The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2002, Volume 13

by Stephen Jones

  Belcher is looking at me now. I felt his gaze shift to my face as tangibly as if he’d stroked me. I look at the doll for a few beats more, resume chewing my sandwich, then try to look away casually.

  He’ll have a plan. We all trust that he knows what he’s doing. The hawk guy makes a wee kind of chucking noise to his bird and strokes its tiny head with a finger, in a kind of affirmation that everything’s going to be okay.

  But I don’t know. It feels different this time. I know I’ve done wrong but Belcher can’t possibly know that. I’m just going to sit it out. The cheese in my mouth tastes like wax. I swallow.

  ‘What about you?’

  I blink, then swallow again. ‘What?’

  He waits. Not honouring my reply with one of his own. Spanner has moved his eyes to my face. The hawk guy is still fingering his fucking bird. I take the back of my hand over my mouth. ‘Same, Mr Belcher. Not a soul.’

  This time, Belcher gives a slight nod. He picks up his paper again, turns two pages, then folds it in half, in half again, and starts to read the fat origamied rectangle of newsprint as though he had never spoken.

  No one breaks the silence. Not even the hawk, and that wee bastard can suddenly give an ear-piercing shriek when you least expect it. Even it senses Belcher’s displeasure. We know him too well to think it’s finished.

  ‘Sun sets at six-fourteen. Meet at the beds at six.’ He smoothes the paper, still squinting at the type. ‘An’ when ah say six, ah mean six, you dozy cunts.’

  I’ve been driving the dumper all week. I like it fine. Although it’s Spanner who fills me up with his digger, I don’t have to see or talk to the stupid bastard. We’re safe in our respective cabs, the only communication a wave of a hand from a window or a flash of headlights. And this afternoon all I have to do is think about The Rising.

  I’m not thinking about what Belcher has in mind. I’m thinking what we all might get this time. I never thought it would work the first go. And I still don’t know if it did, but it felt like it did. And I suppose I need to believe that it did. Yes, I really do.

  I wanted that trail bike and I got that trail bike. Maybe it wasn’t quite the way I thought, but I still got it. It was in the auction, the one I saw, sitting up high on its pink shocks the way an Arab racehorse stands on tiptoe before a gallop. I wanted it so badly, and even more badly when it didn’t reach the reserve price and it got wheeled away. And then the one I got, just exactly like the one in the auction, was on the site, a few days after The Rising. Just left there, paint as good as new, even sporting two day-glo mudguards I hadn’t bargained for. Well, okay, maybe it wasn’t the exact same one. And so the fuck what that it had no back tyre and the carburettor was shot? It only took me sixty quid to fix, and that was several hundred notes short of what I’d have needed to buy the thing proper.

  See, we all want things. Spanner wanted that woman from his estate. Christ knows why. What a dog. Dyed hair, three kids by three different guys, and her tits nearly down at her ankles. And even though she made Mother Teresa look like a supermodel she wouldn’t spit on Spanner if he was on fire. But he wanted her. And one week after The Rising, he told me as we shovelled, that he was getting pissed with her and shagging her from behind in that pit of a flat she has above the shops. You see, that can’t be coincidence, can it? I don’t know what the hawk guy wants and I don’t care. He gets enough for fucking nothing just by chucking that bird around.

  But we all know what Belcher wants, and it worries me that it’s too big. He’s not going to get it. The worst of it is, the thing that really eats me up if I’m being honest, is that I think he’ll keep on going, pulling any stunt he can, because he believes that one day his undoable thing will be done.

  I saw his face one afternoon and that told me a lot. A lot I didn’t want to know. He brought her in the car to the Portakabin on one of his days off, because he was on his way somewhere else. He must have forgotten something important – normally he’d never have done it.

  The engine was still running and Belcher was inside the cabin, but I stopped and looked in the back of the car as I passed. I knew better than to come in because then he’d have known I’d seen her and I know he hates that. It’s an old Ford Mondeo, and it’s shite. There’s rust bleeding all along the underside of the driver’s door that you just know creeps right into the chassis where you can’t see it, and you can hear that the engine’s fucked even when it’s idling. You see, that’s what he should be asking for. A new car. I just think he’d get it. That The Rising could get him it. But like I said, it’s not enough.

  She’s about fourteen, his daughter. She was strapped into what looked like a giant child-seat in the back, except it had kind of a headrest thing on either side of her temples with metal arms to position them like an anglepoise lamp. Her face was turned, looking out the window, although it was obvious she couldn’t look at anything, the way her eyes were pointing in different directions and darting around like she was following two different shoals of fast fish. A long thread of foamy spittle hung from her bottom lip and stuck to her chest like a suspension bridge, and on that barrelled chest two thin arms rested, terminating in the clawed spastic hands that seemed frozen in a desire to tear at her own scrawny throat.

  Then I glanced up at the Portakabin window and I saw him looking at me.

  His face was a mixture of shame and anger, and much worse, a longing that was almost primeval in intensity. I backed away and he never mentioned I’d even been there. But I couldn’t get his face out of my head.

  What does he think? Does he think that after fourteen years she’ll just get up out of that padded contraption and walk? That she’ll open her slack twisted mouth and suddenly say ‘Daddy’? That she’ll untangle her misshapen wasted body and join the other teenagers on the street in choosing clothes, in laughing and drinking and living and shagging boys, and one day even make him a grandfather? It’s too much. Way too much.

  It’s why I closed up that fence. His face. That empty longing. The knowledge that he’d do anything.

  I didn’t see the first guy. At the first Rising, I mean. I knew who he was, though. A good choice. They’re all scum, that family of builders that always try and dump when we’re on night shift. They used to drop him off by car at the gate. Didn’t park, you see, so the nightwatchman or the cops who pass regularly couldn’t get a licence plate. And then he’d come in and scout about, choose the site, then scarper with the details for the truck to follow in the days after. You see, we change the main pit every few days. Move it around. You have to know where we’re burying. Fly bastards. Don’t know where they picked him up again, but no car meant we could never spot him.

  So they never knew where he went, you see. And when the cops came round, we’d never seen him. Like I say, that was the truth for me anyhow. I genuinely never saw him. Just where he was taken, and of course the bit of him that Belcher has to put in the doll’s slit belly. Looked like the tip of a finger. Maybe not. I could be wrong. It was the tip of something, though.

  But I saw the second guy. And all I can say is that fucking junkie was better off wherever he is now than walking the earth with decent people. Junkies make me boke. I can barely look at their sallow sunken faces in the pub where I drink without wanting to walk up and punch their fucking lights out.

  So I watched, and I nearly saw it Rise before I had to look away, but I wasn’t shamed that it took the bastard and that I’d helped this time. Those scumbags rob old ladies just to feed their veins. True. I was more shamed I didn’t see what came for him. Because I was afraid. Anyway, that was when I got my bike.

  But kids. I don’t know. I just don’t think so. I’ve watched them, the dirty underfed neglected little shits, pissing around on the heaps of rubbish by the fence in their shiny chain-store sports wear, and I could see what Belcher meant. But then you’d chase them, and behind those pinched wee masks of adult defiance that called you things you didn’t know were in the English language, there were still glimpses
of something like children. So I closed up the fence.

  I took care, of course, to climb over and do it from the other side, so it’d look like one of those hacket hard-faced ‘mothers’ from the estate had done it, the ones with necks so fat their thin-gold-chained crucifixes look as though they’re choking them to death, instead of protecting their immortal souls. Belcher’ll never know it was me.

  Course, that’s left us without a stranger for this time, but he knows what he’s doing. He’s the one that really wants something. He’ll find a way.

  I let myself think about what I want this time and there’s no contest. In fact I don’t want it, I need it.

  Spanner interrupts my dreaming by missing the back of the truck by ten miles, and piles of shit spill over the edge and spew around my cab.

  ‘You blind, you fucking maniac?’

  He can’t hear me. But I shout anyway, and drive off half full just to bug him. On my way to where this pile of crap needs to be I pass the beds, the mechanically smoothed runways on top of the deepest piles of rubbish that Belcher named, where we’ll be meeting in half an hour, and I think about it again.

  It’s a Cosworth. Sex and power. Four doors, black, with a spoiler and alloy wheels. Gerry Kelly, the smooth fucker who works at the bookie’s, is selling it for near on seven grand, and never in a million years can I get my hands on that kind of cash. But I want it. And you see, a thing like that can’t just turn up on the site. Cars don’t get dumped on the site. So it’ll be interesting to see how I manage to get it. That is, if The Rising really does work. Maybe I want to know for sure that it works more than I actually want the car. Maybe.

  I think about it some more as I dump the quarter-load that the shit-for-brains Spanner has tossed into the back and then I drive back slowly, imagining who I could shag in the back seat of that car and where we could go and how fast.

  And before I know what time it is I see the hawk guy and Belcher making their way to the beds, and I pull up the dumper beside Spanner’s digger, parked at an angle that’ll force him to do a difficult reverse, and go and get ready to join them.

  Of course there’s no sunset. This is Glasgow. The grey sky just turns a darker grey, then the street lights of the city come on and stain it a sickly orange. That’s how it works. But if Belcher says it’s six-fourteen when the invisible sun pegs out and heads west, then it must be right. The air is thick with methane, so much tonight you can hardly breathe. That happens when the air is still, and even after sixteen months I sometimes think I won’t be able to take it. But you do. You get used to anything.

  Belcher is holding the doll casually, letting its legs hang from his square fist the way a toddler would take a teddy to bed, and he stops walking at some unspecified spot and waits. Spanner and the hawk guy stand on either side of him but a step behind, and so when I reach them, I choose the hawk guy’s side and do the same. It’s nearly dark now, but the halogens that ring the perimeter fence are picking us out and lighting up the beds like a football pitch. The shadows are so harsh that the ragged skin of the rubbish almost looks comforting in comparison.

  Although it’s been compacted – inexpertly, by Spanner, obviously – you can still make out the variety of human debris that makes up this unnatural surface. Cartons and plastic containers, broken bread crates, bits of abandoned machines, handles, telephone handsets, rotting vegetables, dried coffee grounds, ripped mattresses. It doesn’t ever do to look too closely. It’s best to treat it all like it was one thing. The one big thing that humanity has decided it doesn’t want any more. The thing that’s been eaten and shat on and torn up and soiled, and needs to be buried and covered by people like us, kept well out of sight.

  I think I can feel something already under my feet, although to tell the truth it might just be my excitement. I never could wait for things.

  The hawk guy hasn’t got his hawk. I notice this and it’s strange. It’s also strange there isn’t a stranger. But I don’t make the rules, and I don’t even know the rules. Maybe it’s not always necessary. I don’t know if I’m relieved or disappointed. I just know that whatever happens I’m going to watch all the way this time. Not chicken out. Keep looking until it comes and goes.

  We wait in silence, hands held in front like we were at church, and then Belcher rubs his face with the hand not holding the doll. ‘Ah fuckin’ hate it when you wee cunts mess me about.’

  He says this so quietly and wearily I wonder if he’s talking to himself, or even to the doll. But he stops mashing his face and turns to look directly at me. My head feels hot, and I can start to hear my pulse beating in my ears, the way you can sometimes when you’re pissed and your pillow’s too hard. I stay silent. There might be a mistake. I might be misreading him. The other two are looking at their feet. I wonder if I should also lower my eyes, but Belcher’s gaze is too intense.

  ‘Ah mean, whit the fuck was a’ that aboot? Ye think anybody would miss wan o’ the wee bastards? Eh?’

  I know, and he knows I know that he’s referring to the fence. I try and hold his gaze.

  ‘Well, do ye?’

  He’s nearly shouting. That’s not like him. I have to answer. I start with a shrug. ‘Just thought there’d be a fuss, Mr Belcher. You know, kids an’ that. The cops. You know. The mothers.’

  He steps right up to me and I can feel his breath on my face. His voice drops again. ‘Those fat whores dinnae even know how many fuckin’ kids they’ve got. Even if ye could drag them oot the pub long enough tae line them up and show them, there’s no tellin’ they’d recognize them.’

  He closes his mouth and his back teeth grind together and make his jaw move. He speaks next in a near-whisper.

  ‘Don’t know the meanin’ o’ the fuckin’ word “parent”.’

  When he says this his voice breaks on the word ‘parent’ and I use my embarrassment as a decent excuse to lower my gaze. This disgusting personal display somewhere between sentimentality and rage is making me more nervous than when he’s just plain mad. I’m praying he’ll stop it and go back to being a one-word fucker. Maybe the prayer works. He’s calming down, the hardness back in his voice when he speaks again. All trace of the break healed. ‘Ah watched ye close up the fence. You stupid wee arse-wipe.’

  I think about lying and then he’s saying something chilling. ‘Ye were last in.’

  As I look quickly back up again three things happen.

  Belcher closes his eyes and nods, like he’s fallen asleep. Spanner and the hawk guy grab me by each arm, Spanner surprisingly strong for such a crap wee guy.

  Then Belcher takes out his knife and slices the top of my left ear off.

  I don’t even cry out with the pain. I just open my mouth as wide as my jaw will allow and nothing comes out. Just a kind of gasp. Because I can feel it coming. The ground is moving.

  I can’t watch as Belcher puts the bit of ear in that oval slit and tosses the doll in front him. I can’t watch because I’m looking at the undulating hump in the beds that’s growing and changing and coming nearer.

  The smell of methane is so strong now that a spark would ignite the whole site, and I gag and cough, trying to get my breath and my voice back.

  I know stuff now. Here’s what I know.

  It makes itself. It just fucking makes itself out of whatever it can find. There’s two dead dogs’ heads melted together to make a thing with three eyes and what looks like all jaws and rotted teeth. The body’s a mess of butcher’s bones, bottle glass, bits of cat, newspaper and broken tiles. But the arms. Oh God, the arms. So much metal. And all ending in blades of tin and steel and rusted pointed broken industrial shrapnel, so that when the first pain comes it’s mixed with a sharp almost fruity tang of oxidizing metal. It works fast but clumsily, like a newborn animal, and I know that we’re helping make it even as it gets bigger.

  And all I can think of, as I sink to my knees and drool on the ground in the pool of my own hot piss, is his daughter drooling the same way in her bed, and how this isn’t goi
ng to make it better.

  If I could ever talk again, if the ragged hole in my throat would close and stop pumping blood on the milk cartons and broken paperbacks, I would tell the stupid cunt again and again.

  Shout it. Scream it.

  It isn’t going to make it better.

  MICHAEL CHISLETT

  Off the Map

  MICHAEL CHISLETT HAS BEEN INFLUENCED by such writers as Robert Aickman, M.R. James, Arthur Machen and Fritz Leiber. His fiction has appeared in such magazines as Ghosts & Scholars, All Hallows and Supernatural Tales, and in the anthologies The Young Oxford Book of Supernatural Stories, The Young Oxford Book of Nightmares, Midnight Never Comes and Shadows and Silence.

  He takes a perverse pleasure in inventing plausible ‘fakelore’ in his stories, many of which are set in South London, where he was born and has lived all his life (and that he feels he knows a bit too well). He is currently working on a novel, Jane Dark’s Garden, which is set in the same area as ‘Off the Map’ and which one day may even be finished.

  About the following story, Chislett reveals: ‘Machen is the obvious influence behind the tale. He was adept at seeing the odd and the hidden in the dullness of suburban London. The mysteries behind closed curtains in Victorian villas and such. The mysteries are still there and it is up to us, if we are so minded, to discover them.

  ‘The park and the streets leading up to it do exist. Not quite so steep a climb, perhaps, and with not so many turnings, but it is there. The view is not very good, though; one might well be able to see London from it, but for the houses in between, and there are no reports of any phenomena such as are described in the story. If those of a curious turn of mind do choose to seek the place out, then they should be very careful of the maps that they consult first. There is, of course, no station named “Mabb’s End” in London, nor Mabb’s Hill. If they are on your map, then I would certainly like to see it. But as for going there . . . well, it is best to be sensible about these things, is all I can say.’