But in any event, the chase was over. Idiotic! Imagine, some animal scavenger makes some noise up near the house, and good old Cal goes running about the desert chasing phantoms, like a madman or a fool. He sat down on a rock near the pumping platform, and heaved a sigh of relief. He looked up at the profile of the pump jack, bizarre and cold-looking in the wan light, but harmless.
‘Well, Jack, here’s one old boy you’re not going to terrorize. The desert may be a strange place sometimes, but it’s not that damned strange.’
He waited. ‘How’s about it, Jack? Aren’t you going to say anything?’
The pump jack sat silent, an absurd insectoid shape against a starry sky.
‘That’s what I thought.’ Cal slapped his knees and got up off the rock and laughed outright.
The laugh, however, caught in his throat.
Whether it was the sight or the sound, he couldn’t have said. But nothing that came afterward, right down to the end, would disturb him any more than that first impression, that first moment.
The moment when the great oblong head, perched atop its neck of steel, bestirred itself with an unthinkable metallic groan and turned, coldly predatory in the pallid moonlight – turned to look at him.
GALA BLAU
Outfangthief
GALA BLAU WAS BORN IN GERMANY, and divides her time between London and Berlin, where she designs jewellery and is a sometime singer with the band Scheintod.
The following story was her first published fiction, and she has a new tale, ‘The Routine’, in The Third Alternative. She is also currently planning her first novel.
‘ “Outfangthief” was inspired by a Guardian newspaper article concerning a “freelance” doctor who botched an operation,’ explains Blau, ‘killing a seventy-nine-year-old devotee of apotemnophilia, a sexual fetish involving the voluntary removal of limbs for sexual gratification. I kept the idea of a mercenary doctor, but changed the fetish to acrotomophilia, which is a fetish enjoyed by those who prefer to have sex with amputees. The story is zero per cent autobiographical.’
AT THE MOMENT THE CAR SLID out of control, Sarah Running had been trying to find a radio station that might carry some news of her crime. She had been driving for hours, risking the M6 all the way from Preston. Though she had seen a number of police vehicles, the traffic had been sufficiently busy to allow her to blend in and anyway, Manser would hardly have guessed she would take her ex-husband’s car. Michael was away on business in Stockholm and would not know of the theft for at least another week.
But Manser was not stupid. It would not be long before he latched on to her deceit.
As the traffic thinned and night closed in on the motorway, Sarah’s panic grew. She was convinced that her disappearance had been reported and she would be brought to book. When a police Range Rover tailed her from Walsall to the M42 turn-off, she almost sent her own car into the crash barriers at the centre of the road.
Desperate for cover, she followed the signs for the A14. Perhaps she could make the 130 miles to Felixstowe tonight and sell the car, try to find passage on a boat, lose herself and her daughter on the Continent. In a day they could be in Dresden, where her grandmother had lived; a battered city that would recognise some of its own and allow them some anonymity.
‘Are you all right back there, Laura?’
In the rear-view mirror, her daughter might well have been a mannequin. Her features were glacial; her sunglasses formed tiny screens of animation as the sodium lights fizzed off them. A slight flattening of the lips was the only indication that all was well. Sarah bore down on her frustration. Did she understand what she had been rescued from? Sarah tried to remember what things had been like for herself as a child, but reasoned that her own relationship with her mother had not been fraught with the same problems.
‘It’s all okay, Laura. We’ll not have any more worries in this family. I promise you.’
All that before she spotted the flashing blue and red lights of three police vehicles blocking her progress east. She turned left on to another A road bound for Leicester. There must have been an accident; they wouldn’t go to the lengths of forming a roadblock for her, would they? The road sucked her deep into darkness; on either side wild hedgerows and vast oily swells of countryside muscled into them. Headlamps on full beam, she could pick nothing out beyond the winding road apart from the ghostly dusting of insects attracted by the light. Sarah, though, felt anything but alone. She could see, in the corner of her eye, something blurred by speed, keeping pace with the car as it fled the police cordon. She took occasional glances to her right, but could not define their fellow traveller for the dense tangle of vegetation that bordered the road.
‘Can you see that, Laura?’ she asked. ‘What is it?’
It could have been a trick of the light, or something silver reflecting the shape of their car. Maybe it was the police. The needle on the speedometer edged up to eighty. They would have to dump the car somewhere soon, if the police were closing in on them.
‘Keep a look out for a B&B, okay?’ She checked in the mirror; Laura’s hand was splayed against the window, spreading mist from the star her fingers made. She was watching the obliteration of her view intently.
Sarah fumbled with the radio button. Static filled the car at an excruciating volume. Peering into the dashboard of the unfamiliar car, trying to locate the volume control, she perceived a darkening in the cone of light ahead. When she looked up, the car was drifting off the road, aiming for a tree. Righting the swerve only took the car more violently in the other direction. They were still on the road, but only just, as the wheels began to rise on the passenger side.
but i wasn’t drifting off the road, was i?
Sarah caught sight of Laura, expressionless, as she was jerked from one side of the car to the other and hoped the crack she heard was not caused by her daughter’s head slamming against the window.
i thought it was a tree big and black
it looked just like a tree but but but
And then she couldn’t see much because the car went into a roll and everything became part of a violent, circular blur and at the centre of it were the misted, friendly eyes of a woman dipping into her field of view.
but but but how can a tree have a face?
She was conscious of the cold and the darkness. There was the hiss of traffic from the motorway, soughing over the fields. Her face was sticky and at first she thought it was blood, but now she smelled a lime tree and knew it was its sap being sweated on to her. Forty metres away, the road she had just left glistened with dew. She tried to move and blacked out.
Fingers sought her face. She tried to bat them away but there were many fingers, many hands. She feared they might try to pluck her eyes out and opened her mouth to scream and that was when a rat was pushed deep into her throat.
Sarah came out of the dream, smothering on the sodden jumper of her daughter, who had tipped over the driver’s seat and was pressed against her mother. The flavour of blood filled her mouth. The dead weight of the child carried an inflexibility about it that shocked her. She tried to move away from the crushing bulk and the pain drew grey veils across her eyes. She gritted her teeth, knowing that to succumb now was to die, and worked at unbuckling the seat belt that had saved her life. Once free, she slumped to her left and her daughter filled the space she had occupied.
Able to breathe again, she was pondering the position in which the car had come to rest, and trying to reach Laura’s hand, when she heard footsteps.
When she saw Manser lean over, his big, toothy grin seeming to fill the shattered window frame, she wished she had not dodged the police; they were preferable to this monster. But then she saw how this wasn’t Manser after all. She couldn’t understand how she had made the mistake. Manser was a stunted, dark man with a face like chewed tobacco. This face was smooth as soapstone and framed by thick, red tresses; a woman’s face.
Other faces, less defined, swept across her vision. Everyone seemed to be moving very fast.
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She said, falteringly: ‘Ambulance?’ But they ignored her.
They lifted Laura out of the window to a cacophony of whistles and cheers. There must have been a hundred people. At least they had been rescued. Sarah would take her chances with the police. Anything was better than going home.
The faces retreated. Only the night stared in on her now, through the various rents in the car. It was cold, lonely and painful. Her face in the rear-view mirror: all smiles.
He closed the door and locked it. Cocked his head against the jamb, listened for a few seconds. Still breathing.
Downstairs, he read the newspaper, ringing a few horses for the afternoon races. He placed thousand-pound bets with his bookies. In the ground-floor washroom, he took a scalding shower followed by an ice-cold one, just like James Bond. Rolex Oyster, Turnbull & Asser shirt, Armani. He made four more phone calls: Jez Knowlden, his driver, to drop by in the Jag in twenty minutes; Pamela, his wife, to say that he would be away for the weekend; Jade, his mistress, to ask her if she’d meet him in London. And then Chandos, his police mole, to see if that bitch Sarah Running had been found yet.
Sarah dragged herself out of the car just as dawn was turning the skyline milky. She had drifted in and out of consciousness all night, but the sleet that had arrived within the last half-hour was the spur she needed to try to escape. She sat a few feet away from the car, taking care not to make any extreme movements, and began to assess the damage to herself. A deep wound in her shoulder had caused most of the bleeding. Other than that, which would need stitches, she had got away with pretty superficial injuries. Her head was pounding, and dried blood formed a crust above her left eyebrow, but nothing seemed to be broken.
After quelling a moment of nausea when she tried to stand, Sarah breathed deeply of the chill morning air and looked around her. A farmhouse nestled within a crowd of trees seemed the best bet; it was too early for road users. Cautiously at first, but with gathering confidence, she trudged across the muddy, furrowed field towards the house, staring all the while at its black, arched windows, for all the world like a series of open mouths, shocked by the coming of the sun.
She had met Andrew in 1985, in the Preston library they both shared. A relationship had started, more or less, when their hands bumped against each other while reaching for the same book. They had married a year later and Sarah gave birth to Laura then, too. Both of them had steady if unspectacular work. Andrew was a security guard and she cleaned at the local school and for a few favoured neighbours. They eventually took out a mortgage on their council house on the right-to-buy scheme and bought a car, a washing machine and a television on the never-never. Then they both lost their jobs within weeks of each other. They owed £17,000. When the law centre they depended on heavily for advice lost its funding and closed down, Sarah had to go to hospital when she began laughing so hysterically that she could not catch her breath. It was as Andrew drove her back from the hospital that they met Malcolm Manser for the first time.
His back to them, he stepped out in front of their car at a set of traffic lights and did not move when they changed in Andrew’s favour. When Andrew sounded the horn, Manser turned around. He was wearing a long newbuck trench coat, black Levis, black boots and a black T-shirt without an inch of give in it. His hair was black save for wild slashes of grey above his temples. His sunglasses appeared to be sculpted from his face, so seamlessly did they sit on his nose. From the trench coat he pulled a car jack and proceeded to smash every piece of glass and dent every panel on the car. It took about twenty seconds.
‘Mind if I talk to you for a sec?’ he asked, genially, leaning against the crumbled remains of the driver’s-side window. Andrew was too shocked to say anything. His mouth was very wet. Tiny cubes of glass glittered in his hair. Sarah was whimpering, trying to open her door, which was sealed shut by the warp of metal.
Manser went on: ‘You have 206 pieces of bone in your body, fine sir. If my client, Mr Anders, does not receive seventeen grand, plus interest at ten per cent a day – which is pretty bloody generous, if you ask me – by the end of the week, I will guarantee that after half an hour with me, your bone tally will be double that. And that yummy piece of bitch you’ve got ripening back home. Laura? I’ll have her. You test me. I dare you.’
He walked away, magicking the car jack into the coat and giving them an insouciant wave.
A week later, Andrew set himself on fire in the car, which he had locked inside the garage. By the time the fire services got to him, he was a black shape, thrashing in the back seat. Set himself on fire. Sarah refused to believe that. She was sure that Manser had murdered him. Despite their onerous circumstances, Andrew was not the suicidal type. Laura was everything to him; he’d not leave this world without securing a little piece of it for her.
What then? A nightmare time. A series of safe houses that were anything but. Early-morning flits from dingy addresses in Bradford, Cardiff, Bristol and Walsall. Manser was stickier than anything Bostik might produce. ‘Bug out,’ they’d tell her, these kind old men and women, having settled on a code once used by soldiers in some war or other. ‘Bug out.’ Manser had contacts everywhere. Arriving in a town that seemed too sleepy to even acknowledge her presence, she’d notice someone out of whack with the place, someone who patently did not fit in but had been planted to watch out for her. Was she so transparent? Her migrations had been random; there was no pattern to unpick. And yet she had stayed no longer than two days in any of these towns. Sarah had hoped that returning to Preston might work for her in a number of ways. Manser wouldn’t be expecting it, for one thing; for another, Michael, her ex-husband, might be of some help. When she went to visit him though, he paid her short shrift.
‘You still owe me fifteen hundred quid,’ he barked at her. ‘Pay that off before you come grovelling at my door.’ She asked if she could use his toilet and passed any number of photographs of Gabrielle, his new squeeze. On the way, she stole from a hook on the wall the spare set of keys to his Alfa Romeo.
It took twenty minutes to negotiate the treacherous field. A light frost had hardened some of the furrows while other grooves were boggy. Sarah scuffed and skidded as best she could, clambering over the token fence that bordered an overgrown garden someone had used as an unauthorized tipping area. She picked her way through sofa skeletons, shattered TV sets, collapsed flat-pack wardrobes and decaying, pungent black bin bags.
It was obvious that nobody was living here.
Nevertheless, she stabbed the doorbell with a bloody finger. Nothing appeared to ring from within the building. She rapped on the door with her knuckles, but half-heartedly. Already she was scrutinizing the windows, looking for another way in. A narrow path strangled by brambles led around the edge of the house to a woefully neglected rear garden. Scorched colours bled into each other, thorns and convolvulus savaged her ankles as she pushed her way through the tangle. All of the windows at the back of the house had been broken, probably by thrown stones. A yellow spray of paint on a set of storm doors that presumably led directly into the cellar picked out a word she didn’t understand: scheintod. What was that? German? She cursed herself for not knowing the language of her elders, not that it mattered. Someone had tried to obscure the word, scratching it out of the wood with a knife, but the paint was reluctant. She tried the door but it was locked.
Sarah finally gained access via a tiny window that she had to squeeze through. The bruises and gashes on her body cried out as she toppled into a gloomy larder. Mingled into the dust was an acrid, spicy smell; racks of ancient jars and pots were labelled in an extravagant hand: cumin, coriander, harissa, chilli powder. There were packs of flour and malt that had been ravaged by vermin. Dried herbs dusted her with a strange, slow rain as she brushed past them. Pickling jars held back their pale secrets within dull, lustreless glass.
She moved through the larder, arms outstretched, her eyes becoming accustomed to the gloom. Something stopped the door as she swung it outwards. A dead dog, its
fur shaved from its body, lay stiffly in the hallway. At first she thought it was covered in insects, but the black beads were unmoving. They were nicks and slashes in the flesh. The poor thing had been drained. Sarah recoiled from the corpse and staggered farther along the corridor. Evidence of squatters lay around her in the shape of fast-food packets, cigarette ends, beer cans and names signed in the ceiling by the sooty flames of candles. A rising stairwell vanished into darkness. Her shoes crunched and squealed on plaster fallen from the bare walls.
‘Hello?’ she said, querulously. Her voice made as much impact as a candyfloss mallet. It died on the walls, absorbed so swiftly it was as if the house was sucking her in, having been starved of human company for so long. She ascended to the first floor. The carpet that hugged the risers near the bottom gave way to bare wood. Her shoes’ heels sent dull echoes ringing through the house. If anyone lived here, they would know they were not alone now. The doors opened on to silent bedrooms shrouded by dust. There was nothing up here.
‘Laura?’ And then more stridently, as if volume alone could lend her more spine: ‘Laura!’
Downstairs she found a cosy living room with a hearth filled with ashes. She peeled back a dust cover from one of the sofas and lay down. Her head pounded with delayed shock from the crash and the mustiness of her surroundings. She thought of her baby.
It didn’t help that Laura seemed to be going off the rails at the time of their crisis. Also, her inability or reluctance to talk of her father’s death worried Sarah almost as much as the evidence of booze and drug use. At each of the safe houses, it seemed that there was a Laura trap in the shape of a young misfit, eager to drag someone down with him or her. Laura gave herself to them all, as if glad of a mate to hasten her downward spiral. There had been one boy in particular, Edgar – a difficult name to forget – whose influence had been particularly invidious. They had been holed up in a Toxteth bedsit. Sarah had been listening to City FM. A talk show full of languid, catarrhal Liverpool accents that was making her drowsy. The sound of a window smashing had dragged her from slumber. She caught the boy trying to drag her daughter through the glass. She had shrieked at him and hauled him into the room. He could have been no older than ten or eleven. His eyes were rifle green and would not stay still. They darted around like steel bearings in a bagatelle game. Sarah had grilled him, asking him if he had been sent from Manser. Panicked, she had also been firing off instructions to Laura, that they must pack immediately and be ready to go within the hour. It was no longer safe.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2002, Volume 13 Page 29