongue against her metal teeth, and told the sky above her:

  “Oh, go on and howl all you want to, father-killer – you had your chance ’fore you let yourself get old, let the white Christ take half the whole world over and some host of no-name one-gods take the rest, with barely even a fight. But you still had to keep spillin’ your seed hither and yon, didn’t you, where we could get to it? And now it’s done. We’re three once more, whole and perfect, with nothing at all left to stop us.”

  She put one hand on my right arm as Miz Forza took my left, and the two of ’em drew me away – cooed at me, stroked me, told me to keep my eyes down ’til we was inside the caravan itself, for fear of any further accidents. And when we got inside they sat me down easy with my feet up, to give me some time to settle in and come to terms with what had happened; Miz Farwander made tea, while Miz Forza tipped a bottle of something into it – that salve she’d used to keep the Mask good-looking? I hoped not, but it sure to hell did stink almost the same—

  I was shaking as I sipped, watching her slip off her gloves, so’s I could see her hands clear for the first time ever: Black like Miz Farwander’s, from tips to wrist. Exactly like.

  They knit their four black hands together tight and rocked together, like they was almost about to cry. And I saw—

  —I realised—

  —remembering those sisters of Hers, who lived forever and took on Her ugliness, who made monsters of ’emselves even though they didn’t have to, just so’s She’d never have to be alone—

  —that all their fingers were nails, and all those nails were claws. That their tongues were equal long and sharp, just as their teeth (metal or no) were fangs. That their hair was snakes too, come seeking out now from under cap and scarves alike, to say hello to mine.

  For it was like Miz Farwander’d told my no-’count Pa, that ranting lightning-strike voice lost behind the thunder: We was all the same again, all three, at long last. Just like ’fore my head was cut off, and my spilt blood birthed out a horse with wings, in and amongst so many other equal-awful creatures.

  I wear the Mask of Fear at all times now, shows notwithstanding, and am worn in turn: She is my face, I her body. To even try taking it off would rip us both apart and force the two Mizes to start over – something I could never countenance, even for my own comfort; I owe them so much, after all. And thus together we hold pride of place while Miz Forza sets at my right hand, Miz Farwander at my left, looking up at me with a swoony mutual love that I can’t feel, startling-keen as any knife slid fast and sure ’tween the ribs.

  We eat well, and plenty. I freeze ’em in their tracks, they knock ’em down. And the caravan moves on, moves on, through this new world with its ancient tides, the ebb and flow of inhumanity. Dustbowl’s just a word to most, near nine decades gone, all but forgotten. Yet you only fool yourselves to think it’s over, for though hunger may be better-hid, it is never far behind.

  That’s why cooch still plays, now as ever. Like it always did.

  I take the stage nightly, hard and proud and cold, a dead light shining from my rigid face; I live always in company but always alone, obdurate, untouched, imperturbable. As though I too was turned to stone that night, so long past – me, Persia Leitner, who am now called by many other names: Sister, Dread Lady, Queen of Snakes, Mask of Fear. Poseidon’s whore, Athena’s injustice, Perseus’ victim. Zeus’ bane.

  Medusa.

  Next show starts right soon, rubes. C’mon inside, look up. Look hard. No, harder.

  And now . . .

  . . . let me show you somethin’.

  JOEL LANE

  Midnight Flight

  JOEL LANE’S PUBLICATION IN the supernatural horror genre include three short story collections: The Earth Wire, The Lost District and The Terrible Changes, while a collection of his supernatural crime stories, Where Furnaces Burn, is forthcoming.

  He is also the author of two mainstream novels, From Blue to Black and The Blue Mask; three poetry collections, The Edge of the Screen, Trouble in the Heartland and The Autumn Myth; a chapbook, Black Country; a booklet of crime stories, Do Not Pass Go, and a pamphlet of erotic poems, Instinct. His articles on great weird fiction writers have appeared in Wormwood and elsewhere.

  Current projects include a collection of ghost stories, The Anniversary of Never.

  “‘Midnight Flight’ was written for The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies, edited by D. F. Lewis,” explains Lane. “It’s a tribute to the classic weird fiction anthologies I read before my teens, and to the libraries – now shut down or severely depleted – where I found them.

  “That led naturally into a story about the loss of memory, and how memory might not want to be lost.”

  PAUL COOKSEY REMEMBERED the book’s title on the same day that he forgot where he lived. As his bus neared the Hockley Flyover and the tall buildings on either side receded, he had a momentary sensation of flying on wings of concrete. Night was falling, but the street-lamps hadn’t yet come on. Cars streamed past on the outside lane. He closed his eyes, and a name he’d been trying to recall for months came back to him as naturally as if he’d never lost it. Midnight Flight.

  The editor’s name continued to elude him, and it wasn’t any of the usual suspects. The book had been in the school library, quite battered when he’d read it in . . . 1956 it must have been, when he was twelve. The first book of horror stories he’d read, unless you counted the children’s versions of Norse and Greek myths and Beowulf, which you probably should.

  As the bus crawled through heavy traffic on the Soho Road, the teenagers shouting into their mobiles and headphones leaking beats drove the book from his mind. But now he’d remembered the title, maybe he’d be able to track down a copy. It might even have the original cover. He couldn’t see through the murky windows to identify his stop, and the chanting around him was getting louder as if the reception was better at this point. Paul rose to his feet and cautiously pushed his thin body past the standing youngsters. Nobody moved to let him through.

  Midnight Flight. There was a
story about a lonely boy who collected moths and was drained of blood by a vengeful giant moth with skulls on its wings. And a story about a dead lake haunted by a terrible black moth. There were other kinds of winged creature in the book, including one that could only fly in utter darkness because it came from outer space, but it was the moth ones he remembered most clearly. For years he’d dreamt of flying through the night on fragile wings.

  “Get out the fucking way!” A boy on a racing bike narrowly missed him on the pavement. The cold air transmitted the near-impact. Paul looked around in confusion. He must have taken a wrong turning: there were no familiar landmarks in sight. A woman with a pram was approaching; he’d better ask her.

  “Excuse me,” he said as she drew level with him. “Do you know the way to . . .” What was the name of the road? He shook his head. “Shit.”

  “Even my daughter knows that.” The woman smiled. “Where are you trying to get to?”

  “My flat. Just can’t . . .” Blood rose to his face, silencing him.

  “Have you got a bus pass?”

  “I can walk, it’s not far.” Though he was no longer sure of that.

  The woman touched his arm. “For your address.”

  Doubtful, Paul pulled out his wallet and checked. His address in Victoria Road was there. He’d never been good with women’s names. “Thank you,” he said, breathless with relief.

  “No worries.” He watched her continue up the road, weaving to negotiate the shattered paving stones. The sky overhead was fully dark; a helicopter’s light moved slowly above the rooftops. Paul replaced his wallet and buttoned up his coat. He wasn’t convinced the face in the bus pass photo was him, but you couldn’t be sure of everything.

  Three days later, he remembered the editor’s name. It happened in the Black Eagle, while he was trying to read the new menu. The lines were too close together, blurring like ripples on still water. He folded the card and put it down, trying to recall what he’d last eaten here. At the next table, a middle-aged man with a beard was being tugged from side to side by headphones plugged into some round, black device that looked about to crawl away. He raised his arms above his head. Paul looked back down at the menu card and immediately saw the words: Thom Creighton Parr. He adjusted his glasses and read: Torn chicken pasta. But he was sure it was the right name. When he closed his eyes he could see it under the book’s title, superimposed on an image of blurred wings against the night. Black on dark blue.

  The pasta was too expensive, so he opted for pie and chips, which didn’t remind him of anything. It didn’t taste of anything either. The bearded man played invisible drums in the air. The sound of voices arguing at another table rose to a violent pitch, though Paul couldn’t see any movement. He left his pint unfinished. On the way out, a grey-haired woman turned her head towards him and smiled. “How’s it going?” He didn’t recognise her; she must be speaking to someone else. But she looked disappointed when he didn’t stop. Embarrassment made him head for the door as quickly as his shaky legs would go. Was it possible that every memory he regained had to be paid for with another one?

  A grey dawn was filtering through the curtains, turning his bed to concrete. Paul sat up and gripped the sides of his head to absorb the dull throbbing before it could break free. His throat was dry. Flakes of dead skin drifted from his fingertips. Was that what old age meant, that the layers of skin went deeper so that less and less of you was alive? He reached out to the bedside table, switched on the lamp and picked up a second-hand book. A detective story. But his eyes were too tired: the lines of print crept across the yellowing paper. When he couldn’t read, why was he convinced that Midnight Flight would release him from pain and loneliness? Was it just because it had done that for him as a child?

  Perhaps the local library could help him. Not that it would have the book, or any book published in the last century. But the computers whose blank screens had frozen him out might hold some answers. Paul washed and dressed a little faster than his usual lethargic morning pace, putting on his favourite cardigan despite the holes he noticed in its left shoulder and arm. Midnight Flight was out there, nestling on a wooden shelf, its pages waiting to be turned again. Maybe the same copy he’d read and re-read all those years ago.

  The library’s few bookshelves were mostly taken up with standard reference works and large print volumes – which Paul, for the first time, wondered if he ought to borrow one of. A few newspapers were scattered on the tables between the long ranks of computers.

  The librarian, a short middle-aged man with an oddly boyish expression, looked up Midnight Flight on his desk terminal. “No copies in the library system any more,” he said. “There’d be one at the British Library, of course, but that’s in London. Have you tried ABE Books?” He didn’t know what that was. The librarian checked his ticket, then found him a computer and showed him how to search. No second-hand copy seemed to be available online. The librarian left him to further searches. “Good luck, Mr Cooksey.” Paul wondered who he was talking to. He had to look back at his own ticket to see that was his name.

  A search for Thom Creighton Parr yielded seven links. Three of them were to listings of second-hand copies of his book on bowling, Green Pastures, while two more were bowling society websites that cited the same book. Another was a Wikipedia entry that gave Parr’s birth date as 1923, but no death date. It mentioned Midnight Flight, but only to describe it as a “long-forgotten horror anthology” with only one edition, in 1954.

  The final link was to a website called Crypt of Cobwebs, dedicated to British and American horror fiction. Paul hadn’t read much in that genre since Midnight Flight. He’d tried a few other anthologies in the 1960s and ’70s but had given up, nauseated by severed heads and vats of acid. The linked passage was in an article on British horror anthologies before 1980. It said:

  One of weird fiction’s great “lost books” is Midnight Flight edited by Thom Creighton Parr (Acheron Press, 1964), which is thought to have included tales by Lovecraft and Jacobi. All the stories involve winged nocturnal creatures. A reviewer called the book “too disturbing to read”, and it was never reprinted – though of course, true weird fiction stood little chance of being appreciated in the Marxist 1960s. Copies are hard to track down. It’s rumoured that copyright problems led to copies of the book being recalled. Or maybe they just flew away.

  The article was by Niall Verde. Working back through the Crypt’s elaborate structure, which seemed to extend under a broad church, Paul found topics ranging from an early Gothic novel to a recent erotic vampire thriller. Verde was among the most frequent posters. His comments, always made in the early hours of the morning, were mostly concerned with how little “the herd” understood about “true weird fiction”. In the course of a bitter argument with another insomniac, he remarked that “visionary” works such as his own collection The Veil of Fail were doomed to oblivion because “writers who care more about creating great fiction than self-promotion will always be passed over.” There was a link to Verde’s personal website, but Paul had seen enough. He cleared the screen, then tried a search for Acheron Press. Much to his surprise, the imprint still existed. He wrote down the address, which was in Stafford.

  The train shuddered as it lost and gained speed, pausing between stations in a landscape of shut-down factories and empty fields. The view had been sprayed white and called morning, but he could see the night sky underneath. Then the young man sitting in front of him pulled down the grey curtain so he could read his phone. Paul closed his eyes and shivered. He didn’t want to be alone with his memories, because they couldn’t be relied on. The gaps were spreading, a ragged pattern of darkness like the wings on the cover of Midnight Flight.

  He’d written to Acheron Press, and a typed letter had come back with a shaky signature. The original publisher was still alive, though a decade older than Paul, and said he still got occasional queries about Midnight Flight. Their stock had been destroyed in a fire in 1971. There’d been some ex-libra
ry copies in circulation for a while. They’d never considered reprinting the book because, after the fire, they’d switched to publishing non-fiction – mostly natural history and Egyptology. The business was steadily winding down, though a few local societies and museums supported it.

  What had made Paul buy the train ticket was the news that Parr was still alive. The Acheron publisher still sent him occasional royalties for some entomology books he’d provided photographs for. Since 2006 he’d been living at a nursing home in Stoke-on-Trent. The publisher had commented: “He and I used to keep in touch, but these days I’m afraid he’s hardly there.”

  The train ground to a halt. Paul wiped his eyes with a hand that felt dry as paper. Surely this was the fool’s errand to end them all. A man losing his memory on a quest to find a man who’d already lost his own. He wanted to believe that Parr could help him find the book – or even tell him, from further down the road, where his own journey into darkness was heading. Perhaps this happened to everyone who’d read the book.

  Last night he’d sat by the phone, trying to remember his sister’s number or the number of anyone he knew. His address book had flown away months ago. Paul had lived alone since his teens. Hadn’t slept with a woman in thirty years, still missed it though he doubted much would happen if he got the chance. All in all, he’d rather miss things than forget what they were like. Hence the ticket.

  On the platform at Stoke, Paul was surprised how unsteady his legs were. As if not just the two-hour journey but the change of scene had affected his connection with the ground. He bought an A–Z map in the station newsagent, but couldn’t make out the street names.

  Outside the station everywhere seemed to be boarded up. He’d never find the way. It was hard enough with places he knew. Behind the derelict buildings, the illusion of daylight seemed more fragile than ever. He waved down a black cab and asked the driver for the Tyton Retirement Home.