The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2002, Volume 13

by Stephen Jones

  Barry bellowed their names and waved until his finger sprinkled the wall with a Morse phrase in blood. None of this was any use. Members of the crowd scowled along the alley at him while the vendors around him glared at him as if he was somehow giving them away. As he fell silent, the personal stereos renewed their bid for audibility. Wasn’t the one at the front of the stall playing his favourite album? He could have taken it for the stereo he’d left in the apartment. He reached for the headphones, but the stall-holder, whose leathery face seemed to have been shrivelled in the course of producing an unkempt greyish beard, tapped his arm with a jagged fingernail. ‘Buy, you listen,’ he said.

  Barry had no idea what he was being told, and suddenly no wish to linger. He might have enough of a problem at the apartments, since he hadn’t brought a key with him. Best to save his energy in case he needed to persuade the owner to admit him to his room, he thought as he toiled past the final stall. It was heaped with suitcases, three of which reminded him of his and Paul’s and Derek’s. Of course there must be many like them, which was why he’d wrapped the handle of his case in bright green tape. Indeed, a greenish fragment adhered to the handle of the case that resembled his so much.

  As he leaned forward to confirm what he could hardly believe, the stall-holder stepped in front of him. He wore a sack-like garment that hid none of the muscles and veins of his arms. His small dark thoroughly hairy face appeared to have been sun-dried almost to the bone, revealing a few haphazard blackened teeth. His eyes weren’t much less pale and cracked and blank than the wall behind him. ‘You want?’ he said.

  ‘Where’d you get these?’

  ‘Very cheap. Not much use.’

  The man was staring so hard at him he could have intended to deny Barry had spoken. Barry was about to repeat himself louder when he heard a faint sound above the awning, and raised his unsteady head to see the owner of the Summit Apartments watching him with a loose lopsided smile from an upper window. ‘What do you know about it?’ Barry shouted.

  If the man responded, it wasn’t to him. He addressed at least a sentence to the stall-holder, whose gaze remained fixed on Barry while growing even blanker. Barry was about to retreat downhill in search of his friends when he noticed that the vendors he’d encountered in the lesser market had been drawn by the argument or, to judge by their purposeful lack of expression, by whatever the man at the window had said. ‘All right. Forget it. I will,’ Barry lied and moved away from them.

  At first he only walked. He’d reached the first alley that led to the topmost section of the main market when the owner of the Summit Apartments blocked the far end. Sandalled footsteps clattered after Barry, who almost lost the remains of his balance as he twisted to see the vendors filling the width of the street. An understated trail of blood led through the dust to him. He sprinted then, but so did his pursuers with a clacking of their sandals, and the owner of the apartments managed to arrive at the next alley as he did. Above it there were only houses that scarcely looked entitled to the name, with rubbish piled against their closed doors, their windows either shuttered or boarded up. A few dizzy panting hundred yards took him beyond them to the top of the hill.

  Two policemen were smoking on it. Though he saw nothing to hold their attention, they had their backs to him. Beyond the hill there was very little to the landscape, as if it had put all its effort into the tourist area. It was the colour of sun-bleached bone, and scattered with rubble and the occasional building, more like a chunk of rock with holes in. A few trees seemed hardly to have found the energy to raise themselves, let alone grow green. Closer to the hill, several goats waited to be fed or slaughtered. Barry was vaguely aware of all this as he hurried to the policemen. ‘Can you help?’ he gasped.

  They turned to bristle their moustaches at him. It didn’t matter that they were the policemen he’d encountered earlier, he told himself, nor did their sharing a fat amateur cigarette. ‘All my stuff is in the market,’ he said. ‘I know who took it, and not just mine either.’

  The officer who’d previously spoken to him held up one large weathered palm. Barry kept going, since the gesture was directed at his pursuers. ‘You come,’ the man urged him.

  Barry had almost reached him when the policemen moved apart, revealing a stout post, a larger version of those to which the goats were tethered. He saw the other officer nod at the small crowd – more than Barry had noticed were behind him. As the realization swung him around, his hands were captured, handcuffed against his spine and hauled up so that the chain could be attached to a rusty hook on the post. ‘What are you doing?’ Barry felt incredulous enough to waste time asking before he began to shout, partly in the hope that there were tourists close enough to hear him. ‘Not me. I haven’t done anything. It was him from the Summit. It was them. Don’t let them get away.’

  The stall-holders from the cheapest region of the market were wandering downhill, leaving the owner of the apartments together with three other people as huge and glistening. The only woman looked pained by Barry’s protests or at least the noise of them. The policemen deftly emptied his pockets, and while the man who’d spoken to him in the market pocketed his cash, the other folded the traveller’s cheques in half and stuffed them in Barry’s mouth. Barry could emit no more than a choked gurgle past the taste of cardboard as the Summit man waddled up to squeeze his chest in both hands and tweak his nipples. ‘You nice,’ he told Barry as he made way for the others to palpate Barry’s shrinking genitals and in the woman’s case to emit a motherly sound at his injured finger before sucking it so hard he felt the nail pull away from the quick. All this done, the four began to wave obese wads of money at the policemen and at one another. Barry was struggling both to spit out the gag and to disbelieve what was taking place when he saw three girls appear where the houses gave way to rubble.

  The girl in the middle was Janet. Presumably she hadn’t been to bed, since she was wearing the same clothes and supporting or being supported by her friends, or both. They looked as if they couldn’t quite make out the events on top of the hill. Barry threw himself from side to side and did his utmost to produce a noise that would sound like an appeal for help, but succeeded only in further gagging himself. He saw Janet blink and let go of one of her friends in order to shade her eyes. For an instant she seemed to recognize him. Then she stumbled backwards and grabbed at her companions. The three of them staggered around as one and swayed giggling downhill.

  If he could believe anything now, he wanted to think she hadn’t really seen him or had failed to understand. He watched the bidding come to an end, and felt as though it concerned someone other than himself or who had ceased to be. The woman plodded to scrutinize him afresh, pinching his face between a fat clammy finger and thumb that drove the gag deeper into his mouth. ‘Will do,’ she said, separating her wad into halves that the policemen stuffed into their pockets.

  While she lumbered downhill the owner of the apartments handed Barry’s passport to the policeman who had never spoken to him, and who clanked open a hulk of a lighter to melt it. The last flaming scrap curled up in the dust as the woman reappeared in a dilapidated truck. The policemen lifted Barry off the post and slung him into the back of the vehicle and slammed the tailgate. The last he saw of them was their ironic dual salute as the truck jolted away. Sweat and insects swarmed over him while the animal smell of his predecessor occupied his nostrils and the traveller’s cheques turned to pulp in his mouth as he was driven into the pitiless voracious land.

  PAUL McAULEY

  The Two Dicks

  PAUL MCAULEY HAS WORKED AS a researcher and lecturer in biology in various universities before becoming a full-time writer. His novels and short stories have won the Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, John W. Campbell and British Fantasy awards. His latest novel, Whole Wide World, is a near-future thriller set in London and Cuba.

  McAuley’s other books include Four Hundred Billion Stars, Fairyland, The Secret of Life and his acclaimed ‘The Book of Confluen
ce’ trilogy, Child of the River, Ancients of Days and Shrine of Stars.

  ‘I meet up with a bunch of North London writers every other Friday for lunch and catharsis,’ the author reveals. ‘I owe the title of the story to one of them, the great American ex-pat Jay Russell.’

  PHIL IS FLYING. He is in the air, and he is flying. His head full of paranoia blues, the Fear beating around him like black wings as he is borne above America.

  The revelation came to him that morning. He can time it exactly: 0948, March 20, 1974. He was doing his programme of exercises as recommended by his personal trainer, Mahler blasting out of the top-of-the-line stereo in the little gym he’d had made from the fifth bedroom. And in the middle of his second set of sit-ups something goes off in his head. A terrifically bright soundless explosion of clear white light.

  He’s been having flashes – phosphene after-images, blank moments of calm in his day – for about a month now, but this is the spiritual equivalent of a hydrogen bomb. His first thought is that it is a stroke. That his high blood pressure has finally killed him. But apart from a mild headache he feels perfectly fine. More than fine, in fact. Alert and fully awake and filled with a great calm.

  It’s as if something took control of me a long time ago, he thinks. As if something put the real me to sleep and allowed a constructed personality to carry on my life, and now, suddenly, I’m fully awake again. The orthomolecular vitamin diet, perhaps that did it, perhaps it really did heighten synchronous firing of the two hemispheres of my brain. I’m awake, and I’m ready to put everything in order. And without any help, he thinks. Without Emmet or Mike. That’s important.

  By this time he is standing at the tall window, looking down at the manicured lawn that runs out from the terrace to the shaggy hedge of flowering bougainvillea, the twisty shapes of the cypresses. The Los Angeles sky pure and blue, washed clean by that night’s rain, slashed by three white contrails to make a leaning A.

  A for affirmation, perhaps. Or A for act.

  The first thing, he thinks, because he thinks about it every two or three hours, because it has enraged him ever since Emmet told him about it, the very first thing I have to do is deal with the people who stole my book.

  A week ago, perhaps inspired by a precursor of the clear white flash, Phil tried to get hold of a narcotics-agent badge, and after a long chain of phone calls managed to get through to John Finlator, the deputy narcotics director, who advised Phil to go straight to the top. And he’d been right, Phil thinks now. If I want a Fed badge, I have to get it from the Man. Get sworn in or whatever. Initiated. Then deal with the book pirates and those thought criminals in the SFWA, show them what happens when you steal a real writer’s book.

  It all seemed so simple in the afterglow of revelation, but Phil begins to have his first misgivings less than an hour later, in the taxi to LAX. Not about the feeling of clarity and the sudden energy it has given him, but about whether he is making the best use of it. There are things he’s forgotten, like unformed words on the tip of his tongue. Things he needs to deal with, but he can’t remember what they are.

  He is still worrying at this, waiting in line at the check-in desk, when this bum appears right in front of him, and thrusts what seems like an unravelling baseball under Phil’s nose.

  It is a copy of the pirated novel: Phil’s simmering anger reignites, and burns away every doubt.

  It is a cheap paperback printed by some backstreet outfit in South Korea, the thin absorbent paper grainy with wood specks, a smudged picture of a castle silhouetted against the Japanese flag on the cover, his name far bigger than the title. Someone stole a copy of Phil’s manuscript, the one he agreed to shelve, the one his publishers paid handsomely not to publish in one of those tricky deals Emmet is so good at. And some crook, it still isn’t completely clear who, published this cheap completely illegal edition. Emmet told Phil about it a month ago, and Phil’s publishers moved swiftly to get an injunction against its sale anywhere in the USA. But thousands of copies are in circulation anyway, smuggled into the country and sold clandestinely.

  And the SFWA, Phil thinks, the Science Fiction Writers of America, Emmet is so right about them, the Swine Fucking Whores of Amerika, they may deny that they have anything to do with the pirate edition, but their bleatings about censorship and their insidious promotion of this blatant violation of my copyright proves they want to drag me down to their level.

  Me: the greatest living American novelist. Erich Segal called me that only last month in a piece in The New York Review of Books; Updike joshed me about it during the round of golf we played the day after I gave that speech at Harvard. The greatest living American novelist: of course the SFWA want to claim me for their own propaganda purposes, to pump my life’s blood into their dying little genre.

  And now this creature has materialized in front of Phil, like some early version or failed species of human being, with blond hair tangled over his shoulders, a handlebar moustache, dressed in a buckskin jacket and faded blue jeans like Hollywood’s idea of an Indian scout, a guitar slung over his shoulder, fraying black sneakers, or no, those were his feet, bare feet so filthy they looked like busted shoes. And smelling of pot smoke and powerful sweat. This aborigine, this indigent, his hand thrust towards Phil, and a copy of the stolen novel in that hand, as he says, ‘I love this book, man. It tells it like it is. The little men, man, that’s who count, right? Little men, man, like you and me. So could you like sign this for me if it’s no hassle . . .’

  And Phil is seized by righteous anger and great wrath, and he smites his enemy right there, by the American Airlines First Class check-in desk. Or at least he grabs the book and tears it in half – the broken spine yielding easily, almost gratefully – and tells the bum to fuck off. Oh, just imagine the scene, the bum whining about his book, his property, and Phil telling the creature he doesn’t deserve to read any of his books, he is banned for life from reading his books, and two security guards coming and hustling the bum away amid apologies to the Great American Novelist. The bum doesn’t go quietly. He screams and struggles, yells that he, Phil, is a fake, a sell-out, man, the guitar clanging and chirping like a mocking grasshopper as he is wrestled away between the two burly, beetling guards.

  Phil has to take a couple of Ritalin pills to calm down. To calm his blood down. Then a couple of uppers so he can face the journey.

  He still has the book. Torn in half, pages frazzled by reading and rereading slipping out of it every time he opens it, so that he has to spend some considerable time sorting them into some kind of order, like a conjuror gripped by stage-flop sweat in the middle of a card trick, before he can even contemplate looking at it.

  Emmet said it all. What kind of commie fag organization would try to blast Phil’s reputation with this cheap shot fired under radar? Circulating it on the campuses of America, poisoning the young minds who should be drinking deep clear draughts of his prose. Not this . . . this piece of dreck.

  The Man in the High Castle. A story about an author locked in the castle of his reputation, a thinly disguised parable about his own situation, set in a parallel or alternate history where the USA lost the war and was split into two, the East governed by the Nazis, the West by the Japanese. A trifle, a silly fantasy. What had he been thinking when he wrote it? Emmet was furious when Phil sent him the manuscript. He wasted no words in telling Phil how badly he had fucked up, asking him bluntly, what the hell did he think he was doing, wasting his time with this lame sci-fi crap?

  Phil had been stuck, that was what. And he’s still stuck. Ten, fifteen years of writing and rewriting, two marriages made and broken while Phil works on and on at the same book, moving farther and farther away from his original idea, so far out now that he thinks he might never get back. The monster doesn’t even have a title. The Long-Awaited. The Brilliant New. The Great Unfinished. Whatever. And in the midst of this mire, Phil set aside the Next Great Novel and pulled a dusty idea from his files – dating back to 1961, for Chrissake – a
nd something clicked. He wrote it straight out, a return to the old days of churning out sci-fi stories for tiny amounts of money while righteously high on speed: cranked up, cranking out the pages. For a little while he was so happy: just the idea of finishing something made him happy. But Emmet made him see the error of his ways. Made him see that you can’t go back and start over. Made him see the depth of his error, the terrible waste of his energy and his talent.

  That was when Phil, prompted by a research paper he discovered, started on a high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet, started dosing himself with high levels of water-soluble vitamins.

  And then the pirated edition of The Man in the High Castle appeared, and Emmet started over with his needling recriminations and insinuations, whipping up in Phil a fine hot sweat of shame and fury.

  Phil puts the thing back in his coat pocket. Leans back in his leather-upholstered First Class seat. Sips his silvery martini. The anger is still burning inside him. For the moment he has forgotten his doubts. Straight to the top, that’s the only answer. Straight to the President.

  After a while, he buzzes the stewardess and gets some writing paper. Takes out his gold-nibbed, platinum-cased Cross fountain pen, the pen his publishers gave him to mark the publication of the ten millionth copy of the ground-breaking, genre-busting The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. Starts to write:

  Dear Mr President: I would like to introduce myself. I am Philip K. Dick and admire and have great respect for your office. I talked to Deputy Narcotics Director Finlator last week and expressed my concern for our country . . .

  Things go smoothly, as if the light has opened some kind of path, as if it has tuned Phil’s brain, eliminated all the dross and kipple clagging it. Phil flies to Washington, D.C. and immediately hires a car, a clean light-blue Chrysler with less than a thousand miles on the clock, and drives straight to the White House.

  Because there is no point in posting the letter. That would take days, and it might never reach the President. All Phil would get back would be a photograph signed by one of the autograph machines that whir ceaselessly in some White House basement . . .