New Fears II - Brand New Horror Stories by Masters of the Macabre

by Mark Morris

  When the lights came up, I staggered out into the cold blue dawn, and the streets were full of us: the dishevelled and the desolate, grey-faced, haunting the seafront. Avoiding one another’s empty gazes as we navigated the slow crash of the comedown.

  (I saw her flat for the first time a few days after she died. I asked the landlord for the spare keys. I stood in the doorway holding an empty suitcase, watching dust motes dance in the sunlight. There was a mattress on the floor, a holdall with clothes in. Nothing else. No signs of a life. As though she had only ever been visiting.)

  There was a message from her when I woke up. The sun was high and bright, like a pickaxe to the skull. I crawled to the bathroom, pressed my face against the cool tiles. I lay there until the rotten-tooth throb of my head began to subside. I felt empty. Her voice echoed in the small space, omnipresent.

  “I suppose I could keep doing this forever,” she said, her voice quiet, and I knew he must be there, somewhere, just out of earshot; asleep, perhaps, blissfully unaware that she would be gone before he woke, and that he would never have her again. “What’s that poem, you know… the one where she eats men like air? It’s so easy, Ruth. They make it so easy. The world will never run dry of gullible men.”

  The slow drip of the toilet cistern, like water torture. Press “2” to repeat. Press “3” to delete.

  “I suppose I could keep doing this forever,” she said.

  Press “2” to repeat.

  “It kills them when they realise they can’t have me,” she said. “Only it’s not really me they want. That’s the thing. They want the idea of me, the one they’ve built in their heads. I give them so little to work with, and when they fill in the blanks the Elodie they come up with never looks like me. It’s only you, Ruth. You’re the only one who knows me at all.”

  Press “2” to repeat.

  “It’s only you, Ruth.”

  Slack face pressed against cold tiles. Mouthing her words like an incantation.

  Press “2” to repeat.

  “It’s only you.”

  * * *

  “It just felt right,” she said. “It felt like it was time. Like a voice, somewhere inside. Calling me back. I had a good run this time, I think.”

  I drew air into disembodied lungs, breathing on blind faith. I was numb meat. I might not have existed at all but for the dull fire of my fingertips, my toes, cold-bitten and burning as I kicked feebly against the current, struggling to stay afloat.

  Her voice cut through the cold blood-rush of the water, an arrow to the brain: “It tires you out, always having to pretend. And of all the places I’ve been, of all the people I’ve met, you were the only one who ever got it right. You were the only one who thought to look inside.”

  Hands light on my shoulders. Skin so cold the breath caught in my lungs. Above me, moonlight seared through the gaps in the pier, stark as bleached ribs. I’d looked inside of her and seen nothing at all but bones couched in black rot; her magpie soul, pieced together out of the fragments she stole from other people, other lives, like a ransom note assembled from newsprint. I could have destroyed her, if I’d wanted to. I could have ruined her. I could have.

  “Remember when I told you I’d seen the face of God?”

  Arms around me, firm. A lover’s embrace. Drifting together out into that dark, quiet space, away from the shore. Numb feet free-floating in the cold, black water. Gently, she lifted my head.

  “Nobody believed me but you. Nobody knows me like you do, Ruth. Nobody loves me like you do.”

  I remembered Sean on the beach, staring fretfully at the blood-red embers. She never felt real, he’d said, and he’d been right. Elodie wasn’t real. She was better than real. She was an act nobody could follow. How could you love a flesh-and-blood human after being exposed to such a perfect cipher?

  Her teeth against my skin, anaesthetised with cold as she tore away the flesh, swallowed without chewing. Her tongue was so warm, lapping catlike at my blood. I had dreamed of this, of her tongue and her mouth and her hands, fingers sliding between my teeth. I bit down, tasted the bitter salt of her the way she had tasted me.

  Perhaps, when she returned—decades later, somewhere far from here, wearing someone else’s face, someone else’s name—there would still be something of me inside of her. A fragment lodged deep in that black, empty cavity; woven into the tapestry of her salvage-yard persona, a series of anecdotes here, a personality quirk there. Perhaps she might even remember me.

  “It’s only you, Ruth.” Skin shearing as her mouth opened wide, hot and cavernous, the wet tear of muscle fibre, of flesh; like birth in reverse, the silk of her pulsing throat hot against my skull. The exquisite agony of teeth splintering bone. Down into the black water, where she was lithe and strong, legs tight around my ribcage, squeezing out the last tightly held breath. Silvery bubbles rose, broke on the surface. Her lips eclipsed me.

  It’s only you.

  Her mouth, like a black hole. Like the end of everything.

  STEEL BODIES

  Ray Cluley

  With a subtle turn of the outboard, Abesh steered them towards a narrow gap between the two nearest vessels. Before they slipped into the dark channel, Samir cast another glance along the coast, taking in all of the tankers and container ships beached there. Some of the vessels were still very much intact, and if they did not look as good as new they at least looked functional. Others were merely skeletal outlines of steel, stripped down to holds empty of all but shadows. Or so they seemed.

  The ship Abesh was taking him to was in a state of only partial decay. Several attempts had been made to take it apart, but work was now far behind schedule. It usually took three to six months to break a ship, but the Karen May had been sitting in the mud for nearly a year.

  They passed massive propeller blades that sat only half submerged, huge fans of rusty red-brown metal hanging mud-crusted over seawater they had once twisted into currents, churned into froth. And then man and boy were past them and between ships, moving through the shadows of giants.

  A sudden chill enveloped Samir as they left the sun behind, its warmth and light eclipsed by the ships either side. The metal walls channelled a cool breeze between them as Abesh steered them in and through with the tide, bump-bumping over the small waves that swelled in the reduced straight space of the sea. The shadows here were deep, deep as the cavities exposed in the steel, the metal skins of the ships pockmarked and stripped of material. Enormous superstructures, rising out of the water, they threw a vast darkness that seemed to leak from their hulls, casting them into premature dusk until there, suddenly, from high above, a shower of shooting stars that were gone before they could reach the water. Sparks from an acetylene torch somewhere nearby. Someone was working late.

  Abesh muttered something, his Chittagonian fast and clipped with urgency. He put a finger to his lips to hush Samir, though he wasn’t the one to have spoken.

  “They will tell us it is dangerous,” Abesh said, his voice low.

  “It is,” said Samir.

  Abesh cut the engine and they drifted, carried by their momentum. It was the same way Samir had travelled for years now. Momentum. All that had ever happened drove him towards all that was yet to occur.

  “Listen,” said Abesh.

  Samir could hear the waves slapping against the sides of their own small boat and the enormous ships to their left and right. From somewhere hidden within one of them came some deep gurgling, the throaty rumble of an ocean contained, longing to escape. He heard the resounding clank of something heavy, its echo swallowed by other settling noises.

  “Can you hear them?”

  Abesh was joking, or trying to, but Samir said, “Not yet.”

  The boy shrugged. “This is it.” He pulled their drifting boat closer to the structure beside them. The sea lapped into an exposed corridor or hold, Samir couldn’t tell, and a set of steps led deeper into the vessel. “This is a good place,” Abesh said as he roped them to the framework.
<
br />   “That’s not what I was told.”

  Abesh laughed. “Are you scared?”

  Samir shook his head. “No,” he said, but he was lying.

  * * *

  Samir had come to Chittagong three days ago. More specifically, he had come to a single stretch of coastline where ships came to die. Not so many years ago, it was a part of Bangladesh that would have been dense with mangroves. Now it held more than a hundred ship-breaking yards, the mangroves cleared to make way for the ever-expanding and always-profitable business of destruction.

  For Samir’s first visit to one of those yards, he’d arrived at low tide and watched as a line of men and boys—too many boys—dragged heavy lengths of cable through the mud towards a row of beached liners. The mud that sucked at their legs and caked their skin was loaded with all sort of toxins—poisoned blood from the beached vessels dying on the mud flats—but all they wore for protection were shorts and T-shirts. It was exhausting even to watch. The cable would be used to heave pieces of ship inland, vast sections of steel excised from vessels that had once known the glory of the open water but now stood mired in mud. They had been tourist attractions once, even in their ruin; there was little else this region had to offer. Now each yard was fenced off. Some were even patrolled, or so Samir had been told, though he had seen no guards. Only signs that promised danger. Signs warning against trespass. Signs forbidding photos. Samir had looked at one of those signs and had taken a picture of it because it would have amused Kamala. She would have admonished him, laughing or shaking her head.

  Samir shook his head now, watching the men at work. Danger, said the signs, and yet beyond the fences people worked. The rest of the world had strict health and safety regulations, Samir had no doubt. In Bangladesh, safety precautions ranged from optional to non-existent, and there would always be plenty of men in the local shanty towns desperate enough for the dangerous work that paid so little. If it meant they could feed themselves and their families then they’d face the physical hazards of injury and fatality, risk poisoning from a range of toxic materials Samir could only guess at. Ship-breaking was big business, and almost all of the local men worked in one yard or another. Children, too, like Abesh. They were cheaper. All of the ones Samir spoke to said they were fourteen years old, but most of them were lying; it was the minimum age for ship-breaking work. Children or not, they were no less aware of the dangers and difficulties. They wore the same slack expressions of exhaustion as the men. It was what they had for a uniform, along with their filthy T-shirts and grubby shorts and the mud they wore up their legs and arms. Some already had their own “Chittagong tattoos”. That’s what they called work-related scars. The shanty towns were filled with men carrying such marks. Many of them were missing fingers. Some were missing entire limbs, or were disfigured in other ways, bent and crippled. More than few carried the clean smooth scars of burnt skin. But still they worked the yards, and the children followed their example. They had little choice.

  “Our bodies are made of steel,” one of boys had said, flexing his scrawny biceps. “Strong.”

  One of the other boys had pointed to Samir’s face and said, “Tattoo,” for the scar that cut a line through his beard. When Samir tried to smile it twisted like a broken snake.

  “Tattoo,” he agreed. It was work-related, so he supposed it counted.

  A foreman of some kind, or someone who wanted to be, came over and yelled at the boys, his Bengali quick to emphasise the hurry. He clapped his hands once, and children who thought they were men rose to their feet to get back to work. They trudged through the mud towards a line of waiting vessels. Boys against giants, Samir thought. Every ship a Goliath waiting to fall.

  “They’re very young,” Samir said.

  The man looked at Samir. “You here to work?” He clearly didn’t think so, not the way Samir was dressed.

  Samir nodded. “Yes.”

  The man shook his head. Said, “There is nothing here for you.”

  The ground reverberated beneath their feet at that moment and thunder roared, shaking the beach. The enormous noise of fallen metal as a huge section of ship collapsed down the shore. Many days of cutting through deck after deck after deck had cleaved a massive section from the main body and it crashed to the ground in a shower of sparks and sharp metal, slapping hard enough into the mud to reshape it. None of the boys walking away were startled by the noise, but Samir had ducked and the foreman had laughed at him. The thunder lingered in Samir’s feet and charged his legs with a quickening tingle.

  “I’m here to work,” he said.

  The man sighed his laughter to an end and shook his head again. “Follow me.”

  A crowd of workers gathered down the beach at the section of fallen hull. The metal plate would be dragged across the mud to a waiting truck, dragged using chains and rollers and the flagging strength of malnourished men and boys. Thousands of pounds of metal moved by skinny people in tattered shorts and sandals. Sandals. Some of them even barefoot, risking tetanus at the very least. And there, clinging to the framework of what remained like fiery barnacles, were the cuttermen who sliced the ship into pieces. Samir saw how they leaned for hard to reach places, an assistant paired with each to hold not only the trailing hose of the acetylene torch but also the cutterman’s free hand as he suspended himself over a fatal drop.

  Samir said a prayer for them, and as he concluded he saw the ship he had come for. It loomed over the other vessels from further down the beach, as if creeping slowly back out to sea. A hulk of steel, rusted red like some scabbed wound. The Karen May.

  * * *

  Brine and diesel. The smell of it seemed to cling to Samir’s skin even just sitting close to the ship. Abesh stood and leaned to clutch at one of the exposed struts of the Karen May and pulled them closer.

  Samir tipped away what was left of his water and refilled his bottle from the sea. He fastened the lid tight and tucked it away in his bag as Abesh tied the boat secure.

  Samir looked inside the exposed section of ship and saw only shadows and absences where once there was steel and substance. It was disorientating, so many missing walls and floors in this section of the ship, and each missing floor a missing ceiling. Samir leaned to look further in and up. There was a rectangle of sky above where a stairwell used to be. The sky was tinged orange, with hues of pink turning red, a fire suspended above him that shed little of its light into the ship.

  “Tell me about your brother again,” Samir said as he eased himself into a standing position in the small boat. He’d made a list of those killed in various accidents over the last year in the ship-breaking yard, and of those he’d made a second list that he’d brought with him of those killed or otherwise lost on the Karen May. Abesh’s brother was on that list.

  “Ibrahim?” Abesh asked. He was little more than a dusky shape in the shadows of the ship, a grubby baseball cap and thin limbs and, incongruous with Samir’s question, a bright smile. He made the sound of a blast, miming an explosion with his hands. Bravado, Samir thought. As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, performed with a simple gesture and sound effect.

  Abesh’s brother had been a cutterman, slicing up sections of the ship when his torch ignited a gas pocket. He was killed in the explosion. His assistant too. Abesh had seen it happen from the beach, he’d said. Saw them both thrown hard against metal and engulfed in sudden flames. He’d told the story like it was a film he’d seen. Like a story he’d heard from someone else and hadn’t been a part of himself. “It’s okay,” he’d said. “I have lots of brothers.”

  He was looking into the ship now as if his brother might still be in there.

  Perhaps he was.

  “How old are you, Abesh?”

  “Fourteen,” the boy said, and grinned.

  Samir climbed from the boat into the remains of the far larger vessel they’d anchored themselves to. “I never had any brothers,” he said. “Just a sister. Kamala.”

  Abesh ma
de a sympathetic noise.

  “I lost her when I was just a little older than you claim to be.”

  Abesh had no additional sympathy for that. Perhaps he thought it was worse to have a sister than to have lost one. The only sound was the boat knocking against the ship and the water lapping.

  “We were living in Munshiganj when Aila hit. Do you remember Aila?”

  “One of the storms?”

  Aila had not been a simple storm. Aila had been a cyclone, killing hundreds, leaving thousands homeless. But Samir agreed.

  “Yes, one of the storms.”

  Abesh shrugged. “I remember lots of storms. They are all the same storm.”

  All the same storm.

  Samir remembered how the water had rushed into their home. How it had filled the rooms and toppled the mud walls. Remembered how his sister had reached for him before the water took her away. He told Abesh some of this, staring into the Karen May. What remained of his family had fled to Dhaka, already crowded with those running from other floods. Other storms.

  All the same storm.

  Samir had often looked for Kamala in those crowds.

  “Why are you telling me this?” Abesh asked. He had stopped looking into the ship’s shadows and instead looked set to follow Samir.

  “Wait here,” Samir told him.

  Abesh looked disappointed, but he sat down.

  “I’m the only one left,” Samir told him. “I told you about Kamala so that you can remember her.”

  He shrugged his bag into a more comfortable position on his shoulder and pulled his way deeper into the Karen May.

  * * *

  The foreman had taken Samir to an office made from an old cargo container. It sat on short stilts of recovered scrap but still it sank into the mud at one end. The lean was even more obvious inside thanks to the papers, maps, and notices pinned to the walls.

  “Wait here,” the man said.