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

by Jones, Stephen

  “Been away, have you?” the driver asked as Paul settled himself awkwardly in the back.

  “Yes.” Why not let him think that? If he said he didn’t live here, there would be questions he couldn’t answer. The cab swerved around potholes in the road, passed the grey skeletons of buildings. This might as well be his home: a town that had lost its sense of identity. He belonged here. The driver stopped at a traffic light; a young woman crossed the road, a phone pressed to the side of her face.

  The nursing home was a few miles out of town, where the dereliction was softened by the flame and rust of autumn trees. Dead leaves marked the road with an incomplete pattern. The cab’s wheels crunched on the gravel driveway. The building had a new white frontage, though its side was rotting grey brick. Paul paid the driver; it was almost all the cash he had.

  The young male nurse who answered the door stared at Paul as if trying to remember who he was. Paul knew how the lad felt. He said, “I’ve come to visit Mr Parr. Is he in?”

  The nurse nodded. “You’ll find him in room 17, ground floor.” As Paul moved towards the door, he added: “Have you booked?”

  “Sorry, no. I wasn’t sure when I’d get here.” The nurse looked like he was considering blocking the way, but then stepped aside at the last moment.

  The interior of the home was poorly lit and smelled like an old-fashioned dry cleaner. Mothballs, that was it. Pipes vibrated behind the walls. The dirt in the cracked floor-tiles suggested a partly-erased image. Most of the doors were shut, but the open ones leaked other smells: antiseptic, stale urine, bacon. A cry echoed through the narrow corridor, more like a seagull than a human voice.

  Room 17 was on the right, a long way into the building. Paul had to touch the raised number to make sure of it. The door was open by a crack. He pressed his shoulder to it and stepped through. A small room with a table and a few chairs, a bookcase, a TV set with the picture on but no sound. A flickering mercury light. Two shrunken figures in armchairs, not watching the TV. Neither of them moved as Paul entered the room.

  “Is Thom Parr in here?”

  The two men looked at each other. Then one of them pointed back over his shoulder. Paul realised there was a side room, or an alcove, with a vague shape just visible against a creased black curtain. “Thank you,” he said, and walked through.

  The stuttering of the light made it hard to understand what was there. The curtain was just random streaks of damp in the wall. The man seated in the chair, or rather held by it in a sitting position, was wrapped below the neck in a lace blanket. He was almost bald. His eyes were sunk so far into his narrow face that it took Paul a while to see that they were open.

  “Mr Parr? Hello?” The face didn’t stir. Paul looked closer. He could have been looking in a cracked and grimy mirror. “I’m a reader,” he said, and blushed with shame at the uselessness of that. “Are you okay?”

  There was no sound of breath. The old man’s lips trembled, but perhaps that was just the light. Paul reached out slowly and touched the side of his throat, where the pulse should be. The flesh was cold. He brushed a fingertip against the dry lips: no air movement. He wondered what he might have to do to be sure that Parr was dead. Maybe the problem was in himself.

  He reported the death back at the reception desk. They didn’t seem either surprised or upset. He asked if there was anyone who needed to be informed, and was told that Parr had no relatives and no property. Everything he owned had been sold to pay for his place at the retirement home.

  When Paul left, the daylight was fading. He felt drained by the effort of reporting the death, as if he’d used up his clarity of mind for the day. He’d better get back to the station, but that didn’t seem possible until he got his bearings. The still face drifted in front of him, shedding flakes of skin like dead leaves. His legs ached, but he couldn’t stop walking until the white building was out of sight. Then he walked on, looking for a sign.

  Woodland, reminding him of childhood walks with his parents. Later, with girlfriends, he’d stayed in the city, maybe walked hand in hand along the canal towpath. Never made love out of doors. But the smell of decaying leaves excited him for some reason he couldn’t explain. If only he could find the book, he could become Parr, not have to go home to a city he didn’t know any more.

  Not only his legs but his lungs ached, his hands were losing sensation, his throat was raw. But he couldn’t stop. As if there were wings at his back. Night was falling, crossing out the errors of daylight. Burning the page.

  At the edge of the wood, he reached a derelict house. Its doorway and windows were boarded up. Had Parr tried to sell it? He dimly remembered going into a derelict house on one of those childhood walks, finding a butterfly brooch, giving it to his mother. Black or dark blue. Had that happened, or was it a dream?

  Behind the house was a patch of waste ground. He couldn’t see where it ended, though he could hear running water. And a faint pulse, like the beating of wings. He could just make out a few dead trees in the half-light around him, with no leaves to shed. Had this been a garden? Was his real life coming to an end, as well as the false life in a city whose name he couldn’t remember? The ground was as cold as the thin face he’d touched. The pulsing of wings made him flatten himself against the dead grass and fragments of stone, the pattern he couldn’t see.

  Then the wings were above him, beating slowly in the dark, their edges brushing his face. The pages turning. The dark covers shutting out the town’s distant light. A clear memory came back to him: lying with his first girlfriend on a narrow bed, pinning back her wings of flesh with his tongue. Their hands locked together. And then the book folded around his body, and its dry pages gave the dust of their stories back to him.

  TIM LEBBON

  Trick of the Light

  TIM LEBBON IS A New York Times best-selling writer from South Wales. He has had thirty novels published to date, as well as dozens of novellas and hundreds of short stories.

  His latest novels include Coldbrook from Hammer/Arrow, The Heretic Land from Orbit, and London Eye: Toxic City Book One, the first in a new YA trilogy from Pyr. Other recent books include The Secret Journeys of Jack London series (co-authored with Christopher Golden), Echo City and The Cabin in the Woods movie novelisation.

  The Secret Journeys of Jack London is in development with 20th Century Fox. Several other projects are also at varying stages of movie development, and he is working on new screenplays, solo and in collaboration.

  Lebbon has won four British Fantasy Awards, a Bram Stoker Award and a Scribe Award, and he has been a finalist for the World Fantasy, International Horror Guild and Shirley Jackson Awards.

  “I often think the spookiest thing about a ghost story is the setting,” reveals the author. “So when I was asked by Jonathan Oliver at Solaris to write a haunted house story, I found myself dwelling more on the house than the ghost.

  “Buildings are home to histories, but is it our imaginations that project them? Or are they really there, in the fabric of the building, its dust-sheened floors, its still air?

  “Approach this from the viewpoint of a character already confused and on edge about where she is, and why, and ‘Trick of the Light’ is the result. I’m very pleased with the story, and delighted and proud to see it included herein.

  “It spooked me a little when I was writing it . . . and surely that’s a good sign.”

  IT WAS THE longest drive she had ever made on her own, and she so wanted the house to feel like home. But when she turned up the short driveway from the narrow country road, and the place revealed itself behind a riot of trees and bushes, Penny stopped the car and looked down into her lap.

  “Oh, Peter,” she said. In her mind’s eye he was smiling. But in his eyes there was no humour. Only a gentle mockery.

  I should never have come. I don’t belong here. Peter would have loved it, but I should be back at home in our nice little house, coffee brewing, patio doors open to the garden I made my own, and which sometimes he wou
ld sit in with a map book open on his lap, pretending to be with me but never quite there. I should never . . .

  Penny’s hands were clasped in her lap. She forced them apart and reached for the ignition, turning the keys and silencing the car’s grumble. It, like her, had never come so far.

  She looked up slowly at the house, trembling with a subdued fear of elsewhere that had been with her forever, but also a little excited too. This was her taking control. Her heart hurried, her stomach felt low and heavy, and she thought perhaps she might never be able to move her legs again. The mass of the house drew her with a gravity she had never been able to understand, but which now she so wanted to. For Peter’s memory, and for the short time she had left, she so wanted to understand.

  She had bought it because of its uniqueness. While it had a traditional-enough lower two levels – tall bay windows, stone walls, an inset oak front door, sandstone quoins – a tower rose a further two storeys, ending in a small circular room with a conical roof and dark windows.

  The estate agent had told her that an old boss of the coal mines had used the tower to oversee work in the valleys. The mines were long gone and the valleys changed, but Penny quite liked the grounding of this story. It gave the building a solid history, and that was good. Mystery had always troubled her.

  Beyond photographs, this was her first time seeing the house. Her first time being here, in her new home. She knew that Peter would have been impressed.

  “I think you’ll like it here,” she said, and as she reached for the door handle, a movement caught her eye. She leaned forward and looked up at the tower’s upper windows. Squinting against sunlight glaring from the windscreen, holding up one hand, she saw the smudge of a face pressed against the glass.

  “Oh!” Penny gasped. She leaned left and right, trying to change her angle of sight through the windscreen, but the face remained. It was pale and blurred by dust. She was too far away to see expression or distinctive features, but she had the impression that the mouth was open.

  Shouting, perhaps.

  Penny shoved the car door open and stood, shoes crunching on the gravel driveway, fully expecting the face to have vanished as she emerged from the vehicle’s warm protection. But it was still there.

  “Ah, Mrs Summers,” a voice said. A tall, thin man emerged from the front porch, and though she had not met him, she recognised her solicitor’s smooth manner and gentle voice. “Is there . . .?” He rushed to her, his concern almost comical.

  Dust, she thought. The shape was much less solid now.

  “Hello, Mr Gough.” She only glanced at him as she held out her hand, and he shook her hand whilst looking up at the tower.

  “A problem?” he asked. “Broken windows? A bird’s nest in the aerial?”

  “No,” Penny said. I did not see a face at the window. “No problem. Just a trick of the light.”

  Mr Gough’s affected concern vanished instantly, and his smile and smoothness returned. “It is a beautiful sunny day, isn’t it?”

  Penny did not reply. She approached her new home, and already she could hear the phone inside ringing.

  * * *

  Peter moves his food around the plate. Pork chops, boiled potatoes, carrots, cauliflower. He’s eaten some of the meat, and picks at where shreds are trapped between his teeth.

  “Fuck’s sake,” he says.

  “Peter, please don’t talk to me like that,” Penny says. Sometimes she thinks she would prefer outright anger, but Peter rarely loses his temper in front of her, and he has never touched her. Not in anger. And recently, not in any other way either.

  “It’s just . . .” He trails off, and she knows what he has to say.

  “It doesn’t appeal to me,” she says. “The heat, for one. Flies, midges, the diseases they carry. The toilets out there, and you know me and my stomach. The water . . . you can’t drink the water. And the sun is so strong. I burn just thinking about going out in the sun.”

  “All those things seem big to you now,” Peter says. She can hear his desperation and impatience. They have been through this so many times before.

  “I can’t help how I feel,” she says. It makes her sad, this gulf between them. It has always been present, but there were bridges – their love, the passion, and Peter sometimes going off on his own. But he says he cannot do that anymore. Says he needs her with him, now that he’s getting older. Just because he has changed, doesn’t mean she must too. The bridges are failing.

  “Just a week,” he says. “The food is amazing, and there’s this one place in the hills that is just perfect for watching the sunset.”

  “The food here is good,” Penny says, glancing down at his plate.

  “This crap?” He shoves his plate across the table. It knocks over a glass of water, and Penny shifts back on her chair to avoid getting soaked. He’ll apologise, she thinks, but something subtle has changed. “You just want to stay here in your little house, cooking the same food, watching TV, letting the world go by and watching . . . watching the sun set over the roof of your neighbours’ houses.”

  “Our neighbours,” she corrects him.

  “Fuck’s sake,” he says again. “It’s always been you living here, Penny. I just exist.”

  “I can’t help it if you want to—” she says, but Peter has already turned around and walked from the room. She hears him storming upstairs, opening and closing cupboards, and when he comes down again he is wearing his walking boots, trousers, and a fleece.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Somewhere,” he says. The gentle way he closes the front door is worse than a slam.

  Penny sits for a while, sad, analysing what has passed between them. Then she clears the table, makes a cup of tea, and turns on the TV in time for EastEnders.

  “I worry about you,” Belinda said.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Mum, you don’t sound fine.”

  “It was a long drive, that’s all, dear. And you know me, I haven’t driven that long in . . .” Ever, Penny thought. I’m further from home than I’ve ever been. She felt suddenly sick, and sat gently on the second stair.

  Take a rest, Peter says, tough voice soothing. Take the weight off.

  A shadow filled the doorway and Mr Gough paused, as if waiting for her permission. She waved without looking, and the shadow entered her house.

  “So the house?” Belinda asked.

  “Is beautiful. He’ll love it.” There was an awkward silence.

  “Russ and I will bring Flynn down for a visit next weekend.

  See if you’re settled all right, look around. Russ says to make a list of any jobs that need doing.”

  “I won’t have it that he’s dead,” Penny said. “You know that.”

  “Mum, it’s been over seven years. He’s been declared—”

  “I don’t care what some strangers declare about my husband. I’d know if he was dead, and I say he isn’t. He’s . . . gone somewhere, that’s all.”

  “What, for a long walk?”

  “Belinda.”

  “Sorry, Mum. But don’t talk as if you and Dad had some kind of special bond. We both know that isn’t really true, is it?”

  “It’ll be lovely to see Flynn,” Penny said. “The garden’s big enough to kick his football around. And can you ask Russ to bring some stuff for cleaning windows?”

  “I will, Mum.” Belinda’s voice was heavy with concern and frustration, but Penny was here now. She had made the break. Left her own home, bought somewhere unusual, twelve miles from the nearest town and without bringing her TV with her. The furniture was coming the following day, but she had brought with her everything she would need for her new life – walking boots, coat, and a map.

  “It’s not much, dear,” Penny said. “I know that. It’s not Cancun, or China, or an Antarctic cruise, or the Northern Lights, or any of those things he always wanted to do with me. But it’s something. It’s a small step on a longer journey. He’d be very surprised of me and . . . proud,
I think.”

  She glanced up at Mr Gough, listening and trying to appear distracted. And then she looked around the large hallway, three doors leading off into new rooms, timber floor scuffed, ceiling lined with old beams. “He’ll love it here.”

  “Okay, Mum. Just . . . call me if you need anything. Will you do that?”

  “Of course. Give my love to Russ and little Flynn.”

  “Love you, Mum. Really.”

  Belinda hung up first, and Penny could tell that her daughter had been starting to cry.

  “Would you like a tour?” Mr Gough said.

  Penny shook her head. “Just the keys, please.”

  “But you really should look at the tower, it’s a remarkable feature, makes the house—”

  “Really, I’m fine. Very tired.” Penny stood, wincing at the pain in her hips from the long drive.

  “Okay, then,” the solicitor said. Smile painted on, now. He handed her a set of keys, then a smaller set. “Spares.” He glanced around. “Lovely old place. You’re very lucky, Mrs Summers.”

  As he turned to leave, a sense of such profound terror and isolation struck Penny that she slumped back against the stair banister, grabbing hold as the house swam around her. She tried to call out, but her mouth was too dry. Help me! she thought, feeling a great weight of foreboding bearing down upon her. Up there, there’s something above, a terrible thing that is pressing down on me now I’m inside. Dusty windows, a trick of the light, but I can hear it up there, I can almost smell it, and I wish I was back in my garden with the roses and rhododendrons.

  Then the feeling started to filter away, and she knew that this was an important moment. She could give in to the terror and run. Or she could remain in her new home.

  There, there, Peter says, his rough working-man’s fingers stroking her cheek with infinite care and softness. Come on, my little rose. Don’t be afraid. You never have to be afraid when you’re with me. He has not spoken to her like this since they were in their twenties, madly in love and obsessed only with each other. I’ll never let anyone or anything hurt you.