The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2002, Volume 13

by Stephen Jones

  Soft voices and whispers from other parts of the large room.

  Soft footsteps and whispering soles.

  The impulse to giggle in such a solemn place became an urge, and he rubbed a hard hand across his lips. A second time, harder, for a shot of pain to kill the laugh. Sniffing, grabbing a handkerchief to blow his nose and wincing at the explosive sound of it; wandering the aisles, reading the legends now, thinking the curator or whatever he was called had one hell of an imagination. In spite of himself, stopping now and then to examine a body, the clothes, flicking dust away to peer more closely at a face.

  Soft voice.

  Soft footsteps.

  A check over his shoulder now and then, but he saw no one else. Only heard them, felt them, had almost convinced himself he was in here with ghosts when, rounding a corner, he nearly collided with a woman, a teenager really, whose eyes widened as large as her mouth when it opened to scream.

  ‘Jesus, where the hell did you come from?’

  He grinned. ‘I’m haunting the place.’

  Too much makeup, hair cropped unevenly, she sneered thick lips at him and huffed away. ‘Stupid creep,’ she muttered.

  He scowled at her back, half tempted to call after her and demand . . . what? What the hell was he getting so pissed about? They had startled each other, they were mad because they’d been scared, what’s the big deal, Hank?

  He scratched the back of his neck, pulled at his nose, and looked at the case immediately to his left.

  It was empty; a little hazy because of the light dust, but still, it was empty.

  Yet there was a card, just like all the others, and this one claimed that what he saw, or didn’t see, was the mortal remains of the recent serial killer known as the Ghost. It took him a few seconds of frowning before he caught the joke and smiled. Nodded his appreciation. Looked around, wishing there were someone nearby with whom he could share the curator’s bizarre sense of humor.

  No one.

  He was alone.

  And being alone, he checked again to be sure he was right, then reached out a finger and drew it gently along the case’s seams, stretching to reach to the top, bending over to reach the bottom. The glass felt warm, but comfortably so, and there was a faint vibration – the traffic outside, footsteps in here. It would be cozy inside, he figured, and almost laughed again. Cozy. Snug. The Ghost making faces at those whose peered in, trying to make sense of what they weren’t seeing.

  This time he couldn’t stop the laugh, and didn’t want to.

  ‘Boo!’ he said to his reflection in the glass, and feigned stark terror, clamping a hand to his heart, staggering backward, nearly colliding with the exhibit behind him.

  ‘Boo!’ he said through a deep rippling laugh, and wiped a tear from one eye, pressed a hand to his side where a stitch had stabbed him.

  He was coming apart, he knew it, and he didn’t give a damn.

  ‘Boo!’ one last time, and he made his way to the exit, giggling, shaking his head and chuckling, on the street laughing so loudly he embarrassed himself even though he was alone.

  He felt . . . great.

  In front of Dutch’s closed butcher shop he applauded when he saw that the cathedral was gone. Another sale. Bravo. Bravo.

  He patroled the neighborhood, just like the old days, and like the old days saved his street for last. He didn’t mind the damp November cold that seeped up his sleeves and down his collar, the way the few remaining leaves hustled after him on the wind, the way his footsteps sounded flat, not October sharp.

  He didn’t mind at all.

  He patroled until near sunrise, then slept the sun to bed. No nightmares, no croaking screams.

  Just before Thanksgiving, Lana commented on his attitude as she served him his steak-and-potatoes dinner. ‘Jesus, Cabot,’ she said, ‘it’s like you’re almost cheerful for a change.’

  And he repaid her by leaning over the counter, taking hold of her arm, and planting a big one on her lips. ‘Why, thank you, my dear,’ he said as he sat back on his stool, picked up his knife and fork, and gave his meal a smile.

  Lana, startled into silence, could only swallow, and touch her lips with a finger as if to test them. A dreamy smile, a scowl at her reaction, and when he finished she said, ‘Hank, you all right? You’re not . . . I mean, like, drugs or something?’ A finger pointed. ‘And don’t you dare say you’re just high on life.’

  ‘My hobby,’ he told her, dropping the price of his dinner on the counter.

  ‘You’re joking, right?’

  ‘Nope.’ He struck a pose. ‘You want to hear one?’

  ‘One what?’

  ‘Poem.’

  Her mouth opened, closed, and he said, ‘Whose ghosts these are I think I know/Their graves are in my dreams, you know.’

  She waited.

  He watched her.

  She said, ‘Is that it?’

  He shrugged as he zipped up his jacket. ‘I’m still working on it.’

  ‘It . . . kind of sounds familiar.’

  ‘Maybe,’ he said as he walked toward the door, a wave over his shoulder. ‘Maybe not.’

  Maybe, he thought as he caught the next bus uptown; maybe not.

  He returned to the museum and gave himself five minutes before he made his way to the Ghost case, touched the seams and found them cold. His eyes closed briefly. His stomach lurched. He held one arm away from his body, for balance. He made his way carefully to the sidewalk where he looked up at a sky that the city’s lights robbed of stars and moon. He didn’t move until a gust of wind nudged him; he didn’t choose a direction until he reached a corner and turned it; he told himself he didn’t know what he was doing until he recognized his home, and saw a man in a topcoat and felt hat urinating against one of the iron-spear fences.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, his voice quiet but mildly angry. ‘Kids play there, you know.’

  The man zippered himself and buttoned his coat. ‘You a cop?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Then screw you, pal,’ and he walked away.

  Hank watched him go, looked at the windows above him, across the street, saw shades glow and dark curtains, and imagined he could hear the sounds of sleep and making love and television shows and stereos and children dreaming and old folks dying.

  I’m a beat cop, for God’s sake.

  Stop lying to yourself, Lana had told him.

  So he did.

  He followed the man in the expensive topcoat for several blocks, out of the neighborhood and into a street where there was more night than night-lights. He moved swiftly then without seeming to, and when the man turned around, glaring at the intrusion, Hank took him by the throat with one hand and held him, knowing now, aware now, what the published reports did not say – that the bodies were somehow thinner. Older. Maybe drained, but not of blood or bone or muscle.

  Hank held the topcoat man until he crumpled into the gutter, his hat rolling into the center of the street, stopping upside down. A sigh, but no regrets, and he took a bus uptown for the second time that night, did not marvel that the museum was still open. He went straight to the Ghost’s case and ran his fingertips along the seams, feeling the cold eventually, slowly, become warm, watching the haze inside thicken . . . just a little. Placed a palm against the front and felt that faint vibration – not traffic or footsteps: it was the reverberation of faint screams.

  If he looked closely enough, hard enough, he might even see his nightmare, not a nightmare any longer.

  A quick smile, a ghost of a smile, and he left for home and slept the sun to bed.

  Comforted in knowing that outside the street never changes from morning to night.

  Comforted too in knowing that at night the street is haunted.

  MURIEL GRAY

  Shite Hawks

  MURIEL GRAY IS A WRITER, BROADCASTER AND JOURNALIST, as well as being the joint managing director of one of Britain’s biggest and most successful independent film and television companies, Ideal World Productions, res
ponsible for such popular series as Location Location Location, Driven, Vids, Equinox, Deals on Wheels and the feature film Late Night Shopping.

  As a presenter, she has hosted such TV shows as The Tube, The Media Show, Frocks on The Box, Walkie Talkie and The Booker Prize, amongst many others. She broadcast for hundreds of hours on BBC Radio One during the 1980s and 1990s and currently presents Radio Scotland’s book review programme.

  Along with a non-fiction book about mountaineering, The First Fifty, she has published three acclaimed horror novels: The Trickster, Furnace and The Ancient.

  ‘I first became interested in the desert landscapes of huge landfill sites,’ recalls Gray, ‘when my television company shot a film that featured one in Glasgow, and met the real man with hawks employed to keep away seagulls. (Not remotely like the seedy figure in my fiction, I hasten to add.) A few weeks later I saw a rubbish-collection truck sporting a figure sitting up front in the cab that had been made out of refuse by the bin men who crewed it. It was horrific. It was meant to be funny, but the effect of its piecemeal construction was chilling. That was the start of not only “Shite Hawks”, but also my novel The Ancient, which played with the same themes.

  ‘I’m interested in how society is childishly desperate to conceal and mask everything we break, use and discard and think of as ugly, and there is a subtext in “Shite Hawks” that suggests how that also applies to people.’

  I HATE THE WAY SPANNER watches me when I eat. It’s fucking unnatural. It’s not like he’s looking at me. It’s like he follows the food from the moment it leaves the plastic bag, and keeps his eyes on it as it travels the last few inches into my mouth. And all the time, he’s holding his own sandwich like it isn’t really food at all, but some synthetic approximation of the real thing, the thing that I have and he doesn’t. It bugs the fucking tits right off me.

  Especially today.

  ‘What the fuck are you lookin’ at, you retard?’

  Spanner moves his eyes from the motion of the concealed food in my cheeks to my eyes, and affects the look of a scolded child. ‘Aw, hey, there’s no call for that now. No call for that at all.’

  Belcher looks up from behind his tabloid and shoots me a look. ‘Mind your language, ye wee cunt.’

  He sees no humour in that, and the idle line of latent violence in his eyes tells me that even if I do, now is not the time to display it. I glare back at Spanner whose stare is fixed back on my hand, the one with the remains of the cheese sandwich in it, and I turn in disgust to look out the window of the Portakabin. I have to wipe an arc in the condensation to see out. It drips all day from the bloody Calor gas fire Belcher keeps on, summer or winter, but through the smear I can make out a figure.

  It’s not like the hawk guy to be late for his lunch break. That fat moron’s as lazy as a fucking woman. But here he comes, ten minutes into the break and only just appearing over the last mound of steaming rubbish, his scabby hooded bird swaying on his wrist, trying blindly to compensate its balance for the bobbing and stumbling gait of its master.

  ‘Door,’ is the only greeting he gets from Belcher as he enters, and he shuts it behind him obediently.

  I watch as he fetches out the stupid wee folding perch he keeps in the pocket of his donkey jacket, erects it on the table, and transfers the bird from his leather glove onto the four-inch piece of dowelling. It obliges him by dropping a viscous brown and white marbled shit on the table.

  ‘Aw, Jesus wept, man. We’re eatin’ here.’ Spanner has taken his eyes off my moving jaw long enough to regard the slug-shaped dropping only inches from his Tupperware box of sandwiches.

  ‘It’s nature. What d’ye want him do? Go to the fuckin’ bog an’ wash his hands?’

  Belcher looks up again. The motion promotes an instant and respectful silence. ‘See anyone?’

  The hawk guy looks at each of us turn. ‘Naw.’

  I look out the steamy window again, this time aware that my heart is increasing its pace.

  ‘Naebody,’ qualifies the hawk guy, as though we misunderstood him the first time.

  The Portakabin is right in the middle of the vast toxic plain of the landfill, and today, as most days, the grey Scottish sky can barely distinguish a horizon against the near-colourless piles of waste. I suppose in reality, if you look closely, there’s plenty of colour in the piles. Mostly primary colours. But it’s funny how when you put them all together like that it just becomes the hue of mud. Sickly, diseased, reeking mud. Only the hooked dinosaur arm of Spanner’s JCB breaks the monotony of these man-made rolling hills, abandoned as it is in a frozen predatory pose to the call of lunch. I stare at it for the visual relief it provides, and when Belcher speaks I can barely force myself to turn back towards the room. Of course I do. It wouldn’t be smart not to.

  ‘Kids?’

  The hawk guy shakes his head. ‘They sealed up the gap in the fence. Wee cunts cannae get through any mair.’

  Belcher looks to Spanner. Tension beats in the air like a pulse.

  For a minute we all think Belcher is going to let it pass. He sits back and folds the paper in front of him, examining the walls of the cabin like he’s just noticed it. Instinctively I do the same. I let my eyes wander over his gallery. A ceramic plate with transfer pictures of Corfu around the circumference supports clock hands that have long since ceased to turn. Next to it a life-size plastic vacuum-moulded head of a Vegas Elvis grins down at all four of us like we were stage-side-table guests, and beneath, the Sellotape holding up a silk pennant from Oban is losing the battle to gravity as the red tassels droop and fold back, obscuring the ‘n’.

  But of course he’s not looking at all that stuff. He’s looking at that fucking doll, Blutacked to the wall, its feet resting on a little souvenir Swiss wooden shelf specially mounted there for the purpose. I glance at Spanner, who’s also looking at it, and I lower my eyes.

  ‘I telt ye to open it up, Spanner.’ Belcher looks back lazily at the transfixed man. ‘I believe I telt ye last week.’

  Spanner opens his mouth, then closes it again. One long wisp of oily grey hair that he combs across and that adheres to his bald pate shifts from its base and falls across his shiny face. He pushes it back with familiar attention. ‘Ah did.’

  He’s lying so nakedly, even the hawk guy looks away.

  ‘Someone from the estate must’ve fixed it again since.’

  We all know it’s a lie. Especially me. I look steadily at Spanner to try and hide that.

  There hasn’t been a stranger on the landfill for over three weeks. Not a kid looking for interesting discarded treasure, not a junky or wino, not even the illegal dumpers who case the joint after the gates close. No one. Mind, there’s nothing strange about that. There’s no seagulls either. And that’s no thanks to the fucking hawk guy who’s getting paid a fortune to keep these non-existent gulls off the site with his scabby budgie. I sneaked a look at his invoice on Belcher’s desk one day. ‘East Glasgow Hawks’ it said at the top of the paper.

  And then EGH claimed to be owed nearly two hundred fucking pounds a week, just to keep that lazy bastard’s mangy pet flying around all day pretending to keep off imaginary flying vermin. Spanner says the guy’s got a contract at the airport too. Must be coining it in, the fat shite. And the worst of it is, the gulls wouldn’t come here any more even if you were pumping fish out your arse. They wouldn’t be so daft.

  The rats went months ago. That leaves us. Only us.

  I force myself to look back up at the doll again. Belcher’s had it up there now for three days. That means The Rising is almost here. Like, really really almost here. He wouldn’t dare have it out so long in case one of the Council suits dropped by and happened to ask what the fuck it was. So it must be almost now. Shit. Almost time, and no strangers. I can’t help wondering what the mad cunt’s plan is. You can’t tell by looking at Belcher. You can’t tell anything very much. So I look at the doll.

  This is only the third time I’ve seen it, since I’m last in. Only
been on the site sixteen months. Been to college, blew out, landed here, and it took me at least three months to murder my bloody vocabulary so they’d even talk to me, the under-educated thick bastards. So now I can talk in words of one syllable, or if it’s Spanner I’m talking to, less. But I fit in now. I fit in fine. Only seen two Risings, and I can’t get the last one out my head when I stare at that thing.

  At least the doll can’t stare back, on account of having no eyes. The head is a bleached rat’s skull, delicate, nearly beautiful. It sits on top of a leather body, attached to it by a separate strip of leather that goes over the top of the skull almost like a World War Two flying helmet.

  And then that obscene fucking body dangles below it. I can’t even bring myself to think about who might have made the thing, what pair of hands held it and stitched it into that shape, but the thought of the maker is worse than the finished work. I used to wonder if Belcher had done it, but one look at his massive chapped hands would reassure you that those fingers would never be capable of any kind of craftsmanship. He can barely make a roll-up, and his fingers are so fat it’s all he can do to force his forefinger up a nostril to pick the snotter out that ugly nose. Somehow that brings me comfort. No matter how repulsive it is, the doll is a work of art, but the thought that its maker could be in this room would give me the dry boke.

  Its upper body has two thin arms dangling from it, the hands – or claws, I can’t work out which – represented by tiny razor-sharp shards of tin cut meticulously from old cans. On the torso are two half-filled pendulous breasts, the nipples made from the ends of condoms, filled with God knows what, that give them a pink fleshy appearance. Hanging below is its distended belly. Maybe it’s supposed to be pregnant, maybe not. But there’s a slit up it leaving an empty oval chamber, about an inch in diameter, that’s blackened and hardened inside like the interior of a bad walnut shell.

  Just below is a two-inch-long thick, wrinkled cock.

  The legs that try and straddle the massive swollen organ are stick-thin again, and end with the same metal claws; and because they bandy out like an old guy with rickets, those tin claws make the doll’s bottom half look reptilian.