New Fears--New horror stories by masters of the genre

by Mark Morris

  Big mistake. There’s a catch in my throat. A weight in my chest. I bite my tongue to hold a sob at bay. Gran wasn’t always a hindrance. She wasn’t always a tooth-sucking mouth-breather. A long-buried memory surfaces. My parents’ voices getting lower and lower, dropping to that dangerous hiss. Their bedroom door closing, a pause and then… Don’t make a scene. Next: Me packing my school bag with Monster Munch and a spare T-shirt. Slipping out the back door and walking the two miles to Gran’s flat, the winter light dying fast. “Don’t tell them!” I begged her when she opened up. She didn’t shout at me for running away. She gave me a hug, watched He-Man with me, made me a hot chocolate and put me to bed in the spare room. It smelled of her.

  A smattering of applause brings me back. Everyone around us is up on their feet, clapping and cheering—a standing ovation. I don’t move. I don’t dare. Let them think Gran and I are just churlish.

  It’s only in the confusion of people rooting under their seats for their belongings that I’m able to shift Gran upright in her seat. Her head lolls forward, but she doesn’t look that dead. The tutting woman tries to edge past me, but I refuse to move, and she’s forced to exit via the other end of the aisle.

  I spy Liz at one of the exits. She waves to me, and I feel myself staring at Liz like an inept stalker, frozen with indecision.

  “Are you coming, Steven?” she calls. And I’m certain there’s something extra in her voice. Something inviting. “Like I said, feel free to bring your gran!”

  Don’t do it.

  “She’s getting a lift from someone else,” I hear myself shouting back, voice booming over the crowd with far more power than the actor who’d played the Phantom. Well it’s true, isn’t it? I can phone for an undertaker from the bar if I have to. Not funny, Steven.

  “Cool, we’ll wait for you outside.”

  I look down at the body. Last chance.

  “Bye, Gran.” I give her a kiss on her cheek; it’s warmer than her hand, so there’s that—and get the hell out of there, knocking my shins on the seats in my haste to join the others.

  I turn back to see one of the ushers tapping her on the shoulder. She flops forward in slow motion, her forehead smacking the seat in front of her with enough force to send her teeth skittering.

  And then I run.

  EUMENIDES (THE BENEVOLENT LADIES)

  by Adam L. G. Nevill

  On his first day at work the only thing that had enthralled Jason was Electra and her legs. For the next two months his admiration developed into a fixation, lasting from morning until home time in the logistics office, at the distribution centre of Agri-Tech.

  Jason found Electra’s egresses away from his desk mesmerising. Whenever his wayward scrutiny lowered to her legs, she seemed to perpetually be doing only that, forever moving away from him, while tantalising him in a way that was more torment than pleasure.

  Electra was the only light within the darkness of his working life, the sole distraction he welcomed. And even though his position at the distribution centre seemed intent on erasing the last of his individuality, and his hopes for anything better in life, he secretly tingled in anticipation of each working day because she was always in those days: sweetly perfumed, tastefully painted, soft, virtually mute, a silky presence with thighs that susurrated between the desks and the grey metal shelving. A siren mounted upon tipped heels that created their own strange music when she teetered along the concrete-floored aisles, or sent a staccato beat across the vast tarmacked spaces, designed for cars and delivery vehicles, under that forever grey of sky engulfing Agri-Tech.

  Jason’s job and office, both confined within the enormous but sparsely staffed “logistics hub” for agricultural engine and machine parts, was a place that did not matter. Agri-Tech and the town that hosted it, Sullet-upon-Trent, was a part of the North Midlands that wasn’t quite the Black Country or Staffordshire, a bit of both but not regarded as either. Sullet-upon-Trent, or “Sully”, had no meaning geographically, culturally, or politically. It boasted no public life or attractions for visitors. The area was a kind of anti-matter and stuck at the intersection of new, fast roads that swept people past it.

  Within a week of Jason’s hasty departure from another dead space just beyond the M25 in what might have been Buckinghamshire—where he had landed after university five years previously when aiming for London’s media world— he’d become even more disappointed with Sullet-upon-Trent. It now seemed to him that his life was destined to waste away among dual carriageways, metal fences, eerily quiet industrial estates, white vans, new houses built on railway embankments, and warehouse-style shopping malls containing pet suppliers and white goods stores the size of football stadiums.

  He’d found that Sullet-upon-Trent and its ilk offered the antithesis of a life that one could engage with, embrace, or be invigorated by on any level. Such locations offered existences rather than opportunities to attain any kind of essence. As a consequence, they remained areas devoid of vitality. He’d also discovered that the places of work within them were usually created, and peopled, by concentrations of the unimaginative.

  Sully filled Jason with a particular apathy and inertia common to such zones. They made him listless but occasionally eager to scream or laugh hysterically, or to inflict physical damage upon his surroundings. Increasingly, the longer he lived in Sully, he thought of himself as a caged ape, dressed in a cheap suit; one left in a narrow and littered cement enclosure, forever bereft of visitors; a forgotten and unexceptional primate that incessantly slapped its own face with a big leathery hand.

  Jason only kept his mind alive by ordering books online and reading them patiently in his room, seeking self-knowledge as well as answers about how to better deal with his lot until he managed to escape. His reading was also an attempt to cup his hands around the small, bright flame that three years at university had ignited. If that tiny fire was doused he feared who he might become, perhaps a man that would also forget who he had once been.

  Here too, as with his last job, his colleagues were mostly men, painfully ordinary, but somewhat cynical and prescribed to a limited discourse that mostly revolved around football, cars, IT, gaming, drunkenness, and handheld gadgetry. Even in its briefest form the office discourse made Jason’s heart smoulder with a frustration born of morbid boredom.

  Online dating sites had only returned the profiles of eight single females within his reach geographically, and the profiles had all looked fake. Romantic opportunities to relieve his demoralising loneliness were slender. The Sully women that didn’t leave the area appeared to marry early and become mothers even earlier. Only Electra appeared different. Who was she and what was she doing here? No doubt she had not long left further education and probably had a boyfriend.

  Whenever he came across her during the lunch intervals, as she sat on one of the solitary benches set around the warehouses on grass verges that were criss-crossed by roads without pavements, he picked his way clear of subjects that might encourage any mention of a man in her life. If she did ever confess to such, Jason knew that his reaction would be so emotional that his powers to disguise his colossal disappointment would fail. For as long as she never revealed a significant other—a Gaz, Baz, Nigel, Anton, Leon, Jay or Ste—his wishful thinking about her might continue undiminished. Even an innocent stock-related query before her desk, made by one of his male colleagues, evoked spasms of jealousy so intense that they left Jason dizzy.

  Perhaps she was religious and saving herself. This was possible because the only jewellery she wore was a crucifix of white gold. He fancied he might convert to anything just to be with her.

  In Jason’s company, during his lunchtime intrusions, she remained passive, half-smiling and monosyllabic. But he often harboured a suspicion that she shared some knowledge with his colleagues about him, and that his interaction with her was embarrassing to her. He sometimes suspected that, at best, Electra was merely humouring him.

  On the occasions Jason sat beside her, his head
would thump with blood while his mouth issued inanities and observations so lifeless and charmless that self-mutilation seemed the only fitting antidote. She would twist strands of her shoulder-length hair around a finger and then peer at it intently with her young green eyes, not nervous but not restful either. Her legs would always be crossed, her lined skirt slithering back from the leading knee while one foot bounced a high-heeled shoe upon its hidden toes.

  Such was his obsession with the girl, that on the final day of his probation period he summoned the courage to ask her out. As Electra made tea for the entire office, Jason followed her into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door for no reason, and said,“We should go out sometime?”

  After he’d made the request a silence thickened within the staff kitchen as if the very air had become gelatine, while the space inside his ears roared as loudly as an underground tunnel filled with freight trains. As quickly as his disintegrating thoughts could manage, he tried to remember his pre-rehearsed get-out clause.

  What had he been thinking? He was at least ten years her senior. He was a pest. The insidious word hissed through his mind like a serpent in dry grass. To finally be reduced to this at his age. It made him want to tear his shirt from his untrained, freckled torso, the action accompanied by the howl of a thwarted beast. He had finally lost his reason and was no longer an acceptable person.

  “Okay. Where’d you wanna go?” Electra said, without looking at him. Her indifference was created anew in his eyes as boredom.

  She was bored. Bored with it all, like him. Not enigmatic, mysterious, coquettish or coy, or any of the things that his imagination had invested into her. She was merely young and bored. He perceived this as the stark walls of the room shuddered back to their former dimensions.

  So certain was he of failure and rejection, Jason had not thought as far ahead as to where they might go. “Where’s good to go… to go round here?”

  Electra frowned. “Nowhere much. Beside the zoo.”

  * * *

  Jason rented a room in a large, sub-divided Victorian house in the town’s oldest street, an area unhappily separated from where it had originally been founded after the county’s lines were redrawn in the sixties. Initially, Jason had hoped to have his own place in Sullet-upon-Trent, but even so far away from London, his credit card debt consumed most of his income and he was forced to cohabit.

  All of the residents of the house were male, older than Jason, and appeared even more weary and disappointed than he felt. If he could not break his current encirclement of poorly paid employment without prospect, in negligible places set beside motorways, he perceived his new neighbours to be a communal portent of what awaited him in the future.

  Only one resident of the house ever engaged him in conversation, though Jason wished Gerald had remained as secretive, sullen and retiring as the other grey figures that existed before the muttering televisions of their rooms. But Gerald was one of those unfortunate individuals who hated being alone, while being in possession of few social graces and no emotional intelligence. Gerald was also an autodidact on council politics, which he interspersed with political history, both moribund and local. He always spoke through a knowing half-smile too, employing an ironic tone of voice that helped Jason understand why housemates often murdered each other.

  But Gerald liked an audience and had selected Jason to fulfil that function when Jason, making an effort to be the gregarious new boy, had been moving his meagre belongings into the house. A geniality he now paid a heavy price for whenever he used the kitchen.

  That part of the building had become a kind of trap laid by the spidery and withered Gerald. His door on the first floor would click open whenever anyone entered the kitchen to boil a kettle or prepare a meal. The insect-like figure would then descend silently and hover about the kitchen door, as if weaving an invisible web that his victims would fail to break through, should they decide, quite reasonably, that hunger and thirst were better alternatives to Gerald’s company.

  But the night before his “date” with Electra, Jason saw a rare opportunity to employ Gerald’s local knowledge to some purpose. An opportunity he had never before discovered in their one-sided interactions. Jason took a ready meal down to the ground floor kitchen, and, with a magician’s flourish, hit the OPEN DOOR button of the microwave. The appliance’s bell pinged loudly, and within three seconds the door to Gerald’s room had clicked open.

  “Evening,” Gerald said from the doorway, and followed this with his customary embellishment, “How’s life down pit?” To which he chortled through his beard, close to tearing-up with delight at his own jest.

  Jason cut out any preliminaries to Gerald’s ubiquitous encirclement. Tonight, he’d let him in. “I had no idea that Sullet had a zoo.”

  Gerald stopped smiling and frowned. “It doesn’t. Not in all the years I’ve lived here. And I would know. You can trust me on that.”

  Jason had such faith in Gerald’s local knowledge that this news filled Jason’s head with a terrible confusion that lapsed to dread. Electra had made a fool of him then? If Gerald said there was no zoo in Sullet, then none existed. And wasn’t a zoo a place where older men, like dads and uncles, traditionally took younger girls, like nieces and daughters, on innocent days out? Electra’s offer to meet him outside the gates of the zoo the following morning, on Saturday, must have been a disingenuous, mocking rejection that he’d been too stupid to recognise.

  When Jason arrived at work on Monday and he accused her of playing a cruel trick, she would say, Did you really think? No, tell me you didn’t? I was only joking. No, wait, don’t tell me you actually went and looked for a zoo? In Sully? He could almost hear her voice. His disgrace and humiliation would reach the forklift drivers by elevenses. The material he’d gifted his colleagues with, for endless pranks and jibes about all things zoological, was limitless. Why had he been so gullible? Sullet had no cinema, no theatre, museum, bowling alley. It was simply a place where people existed. Recreation was sought out of town. So how could it possibly boast a zoo?

  “But that was a roll up right there. Typical really.” Gerald’s voice returned to Jason’s shocked stupefaction before the microwave oven. “As usual the money wasn’t there. Gibbet was running the council into the ground at the time. So instead they used the budget on roads that no one needed.”

  Jason’s horror at Electra’s deception turned into anger. “What the hell are you wittering on about? I asked about a zoo, not budgets and roads.”

  Gerald grinned as if Jason was positioned exactly where the older man wanted him to be. “What you need to understand. What you need to know is how it all came about—”

  “No I don’t. There is no zoo. I know what I need to.”

  “Oh, but there was one once. Pentree Zoological Gardens. In ruins now. You can still see it from the A2546. If you’re going towards Bunridge, just before you get to where the Man in the Moon used to be…” And this continued for some time. Another of Gerald’s interests was interminable road directions using landmarks that no longer existed.

  “Stop.” Jason even held his hands up as if pleading. “Please, stop. The zoo. There was a zoo, but it’s no longer open?”

  “That’s what I said. When Gibbet—”

  “Stop. Slow down. Please. This zoo. The zoo itself is still there? So what else is there?”

  Gerald frowned.

  “In terms of leisure activities? Funfair? Restaurant? Pub? Whatever? Why would anyone go there now?”

  “Well they wouldn’t, unless they belonged to the local historical society. I was once the secretary, from—”

  “Gerald!Why would the local historical society go there?”

  “Because of the architecture of course. It’s one of the last remaining Victorian zoos built by Bellowby. A testament to inhumanity. If you were an animal shipped over from Africa or Asia, then the last place you’d want to end up inside was Pentree Zoological Gardens. You see, what you need to understand—”

 
“So it’s a museum, of sorts, open to the public?”

  “Not likely. There’s never been enough money to pull it down, let alone preserve it.”

  “So it’s derelict? This is a derelict Victorian zoo?”

  “More or less. Why do you ask?”

  “I’m going there tomorrow. To meet a friend.”

  Gerald’s eyes burned with an opportunist’s glee. “Well, all right, I’ve nothing on. I’ll come too. There’s no point going unless someone’s with you who knows the story.”

  “No. No. Thanks, but no. It’s a date.”

  “A date? With a girl? There?” Gerald’s shock was shared in equal amounts between the idea that Jason would even know a woman, and the idea they would visit the abandoned zoo together.

  “The story we don’t need. Sorry, local history, that sort of thing. Wouldn’t quite work.”

  Gerald deflated at the rebuff. “Maybe she knows all about it then.”

  “I doubt that.” And then Jason wondered if he was meant to find the zoo locked up and in ruins on Saturday morning, as if that were to serve as an epitaph to his romantic aspirations. Or was she suggesting that he were an animal that should be locked up? The best place for him after pestering her at work and staring at her legs for months? My God, he thought, and seemed to shrink inside. Was it that noticeable, his leering?

  “A bad business. Religious nutters finished off what a shortage of funds began.”

  His miserable reverie broken, Jason looked at Gerald. “What? What did you say?” A question he’d never thought he’d ever ask Gerald. “What bad business? What nutters are you talking about?”

  Gerald appeared to expand with the spirit that had so recently deserted him. “The animals all died. Horribly. Poisoned, they suspected, from chemicals that drifted over from the works out at Bunall. Place had been in decline, of course, for years, so the poor beasts were in bad shape. No money you see. Way before the animal rights lot got organised the animals’ welfare was in serious decline. But a group of swivel-eyed evangelists had actually been going into the enclosures and poisoning the animals at night. The Sisters of the White Cross they called themselves. They had a temple out Ruddery way, but it’s a teeth-whitening place now…”