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

by Jones, Stephen

  “Could just be some hot pixels on the sensor, maybe. Maybe a lens problem. But I have some pictures I took before and after, and they seem clean. That shadow you point out though . . . it’s obvious something’s not right. Bollocks. It’s quality glass that. Spent a fortune on it . . .”

  “I have to go,” Don said.

  Kerner nodded, smiled. His fingers fidgeted with the buttons on the camera body. “Adieu, caribou.”

  Go home. Leave this place. Let it sink into time, let it become a fossil in your memory.

  But how could it? This was as much Julie’s place as his now. They were inextricably linked by Sheckford, the things that happened to them here.

  He was back in his room, standing in front of the mirror, his shirt off, staring at his chest, willing the glow to reappear. It’s you, isn’t it? Julie?

  He switched on the light and his breath caught. Two shadows. But one was merely a copy of the other, bounced back by the silvered glass. He pressed his fingers against his skin and felt something hard. It was like a swelling. All of the other hotspots of pain in his skin sang out. He buttoned his shirt and returned to the bedroom. There was a sense of someone having just departed. The mattress seemed to be rising slightly, where it might have cushioned a body moments before. There was a slight shift in the temperature of the room. A microscopic change in its pressures.

  I want to go to the white I want to run through the snow

  The crystal snow globe had been so important to her. It had been with her for much of her life, and it had helped to end it too. She had often told him how lovely it would be to live in a snow globe, to be protected from all the evils in the outside world by that perfect glass. The silence, the beauty.

  He was out of the hotel and walking hard along the street before he had any concrete notion of where he was heading.

  His mind was filled with white.

  Mac let him through the gate but was unsympathetic when Don told him he might have lost his car keys in the cavern. “It’s not really my job to go hunting for lost property. I’m a security guard.”

  “I’ll go,” Don said.

  “I don’t think so. This isn’t a drive-through restaurant. You don’t just pop back whenever you feel like it.”

  A twenty-pound note changed his mind.

  Don steeled himself at the entrance, but only because the pain in his chest ramped up a notch. It was like heartburn, only a hundred times worse. He thought he might retch, but nothing would come when he leaned over. Something felt sharp just beneath the skin. Something was coming.

  He could hear the water ploughing over and under and through the rock as it had done for so many millions of years. It had churned through this cavern at the moment of his birth and at the moment of Julie’s death. He staggered along the pathway, grateful for its enormous sound; it meant he did not have to listen to his own skin tearing open.

  He reached the boulder choke and stared at the foot of it, where the tiny opening was like a pupil in a dead eye. He imagined great acres of untouched white crystal beyond it, like a field of virgin snow before the children have wakened, like Heaven.

  “Julie?” he called out, but his voice was unable to best the roar. It hurt too much to try again. He felt his chest fail, and lifted his hands as if he might prevent himself from tipping out on the cold, wet path. What was there in his chest cut his hand. Blood sped from him, slicking his fingers. It was difficult now, to find purchase on the slippery curve of the glass in him.

  He saw movement at the lip of the aperture. Julie? But of course it wasn’t. What could he have hoped from this? Julie was cold and dead as the piece of glass within him.

  Long, white nails attached to long white fingers. The skin of something eternally damp, of something that had never known sunlight. It skittered out, all elbows and fish-thin ribs pulsing beneath translucency. A sore-looking jaw, red-rimmed, loaded with icy needles that glittered like Hoar frost, splinters of the missing packed between them. It made a sound that was almost beyond a frequency audible to him. It sounded like metal scraped across glass. It turned an eye to him that was as pale as moonstones.

  Don turned to run, but his foot slid in his own filth. The chunk in his chest shifted. As he gripped it and pulled, closing his eyes to the terrible suck as the glass came free, the lights went out and it fell on him, all too keen to lend him its assistance.

  SIMON KURT UNSWORTH

  The Ocean Grand, North West Coast

  SIMON KURT UNSWORTH WAS born in Manchester in 1972. He currently lives on a hill in the north of England with his wife and child, where he writes essentially grumpy fiction (for which pursuit he was nominated for a 2008 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story).

  His work has been published in a number of critically acclaimed anthologies, including At Ease with the Dead, Shades of Darkness, Exotic Gothic 3, Gaslight Grotesque, Never Again and Lovecraft Unbound. He has also appeared in three previous volumes of The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and also The Very Best of Best New Horror.

  His first collection of short stories, Lost Places, was released by Ash-Tree Press in 2010, and his second, Quiet Houses, followed from Dark Continents Publishing a year later. A further collection, Strange Gateways, is now available from PS Publishing, with another set to launch the “Spectral Press Spectral Signature Editions” imprint in 2013.

  “‘The Ocean Grand, North West Coast’ first appeared in Quiet Houses, my portmanteau collection set as far as possible in real locales,” explains Unsworth. “This particular story is based on the Midland Hotel in Morecambe.

  “The Midland has a long and chequered history, and when I first went there ten years ago it was just before it closed amid accusations of mismanagement and ownership wrangles. Back then, it was a perfect example of faded seaside glamour; it had the most beautiful fixtures and fittings, but they were falling to pieces.

  “We used to go on Saturday evenings and have an after-dinner drink, sitting in a long glass corridor that extended across the rear of the hotel and gave out on magnificent views of Morecambe Bay and, in the distance, the Barrow headlands. It was always freezing in the sun corridor because the heating was never on and half the windows were broken, but it was worth it for the sight of the ocean and the sense of being somewhere that had a foot placed firmly within a magnificent past.

  “The story came about because I’d read Barry Guise and Pam Brook’s excellent history of the Midland, The Midland Hotel: Morecambe’s White Hope (Palatine Books, 2007) and it made me think about how buildings made to be full of people might feel if they were closed and empty, and about art created to be viewed being alone and going slowly, claustrophobically mad.

  “Gravette and Priest and the art they created for the Ocean Grand are very, very loosely based on the work and philosophies of the architect Oliver Hill and the artists Eric Gill and Marion Dorn, who designed and decorated the Midland originally. But mostly they’re my creations. Make of that what you will.

  “The Midland, after years of closure, has been completely refitted and has re-opened, and looks spectacular. I’d urge you to visit and to have a drink in the new sun corridor or a meal in one of the restaurants.

  “Me, I’m still a little nostalgic for those Saturday nights in the old sun corridor, when we had to keep our coats on because of the cold and when the wind danced in through the broken windows smelling of brine and sand.”

  Arrival; Initial Impressions

  MANDEVILLE TWISTED ON the key, hard, and felt it grate in the lock. With a final yank, it came around and then the Ocean Grand was open for the first time in fifteen years.

  The central door was large and heavy and, even unlocked, it took him several hard shoves to open it fully; it had swollen from the years of disuse, clinging and screeching as it moved and cutting tracks through the dirt on the floor. Pieces of crumpled paper shifted away in the light breeze that entered the hotel around Mandeville. Of course, he thought, it wasn’t really the first time the building had been open for fi
fteen years, and he had to be careful not to romanticise the experience or what he found inside. Safety assessors had been inside only recently and security checks were carried out monthly, but he was the first outsider to gain entrance since it had closed as a working site in the early 1990s.

  Actually, even that wasn’t quite true. A local television news team had accompanied one of the early safety crews and had filmed them placing boards over the wall murals and picture windows. Mandeville had a copy of the footage in his bag; in it, the unseen presenter talked about the glories and controversies of the art deco pieces that adorned the Grand’s walls whilst workmen nailed large boards over each piece “to protect it for the few months that the hotel was shut during its refit”. The “few months” had turned into almost two hundred, the refit had never occurred and the Grand had remained shut to everyone as it changed owners time and again in the intervening years. Until now.

  Behind Mandeville, Parry began to unload the van, dropping their gear onto the cracked surface of the car park and telling a joke to Yeoman, the third member of the self-dubbed “Save Our Shit Crew”. Mandeville could already smell the sharp tang of Yeoman’s cigarette, and he smiled to himself.

  Yeoman had said little on the journey, but his silence had become more pointed as they travelled and Parry refused to pull over for a rest stop, claiming that he was helping to break Yeoman’s habit by forcing him into periods of abstinence. Yeoman wouldn’t enter the Grand until he had smoked at least three cigarettes in the car park, Mandeville knew. It was an old routine, practised and refined over the previous years until they were all comfortable with it. Leaving them, Mandeville stepped forward into the Grand.

  The foyer was large and circular, with the wings branching off through large, arched entrances at his left and right. Opposite Mandeville, the reception desk hugged the curved rear wall, its surface thick with dust. The great staircase rolled around from Mandeville’s right, clinging to the wall as it rose before letting onto the floors above the reception. He could just see the dark smears of the doorways leading to the upper bar and the outdoor sun deck.

  Under his feet, the original wooden flooring was hidden under heavy linoleum, assuming it still existed at all. The light reaching him was dirty and dank; two storeys above him, the atrium’s great glass roof was mostly intact but had been covered from the outside with wooden sheets. Where these had peeled back or broken, allowing the light to enter, he saw a film of dirt and old leaves covering the glass.

  Clicking on his torch, he let the beam play across the roof’s frame. It looked to be in fairly good condition, all things considered. There were rust patches, not unexpected given the Grand’s coastal location, and several of the more delicate sections of the pattern looked to be twisted out of shape. Some of the glass had been removed by the safety team; other panes, he knew, had fallen in long ago, the coloured glass swept up and discarded.

  “Can we come in yet?”

  “No,” said Mandeville. He wanted to savour this; he felt like a time traveller, stepping back into a past placed in storage and only now being brought back to use.

  The Ocean Grand had been decaying for years, not just for the fifteen it had been closed and its ownership a fluid thing; even when it had been open, the rising costs of maintaining a building that had so many unique features had led to a legacy of mismanagement, cost-cutting and barely done repairs, of unique fixtures and fittings falling into disuse, of damage, of art lost and stolen and sold. The Ocean Grand was a part of England’s industrial and cultural heritage, abused and battered and only now receiving the attention it deserved.

  Mandeville and his small team had to find out how bad things were in the Grand, catalogue what remained, and work out what could be saved and what was gone.

  Even in the foyer, Mandeville could see evidence of the neglect. There should have been ten balustrade tops in the “primitive figures” style, cast in metal and spaced every five feet up the staircase, but three were missing. Sections of the reception desk’s ornate wooden panelling had been replaced with plain wood sheets and, worst of all, the large panels of the Gravette mural that should have faced the guests as they approached the reception desk were gone.

  Mandeville knew two were in storage in London; the other two were missing, presumably destroyed or taken when the mural was removed in the early 1980s rather than pay for its professional renovation. There was always someone prepared to buy an original Gravette, even one that was painted on a twenty-foot by six-foot wooden panel and which was only actually a quarter of the whole piece.

  To the left of the reception desk was the entrance to the restaurant and, beyond it, the sun corridor. Moving to the doorway, Mandeville saw immediately that sections of the intricate floor designed by Constance Priest were gone. Created by using nearly four thousand handmade tiles, its pattern should have covered the floor, an interlocking swirl of lines and blooms suggesting water, air and life. However, some of the tiles had been replaced by ones that only almost matched and whose colours, size or patterning was just off-kilter. Other tiles had been replaced by plain squares which cut into Priest’s patterns clumsily, disrupting its movement.

  Mandeville sighed to see it.

  Tables, cheap Formica models with spindle legs, were piled against the walls like the skeletons of long-dead animals. In the sunlight, the floor pattern and the shadows from the tables merged at the corners of the room, bleeding together in black clots.

  The doors to the sun corridor were open and through them, Mandeville could see the grey ocean churning beyond its glass walls. He walked towards it, his feet crunching on the grit and dirt on the floor, and peered into the glass corridor.

  A later addition to the Grand, running the length of its rear, the 1950s structure had suffered badly from neglect during the previous years. Streaks of rust crawled down the glass from metal struts that were losing an uneven battle against the corroding, salt-laden atmosphere. Several of the panes were broken and had been replaced by plywood sheets. More sheets lay piled against the seaward wall, having been removed from the windows at Mandeville’s request. Apart from the roof in the foyer, all the windows that had complete glass panes had been uncovered so that the Crew could work in daylight where possible.

  Mandeville was about to leave the sun lounge when he noticed something beyond the glass. No, not beyond the glass, on it: swirls of colour, so incredibly pale as to be almost invisible, but present nonetheless. An arc of red and green straddled the pane nearest to him, blue and red in the next pane along.

  Stepping close, he ran his fingers across the glass, leaving streaks along the surface. Looking at his fingertips, he saw that the ovals of grime below his nails also contained tiny flashes of colour. Paint? he wondered, sniffing at it. Had someone sprayed or splashed paint on the windows in the past and then tried to wipe it off? Vandalism? He would check with Parry, see if there was a record of that kind of damage; God alone knew what other problems they would come across in here.

  Turning, he called for his colleagues.

  Setting Up; Working the Hotel; Cataloguing

  Parry, the Crew’s archivist and researcher, had set up in the foyer. Laid out across the floor were photocopies and typed sheets, indicating precisely what the Crew was to look for and where within the Grand it was, how it was made and the materials used. Where makers were known, this was indicated as well.

  Yeoman, the architect, who had less to do in this initial phase, was setting up a base camp in the restaurant.

  The Crew was staying in the hotel, sleeping in the open expanse of the empty dining area to save time. There was a lot to do, and they had only a week to do it before the owners wanted an initial report. In seven days, Mandeville had to be able to make recommendations about the order of jobs and which parts of the hotel’s original decorations could be preserved or restored and incorporated into the latest developments planned for the hotel. It was a big job, the biggest the Crew had taken on.

  Mandeville was re-reading th
e initial site assessment carried out by the owner’s own assessors. There were a couple of areas in the hotel the Crew had been instructed to stay away from (the kitchen; not an issue as there was nothing in there for them to assess according to Parry, and a first floor bathroom whose floor was rotten but which Mandeville did want to check out if he could).

  Up or down? he asked himself. Top or bottom first? Finally, he chose bottom simply because the closest of what Parry called his “Interest Lists” dealt with ground floor.

  Taking the sheet of paper, Mandeville moved into one of the Grand’s lower corridors.

  Parry was in the top corridor. Unlike Mandeville, the artist and restorer, or Yeoman the architect, Parry was a historian and he simply wanted to see what remained of the hotel’s past. Of course, the great delight in being part of the Save Our Shit Crew was that sometimes they could persuade those designers of the present and the future to save or incorporate the past into their plans.

  Take this place, for example; the Ocean Grand. Originally owned by one of Britain’s smaller rail companies, the Grand was the crowning glory of the artists Howard Gravette and Marie Priest, and the only hotel they had ever designed. Working with the architect, Edward Manning, they had created a small, opulent establishment, intended for the moneyed classes. Its every element was part of a unified, intelligent whole, creating a unique holiday venue that had been popular in the periods just before and after the First World War.

  Manning’s architecture and Gravette and Priest’s designs incorporated the ideas and principles of the art deco movement, blending them with, in particular, Gravette’s ideas of art as a reflection of what he called “the lived life”.

  Aided by Priest’s skills in the use of pattern and intricate textile work, Gravette’s intense, layered artwork utilised images from both the natural and industrial worlds, turning the Grand into a building that was, in a review of the time, “simply astonishing” and which celebrated both mankind’s move towards an industrialised society and the supremacy of the natural world.