He wakened, rimed with perspiration, to see Losh chewing an errant hangnail and tossing his instruments back into the suitcase. Laura was wrapped in bath towels that had once been white. They were crimson now.
‘Is she okay?’ Manser asked. Losh’s laughter in reply was infectious and soon he was at it too.
‘Do you want the off-cuts?’ Losh asked, wiping his eyes and jerking a thumb at a bucket tastefully covered with a dishcloth.
‘You keep them,’ Manser said. ‘I’ve got to be off.’
Losh said, ‘Who opened the window?’
Nobody had opened the window; the lace curtains fluttering inward were being pushed by a bulge of glass. Losh tore them back just as the glass shattered in his face. He screamed and fell backwards, tripping on the bucket and sprawling on the floor.
To Manser it seemed that strips of the night were pouring in through the broken window. They fastened themselves to Losh’s face and neck and munched through the flesh like a caterpillar at a leaf. His screams were low and already being stifled by blood as his throat filled. He began to choke but managed one last, hearty shriek as a major blood vessel parted, spraying colour all around the room with the abandon of an unmanned hosepipe.
How can they breathe with their heads so deep inside him? Manser thought, hypnotized by the violence. He felt something dripping on his brow. Touching his face with his fingers, he brought them away to find them awash with blood. He had time to register, as he looked up at the ceiling, the mouth as it yawned, dribbling with lymph, the head as it vibrated with unfettered anticipation. And then the woman dropped on him, ploughing her jaws through the meat of his throat and ripping clear. He saw his flesh disappear down her gullet with a spasm that was almost beautiful. But then his sight filled with red and he could understand no more.
Sarah had been back home for a day. She couldn’t understand how she had got here. She remembered being borne from the warmth of her companions and standing up to find both men little more than pink froth filling their suits. One of the men had blood on his hands and a cigarette still smouldered between his fingers. The hand was on the other side of the room, though.
She saw the bloody, tiny mound of towels on the pool table. She saw the bucket; the dishcloth had shifted, revealing enough to tell her the game. Two toes were enough. She didn’t need to be drawn a picture.
And then somehow she found herself outside. And then on Edgware Road where a pretty young woman with dark hair and a woven shoulder bag gave her a couple of pounds so that she could get the Tube to Euston. And then a man smelling of milk and boot polish whom she fucked in a shop doorway for her fare north. And then Preston, freezing around her in the early morning as if it were formed from winter itself. She had half expected Andrew to poke his head around the door of their living room to say hello, the tea’s on, go and sit by the fire and I’ll bring some to you.
But the living room was cold and bare. She found sleep at the time she needed it most, just as her thoughts were about to coalesce around the broken image of her baby. She was crying because she couldn’t remember what her face looked like.
When she awoke, it was dark again. It was as if daylight had forsaken her. She heard movement towards the back of the house. Outside, in the tiny, scruffy garden, a cardboard box, no bigger than the type used to store shoes, made a stark shape amid the surrounding frost. The women were hunched on the back fence, regarding her with owlish eyes. They didn’t speak. Maybe they couldn’t.
One of them swooped down and landed by the box. She nudged it forward with her hand, as a deer might coax a newborn to its feet. Sarah felt another burst of unconditional love and security fill the gap between them all. Then they were gone, whipping and twisting far into the sky, the consistency, the trickiness of smoke.
Sarah took the box into the living room with her and waited. Hours passed; she felt herself grow more and more peaceful. She loved her daughter and she hoped Laura knew that. As dawn began to brush away the soot from the sky, Sarah leaned over and touched the lid. She wanted so much to open it and say a few words, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it.
In the end, she didn’t need to. Whatever remained inside the box managed to do it for her.
JOEL LANE
The Lost District
JOEL LANE LIVES IN BIRMINGHAM. His tales of horror and the supernatural have appeared in various anthologies and magazines, including Darklands, Little Deaths, The Third Alternative, The Ex Files, White of the Moon, Dark Terrors 4, 5 and 6, Swords Against the Millennium, The Museum of Horrors, The Darker Side and Gathering the Bones.
He is the author of a collection of short stories, The Earth Wire (Egerton Press, 1994); a collection of poems, The Edge of the Screen (Arc, 1999), and two novels, From Blue to Black (Serpent’s Tail, 2000) and The Blue Mask (Serpent’s Tail, 2002). Lane has also edited Beneath the Ground (Alchemy Press, 2002), an anthology of subterranean horror stories and, with Steve Bishop, Birmingham Noir (Tindal Street Press, 2002), an anthology of tales of crime and psychological suspense.
‘Influences on “The Lost District” include Fritz Leiber, Ramsey Campbell and The X Files,’ explains the author. ‘It was written for a Leiber tribute booklet that never got published. Then it was accepted for a horror anthology whose publisher went out of business. I began to suspect that it was fated to kill every project it was accepted into, like a paper version of the Red Death. Happily, it appeared in Andy Cox’s excellent The Third Alternative with no fatal outcome for the magazine.’
These lost streets are decaying only very slowly. The impacted lives of their inhabitants, the meaninglessness of news, the dead black of the chimney breasts, the conviction that the wind itself comes only from the next street, all wedge together to keep destruction out; to deflect the eye of the developer.
Roy Fisher
Quite recently, I heard some kid on the TV saying ‘Nothing ever changes’. It made me think about Nicola. Are we really blind to what happened before our own lives? This was just after the 1997 General Election, the first change of government in eighteen years. There’d been this joke going round that all the parties had trouble canvassing in the Black Country, because none of the local people would go outside the street they lived in. Which again reminded me of Nicola, and made me want to go back to Clayheath and see what, if anything, had changed.
Back in 1979, I was in the fifth year at secondary school. It was an odd time for me. People think ‘teenage culture’ is just one thing that everybody gets into. But it wasn’t that simple. In our school there were punks, second-generation Mods, long-haired heavy-metal kids and fledgling Rastas. Each crowd had its own language, politics and drugs. The rebels had gone by then, disappearing into casual work or street-life or youth custody. Those who remained were only playing with fire, not living in it. Like the girl who was sent home for wearing a slashed blazer. We were too obsessed with our needs and resentments to communicate. None of us knew what to say, what to feel, what to believe in. It didn’t matter: nothing was going to change.
After school, at a loose end, I often walked or ran through the long strip of parkland along the Hagley Road. The first half was neatly laid out, with flower beds and bowling greens. The second half was more like woodland, an overgrown and sometimes marshy surface flowing around the boles of huge trees. Now that I no longer had to do Games, I missed the exhausting cross-country runs that had made me feel connected to places like this. It had been my only chance to look good in front of the heavy lads who could fillet me on the rugby pitch. Out here, I could leave them panting and clumping while I raced against the heartbeat of an invisible partner, on into a mist of adrenalin and sweat. But at sixteen, I was too lazy and self-conscious to race against anyone.
One chilly, bright day in April, I was strolling along the boundary between the halves of the park: a ragged line of birches, their silvery trunks slashed with rust. Phrases from my German homework were flickering through my head, alongside The Jam’s ‘Going Underground’. A pale-fac
ed girl was sitting on a bench in front of a cedar tree, not far away. I walked past her, noting her short dark hair, white blouse and black skirt. In the thin afternoon light it was like a scene from an old film. Her gaze followed me impassively.
Driven by a sudden impulse to try and impress her, I ran up to the cedar tree. It was as wide as it was tall. I clasped my hands around the lowest branch and pulled myself up, kicking to gain height. A momentary shiver of sexual excitement passed through me. Using the rough trunk for support, I climbed upwards for another three or four branches. I felt a cold breeze shake the leaves around me, and didn’t dare climb any higher. The girl was standing below me. I could see her upturned face, almost featureless at this height. A sudden vertigo snapped my eyes out of focus and I could see two of her, no less alone for it.
When I’d succeeded in climbing down, we stood awkwardly for a while. ‘Which way are you going?’ I said.
‘Don’t mind.’ She smiled; her teeth were strong and very white. ‘You just come from school?’ I nodded. ‘I’m from Clayheath. Y’know, out past Quinton. Came here on the bus.’ Her accent was Black Country with a touch of something else, perhaps Irish. It was an old person’s voice.
We walked along toward the road, where the traffic was beginning to thicken. ‘Why are you here?’ I asked.
‘I have to get out sometimes. Just anywhere. It’s bad at home.’ I knew what she meant. I was in no hurry to get back to our narrow house in Smethwick: my tired parents bickering and shouting, my brother turning up the sport on TV to drown out everything, chores undone, dinner a communal stare. ‘You don’t know where Clayheath is, do you?’
I’d never heard of it. ‘Never been there. Is it far?’
‘Not really. It’s just nobody goes there. Or leaves.’ Along the Hagley Road, the lamp-posts were hung with election placards: mostly blue, a few red. Traffic punctuated our conversation. Her name was Nicola; she worked part-time in a garage. I guessed she was the same age as me. She looked unhappy even when she smiled; it was something in her gaze, always trying to run away. Her skin, stretched tight over her cheekbones, was as pale as a Chinese paper lantern. I wanted to make her blush.
When we reached her bus stop, Nicola said ‘What are you doing on Sunday?’ I shrugged. ‘D’you want to come to Clay-heath?’ She gave me directions that involved catching a local train to Netherton, then taking the number 147 bus as far as the swimming baths. She’d wait for me there. ‘Promise you won’t let me down.’ I promised. We stared at each other nervously until the Quinton bus arrived. Then Nicola leaned forward and kissed me, her eyes shut. Her lips were so soft I could hardly feel them, just her teeth and a whisper of breath. When the bus drove away, I turned round and walked back into Bearwood. After a while, I realized I’d passed my stop and was in a street I didn’t recognize. All the shops had closed.
The train to Netherton stopped at Sandwell, Blackheath, Cradley Heath, and some other towns or districts I’d never heard of. The gaps between towns were a mixture of rural and industrial features: forests, waste ground, factories, scrapyards, canals. Parts of the line ran close to the backyards of terraced houses, where clothes jittered on washing lines and blurred figures moved behind windows. I pictured Nicola in such a room, brushing her hair. The only other people in the train carriage were three teenagers, not much older than me, who’d got on at Blackheath. The two girls sat behind me, whispering to each other. The boy sat in front of me, on the other side. He was wearing a brown jacket that he’d pulled up so it covered his head. After a few minutes of sitting like this, leaning sharply forward, he twisted his face around and snarled, ‘A wooden vote for th’Layba.’ The girls didn’t respond. His pale, staring face rose above the seat like a mask. ‘Ah said, a wooden vote for th’Layba barstad.’ Then he relapsed into his leaning posture, forehead pressed against the back of his seat, jacket pulled over his ears.
The bus stop was in a narrow, old-fashioned high street with half-timbered buildings and wooden pub signs. The approaching streets were the usual Black Country mixture of small factories, houses and less easily identified buildings. Nothing was derelict, but everything had been patched up and reallocated many times over. Most of the buildings had the soft, grimy look of long-ingrained pollution. A faint sunlight filtered through the streets without catching any surface. Opposite a grey churchyard was a tall Victorian building with stone steps: the swimming baths. As I got off the bus, I saw Nicola step out from the shadow of the wall. She was wearing a pale grey jacket and black jeans. I walked towards her, wondering if I should kiss her or wait for a better opportunity. Her pale hand gripped my arm; her lips brushed my cheek. ‘Glad you made it here,’ she said.
We walked together through the centre of Clayheath, if a place so marginal could be said to have a centre. All around us were raw traces of industry a hundred years old: canals just below road level, a brickworks wearing a loose scarf of smoke, black cast-iron railings ornamented with crudely worked flowers, walls studded with blue-green pieces of clinker from glass manufacture. By contrast, the houses themselves were coldly uniform: narrow grey terraces arranged in regular grids like the lines on a chessboard. The district seemed overcast, though the sky was dead white.
Nobody much was around. I remember a white dog pissing on a lamp-post; a young woman pushing a pram; a few nondescript grocery and hardware shops with figures moving behind the window displays. ‘It’s dead here,’ Nicola said quietly. ‘Nobody comes here, nobody goes away. It’s always the same. Nothing ever changes.’ She was shivering; cautiously, I put my arm round her shoulders. A faint smile ghosted her mouth, nervousness mixed with resignation. She took my hand and curled it into a fist.
‘Where do you live?’ I asked.
‘We’ve just passed it,’ she said. I remembered a street of narrow terraces, unlit basement windows behind iron railings like display cases in a museum. ‘Don’t matter. We can’t go there.’ The houses at the end of the street were derelict: windows smashed, doors clumsily boarded over. Ahead, a new expressway crossed a stretch of canal where rotting barges clung to the towpath. Drivers raced over Clayheath without seeing it. I wanted to be with them. I wanted Nicola, but not this featureless place where she seemed little more at home than I was. Light flickered between strips of pale cloud. The road dipped under a railway bridge, part of a viaduct made from tiny bricks and blackened by industry. Frozen worms of lime poked through the brickwork overhead. In the shadow of the bridge, Nicola stopped and kissed me. For the first time, I was really aware of her vitality: a fierce, bitter energy, like the charge you felt if you put a battery to your tongue. My hand moved from her shoulder to her breast, from the shape of bone to the shape of flesh. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I know somewhere to go.’
Beyond the railway, a footpath led behind a row of allotments. They didn’t seem to have yielded any crop except leaf mould and scabs of black ash. A few small lumps of greenish clinker studded the earth, like jewellery on a drowned body. As we walked, I told Nicola about my school, my parents, my hopes of being a journalist if the O levels worked out. ‘I never took any exams,’ she said. ‘I was ill, and then it was too late. Makes no difference around here.’ Her voice seemed more accented than it had been in Bearwood: the vowels flattened, worn out. In front of us, the outlines of buildings repeated themselves as if the sun were a cheap Xerox machine. ‘I like it here. Away from the houses. It’s here too, but you have room to be yourself.’ I didn’t know what she meant.
Ahead of us now, I could see the sun setting through trees: warm petals of orange and pink that belied the growing chill. A park. We stumbled through some undergrowth, skirting a pond that was crusted with grey flakes. The trees around it were short and wide, their branches tangled together. There was a smell of decaying wood and fungus. Nicola tripped and fell; I knelt to help her up. ‘Are you okay?’ She stared into my eyes. I put my arms around her. After a while, we spread our coats beneath us on the mossy ground.
It was too cold to undress, but we ar
ranged our clothes to allow our bodies as much contact as possible. I remember the slow warmth of her, the sudden incredible heat. Then it was over. As I wiped her thighs with a tissue, I thought of all the times I’d wiped my residues from the centrefold of a magazine. She showed me how to give her pleasure with my fingers, and I felt less guilty. As we covered ourselves, Nicola laughing softly, I had an unmistakable sense of being watched.
Going from the waste ground to the park was like stepping back into the town. The edge was marked by a straight line of poplar trees, their shadows like the bars of a giant cage. We held hands as we shuffled through the grass; Nicola was still laughing, and I realized that something like love was keeping pace with us. Then she stopped, the smile dissolving from her face like smoke. ‘All laughing,’ she said. ‘All laughing, all dust, all nothing.’ I kissed her. As if sex were a bandage for all kinds of unease and despair. You can be a lot older than sixteen and still do that.
Dusk was beginning to isolate the town, reducing it to a cluster of lights surrounded by industrial wasteland. Perhaps it wasn’t a town after all. I was still wondering what was the matter with Nicola as we returned from the uncomfortably tidy park to the grey streets. A cat waddled past us like a drunk. ‘Can’t you feel it?’ she said. ‘They’re used to it round here. But you’m not.’ I frowned at her, then shook my head. Nicola shrugged with a quiet irony that I already recognized as characteristic of her. ‘I’ve got to go to work now.’
The garage was a small plastic-roofed box, between the expressway and a low block of flats with iron railings in floral patterns. It had a long car park that smelled of petrol and old newspaper. There were two or three cars that looked abandoned, well away from the pumps. As we stood in the light of the garage window, the red above the houses fading to the blue of night, two figures emerged from the shadows. Boys, a year or two older than me. I registered the similarity of their denim jackets and blow-waved hairstyles before I realized they were twins. Nicola smiled at them. ‘Hello.’
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2002, Volume 13 Page 31