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

by Jones, Stephen

  “Something?” asked Yeoman loudly. His breath smelled of cigarettes and sour air and tiredness.

  “Something,” repeated Mandeville. “Three somethings, actually. Look.”

  Yeoman sat up in bed, rubbing his hands through his beard with a noise like sandpaper rustling. Whatever it was circling the room, they reacted to the noise, coming in closer, still just out of reach of the light, still mere blackness against blackness, moving with an increasingly rapid tactactactac sound.

  “What the fuck?” said Yeoman, finally seeing them. “What are they?”

  “Don’t know,” said Mandeville. “Have you got the torch?”

  “Yeah,” said Yeoman and began rooting on the floor. Finally, with a muffled grunt that might have been the words “found it”, he emerged holding the large lantern torch they used at night.

  The things were moving faster and faster around them, passing each other, getting lower, still impossible to see other than the movement, the rapid circling centring in on the two men, purposeful and raw.

  There was a click as Yeoman turned the light on, the beam at first glancing into Mandeville’s eyes and then upwards, leaving him dazzled, before dropping and gleaming out into the room, catching in its gaze the things that moved about them.

  Yeoman screamed.

  Mandeville fled as things that could not be, impossible things, came streaking across the space towards Yeoman in a matter of seconds, brown and lithe in the jerking, spastic light from the torch, and fell upon him.

  As Mandeville reached the entrance to the sun corridor, Yeoman shrieked, once, the sound cutting off with a noise like tearing paper.

  The sun corridor was deserted, silent apart from the frenzied fall of his own feet, and Mandeville ran. The large panes were covered, he saw, in blurred silhouettes, arms outstretched as though trying to embrace the world beyond, overlapping and chaotic, a silent audience for his flight.

  Ripping sounds danced around him, roars and snarls and, once, a sharp, heavy crack, and he ran faster. Through the empty games room and out, along the corridor and into the foyer towards the door, but he was already too late, one of the shapes was there before him, drained to a grimy sepia by the light from above them except around its mouth, where a rich redness pooled and dripped.

  It came from the restaurant, cutting off his passage to the door, forcing him to shift direction, to go towards the stairs.

  He hit them at a stumbled run, leaping two or three at a time as the thing streaked towards him, emitting a noise like an escalating fire siren. Its feet (claws, he told himself, disbelieving, they’re claws) skittered as it ran, the nightmarish tactactactac getting closer and closer.

  At the top of the stairs, Mandeville hesitated briefly. The bar was open ahead of him, but he would be trapped in there. The panel that had nearly fallen on him was leaning in the doorway where he had propped it earlier in the day, its face now blank, the wood smooth and unsullied.

  The tactactactac was getting louder behind him, closer, the fire-whistle sound of the impossible thing’s growling surrounding him, and then there was light from above him.

  It wasn’t light, though, not really; more a kind of greasy glow that clung to the walls, dripping from above him, from the upper flights of stairs, from above the second floor in the shadows that clung to the opening of the third floor. In the opening, the darkness seemed to close itself up like a fan, solidifying into a figure that emerged from the doorway, waving at him.

  He started towards it and then, shrieking, the thing from below was on him.

  Despite the champagne, Parry couldn’t sleep. Even when Yeoman started snoring (which, oddly, he found a reassuring rather than an irritating sound), he found himself lying awake, teasing at something. He couldn’t work out what it was, not exactly; they’d uncovered the pictures that formed The Stations of the Way and found them in almost perfect condition, true, so he should be celebrating, yes?

  No.

  Something about the top corridor, about this whole place, bothered him. Despite what he had said earlier, flushed with success and alcohol, he wasn’t sure about recreating Gravette and Priest’s masterwork in its entirety.

  It seemed too intense, almost extremist in its views; it was everywhere, when you looked. From the panels and pictures on all the floors to the design of the taps to the carpeting along the corridors (which no longer existed but which pictures showed had consisted of a complex paisley pattern of interlocking, swirling stems and buds which Priest had called “cunts and pricks” in one of her notebooks), this place wasn’t so much a homage to the supremacy of life and procreation over industrialisation as it was a proselytisation of it.

  The Stations of the Way was a good example: taken by itself, it was simply a series of pictures that between them formed a narrative, one of returning to recognise the beauty of nature and God’s place within it.

  The religious allegory was unsubtle, and the pictures themselves beautifully done, some of Gravette’s best work. But, read another way, they were something more.

  Gravette and Priest had fucked in every room on the third floor once the pictures were set in place, and there were persistent rumours that Gravette had mixed his semen and Priest’s menstrual blood into his paints. Early sketches showed that the original ideas for the Stations pictures were far more graphic, with the angels of sea and air having sex with the woman, transporting her to God’s side in a storm of sexual energy and passion and lust.

  The woman. It was the woman in the pictures that bothered him, he suddenly realised. Getting out of his sleeping bag, he pulled on his shoes and went to his untidy pile of folders and photocopies and prints.

  The problem was that the art in the Grand hadn’t ever been formally catalogued, and most of it wasn’t recorded anywhere, so his research had had, by necessity, to travel circuitous routes to find the information they needed.

  As well as Gravette’s and Priest’s notebooks, he had scoured old newspaper articles, private photograph collections and what little television appearances the Grand had made to try to get an accurate picture of its inside.

  Leafing through the papers, he came across the screen grabs from the television documentary about the Grand’s closure, eight of them that showed in not particularly good details some of the pictures from the third floor. Looking at them by torchlight, prints from a not very high quality source document, he saw what bit it was that had been bothering him.

  The pictures were different.

  The positioning of the characters within the pictures was the same, their layout and structure unchanged, but the woman and the creatures that surrounded her were definitely altered.

  Christ, had someone removed the originals, replacing them with fakes? Only, that didn’t feel right either; the boards covering the pictures had looked to be the originals from the documentary, filmed just after the Grand finally closed and the pictures themselves were, he would have sworn, original Gravettes.

  This made no sense, none.

  Taking the prints and the torch, Parry went out into the Grand.

  The pictures were definitely different, every one of them that he could make comparisons for. In the prints he held, the woman and the creatures, both the ones that emerged from the air and the water, were painted as innocents. They had wide eyes, almost perfectly round (like anime characters, Parry suddenly thought, wondering if there was a research paper there, looking at the shorthand artists of different ages used to depict innocent and vitality), looking back at the observer as they viewed the pictures.

  Now, though, that had changed. The woman looked past the viewer, her eyes no longer open wide but narrowed, focused on something over the viewer’s shoulder. The undersea creatures, although not completely anthropomorphic, had flickers of recognisable emotion painted across their features, mouths twisting in anger or frustration, arms and fins and tentacles curling around the woman not in support but in possessive twists, as though holding her back and preventing her from escaping.


  The later pictures in the series, the ones with the woman being elevated into the sky and surrounded by things that might have been angels, or man’s better nature freed from the shackles of the flesh, showed the woman still looking back out of the pictures, still staring at something beyond Parry, beyond the Grand itself.

  The angels looked cold, emotionless, their hands taut upon the woman’s body but the expressions on their faces supercilious and dismissive.

  Parry had reached the end of the corridor, had studied each of the pictures as best he could in torchlight, and he was convinced that they were the work of Gravette. They were technically skilled, full of subtleties and tight, hidden details that only emerged when you looked at them for longer periods, but they weren’t the pictures that had been nailed behind cheap boards of wood fifteen or more years back.

  Had the owners pulled some kind of switch? But why? What would be the point, when they could have merely taken the pictures? He’d have to tell Mandeville, let the owners know, assuming they weren’t already aware of the changes.

  He made to go back down the corridor when he stopped. Was something moving down there, in the tar-like shadows that pooled along the edges of the floor? And there? There?

  Everywhere?

  As Parry watched, something glistening detached from one of the pictures and drifted to the floor in the centre of the corridor. It rippled and swelled as it fell, floated really, dancing in the air as more fell from every picture along the corridor.

  Soon the corridor was full of the things, gossamer and glimmering. Some of them moved along the floor after they descended, slithering to the edges of the walls and joining the shadows, thickening them, making them pulse and bulge.

  It was oddly beautiful, the descents drifting, slow, tracing gentle parabolas through the corridor before alighting with a touch that appeared as delicate as the spinning of feathers or the kiss of elegant mouths.

  Soon, the corridor was full of them, pressing out from the walls, swelled by the arrival of more and more of the things.

  In the centre of the corridor, the first shape he had seen was now moving, not to the side but away from him, along the carpeted floor towards the stairway. As it went, it coalesced, drawing in seemingly identical shapes that were standing ahead of it. Parry counted three, four, ten, fourteen, and as they merged the remaining moving shape became more solid, more real.

  Parry made out the curve of buttocks, the sway of full breasts, the outstretching of arms, and the opening of hands, and then something else was moving.

  A long tendril came out of the shadow by Parry’s side, solidifying as though it was drawing itself together from the thinner shapes, languidly curling in the air above his head. It tapered down to a delicate point, he saw, trembling as though sniffing the atmosphere. As it broadened, became fatter and more solid, pale discs emerged across its underside, shivering and clenching wetly.

  It’s a tentacle, he thought to himself, but before he had time to scream, it had dropped onto him and wrapped around his neck.

  It hurt, crashing into Mandeville’s legs and knocking him to the floor. He braced himself for further attack, but whatever it was simply flung him out of the way, growling, and dashed on. It hit the wooden panel leaning just inside the doorway, sending it spinning on one edge before it fell, ending up propped between the two sides of the doorframe, canted at a drunken angle.

  Where it had been blank before, the wood now contained a carving of a huge jungle cat, not a tiger or a lion exactly, but a creature that was an amalgam of those and others.

  Fierce nature, Mandeville thought wildly, Gravette’s fierce nature, hunted and abused but never cowed. Would two other panels in the bar be blank if he went in and looked at them? He suspected so.

  His legs were bleeding, although the tears in his skin didn’t feel deep. Mandeville rolled and then stood, unsteadily, leaning on the wall for support.

  The panel in the doorway swayed, making the cat’s face emerge and vanish into the bar’s darkness, as though it was rocking back and forth and considering him quizzically.

  From below, in the foyer, came the sound of a distant train, the noise ascending, dopplering and then muffling within the space of a moment.

  Going into the tunnel, he thought as the noise started again. In and out, in and out.

  The other two cats were there, and God knew what else. He looked back up at the waving figure; it had emerged and was now standing at the top of the stairs, still waving, beckoning him upwards.

  It was the woman.

  Even in the grey light filtering through the glass ceiling, she seemed to glow all colours, casting her illumination about her the way great art did. And she was great art, he understood suddenly, perhaps the greatest there was.

  He began to move to her, wincing as he climbed the stairs. Where else could he go?

  As he approached, she moved back, returning to the corridor where her glow danced about her like distant, guttering flames. As he reached the corridor entrance, he saw movement beyond her.

  At the far end of the third floor, almost lost to the darkness that pooled there like spilled paint, Parry was sitting against the wall as a myriad tentacles clenched about him. The largest was wrapped around his neck, was pulled so taut that the skin either side of the tentacle bulged, bloody and mottled.

  The air around Parry was filled with moving, darting shapes, fins lifting and dropping and mouths open wide. As Mandeville watched, a larger shape emerged, conical, mouth agape, and tore into Parry’s side, shaking him like a rag doll, tearing a piece from him and disappearing back into the darkness.

  Parry twitched spastically, blood spraying from him but not falling to the floor, instead floating around him, breathed in by the fish and the octopuses and squid and the things without names that scuttled and bobbed and feasted upon him.

  Parry managed to twist his head, despite the ever-tightening arm of the octopus that was wrapped around his neck and whose bulbous body was drifting in the air above him. For a moment he was looking directly at Mandeville, his eyes desperate, and then the contact was gone as he was twisted further around.

  Mandeville didn’t move. After all, what could he do?

  There were none of the angels in the corridor, he suddenly realised, and just as quickly the realisation came that they were only metaphors, not alive in the way that the cats, the train that was in fact a prick, the undersea creatures were. They were intellect and spirituality, not flesh and lusts and desires and passions and things to worship. They weren’t alive in the way that she was, the woman.

  She was standing in the centre of the corridor, her arms outstretched as though to show him the things that belonged to her, and they did belong to her, he saw; they moved around her, never touching her, always giving her space.

  It’s how they’ve been painted, he realised, to worship her. If she’s a female archetype, then those other things are men, sleek and brutal and driven by lust and greed and desire, and between them they make . . . what?

  She was approaching him again now, moving down the corridor as though carried by currents that he could not feel, moving towards him, beautiful and austere and suddenly he wanted her, was hard and sweating despite the pain in his legs and the part of him that even now was calling for his attention, was screeching its fear of this impossible situation.

  She came closer still, her features resolving, streaks forming on her skin in a pattern of delicate brushstrokes. Her hair moved in clumps, strands matted together, painted together. Her arms were outstretched and suddenly Mandeville thought about her, about her pressing herself against the glass of the sun corridor, about her seeing the outside world at night and spending most of her time trapped under boards, locked inside the paint, alive and claustrophobic and alone except for creatures without mouths or intellects, just cocks made to love her.

  How terrible must her life have been these last years, he suddenly thought, trapped here day in night out, with no one to look at her, no one to feast
themselves upon her, how awful it must have been.

  And what damage had it done to her?

  Her face twisted into a snarl as she came, lips drawing back from teeth that seemed suddenly too large and too white and too hard, her arms stretching forward, the skin of her hands broken by paintbrush swirls that reminded Mandeville of the sucking pads of the octopuses and squid that served attendance upon her.

  Sharks darted between her legs, and still she came and Mandeville saw the hate in her eyes, the desperation to hold him and own him, to take him from the outside and bring him in and keep him so that he, too, could look at her and worship her, and he turned and ran.

  The two cats were waiting for him on the stairs between the foyer and first floor, brown and wooden yet terribly fluid, moving back and forth with a restless energy. Trapped between them and her, Mandeville stopped on the first floor and turned a full circle, looking for an escape route.

  The bar was blocked to him; the third cat still stood in its entrance, back on its board but its mouth open in a rictus of teeth and ravenous appetite. He debated running back to the second floor, losing himself in the place where Gravette and Priest’s hold had been comprehensively removed, but the woman was already between him and it.

  A vast octopus, stretching an impossible height from the floor, moved behind her, its black eyes gleaming, and around it circled the sharks and the smaller fish. She was smiling, possessive, absolute, still coming on, placid and inexorable.

  That left only the sun deck.

  Mandeville ran to it, crashing against the door and forcing the cheap lock in one stumbled fall of his body weight. One of the cats leaped at him, snagging its teeth into his leg, but its grip was weak and he managed to kick it off. The octopus came past the woman, spreading its arms in an effort to reach him but he ran, dodging past it and out onto the wooden apron of the deck.

  He had time to wonder why, if they wanted to get out, the woman and her entourage didn’t simply come out here, and then he was at the concrete wall with its pictures that moved as he saw them, writhing and trying to grasp at him, and then he was over the wall and was airborne.