The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 22

by Stephen Jones

  It was like a bath emptying, she thought as she jerked her head up from the table. Or, more accurately, it was like the sound air made as it broke the surface as water emptied away, a sort of deep, bass rumble that seemed to have no end and no real beginning. She went to the poolside, not sure what to expect, and found that the surface was choppy and broken. Fat bubbles rose from under the water, emerging in gross mushroom domes that burst and splashed. Watching the agitation, Helen smelled something sulphurous and dank and corpulent that bloomed with every new bubbleburst and then faded as the water calmed, dissipating like the scent of a match after it had been extinguished, until nothing of it remained but a sour memory and the itch of it in her nose.

  When the water finally settled, Helen checked the pool carefully. She thought at first that it was empty but then saw, floating near the bottom of the deeper end, something small and black.

  “Another piece of fruit?” she asked herself aloud, and then the black thing shifted sluggishly. Helen watched as it unfurled, stretching out until it was a few inches long. It jerked and then moved through the water before slowing and stopping, finally drifting to the bottom like a half-furled parachute. She picked up the net and trawled for it but couldn’t reach; the bottom of the net passed over the top of the thing, making it drift towards the centre of the pool in lazy, curling arcs. She tried to use the net to create updrafts in the water to bring the thing within grabbing distance but it remained stubbornly low and out of reach. Not liking the way it hung there like a tiny black shadow intruding into her clean, clear pool, Helen took her sarong off and slipped into the water.

  Diving down, Helen remembered with something almost like surprise how much she enjoyed being in the water, and why she had been so insistent about finding a villa with a pool for her retirement. These last days had taken away the joy of it, replacing it with dull irritation and a tension in her chest whenever she thought about the pool, and it was nice to rediscover pleasure once more in the water’s cooling embrace.

  She swam around the pool’s floor until her breath gave out, looking for the thing and not finding it but not really minding. Surfacing, she released the stale air from her lungs and drew in a fresh breath. It was sweet and warm, and she liked the taste of it in her mouth. Turning onto her back, she floated for a while without moving, feeling the light against her face and her closed eyes and enjoying its warmth. This was why she had come here; the lightness of the air and the caressing weight of the heat, the way her skin seemed to open when the sun hit it and the smell of olives and oranges and the sea, all of it making a world as delicate and far removed from her lumpen, leaden old home as could be. There were no commuter journeys here, no weekends trapped inside by rain and boredom, no layers of clothing to deal with unexpected rain or cold snaps, no dismissive bosses or condescending work colleagues, no pitying looks in shops when she bought only enough food for one, no endless days of drudgery and repetition, only lightness and exhilaration and enjoyment.

  And no one was going to spoil it for her.

  Turning, she dived again, this time making a more precise search for the small, dark thing. She found it in the corner of the pool, not quite sunk to the bottom. Without her goggles on she couldn’t see it clearly, grabbing it and rising to the surface rather than trying to work out what it was whilst underwater. It felt warm and soft, rubbery and smooth. An olive, she wondered? A ball of some sort? Emerging and making her way to the side, she shook water from her eyes and looked at the thing in her hand.

  It might have been an octopus or a squid, it was hard to be sure. It had tentacles, to be sure, seven of them and a ragged stump where an eighth might have been and two smaller, almost vestigial nubbins above them. Above these limbs was a bulbous body, looking and feeling like a ripe and boneless fruit in her hand. It was only two inches long and out of the water it was an iridescent black, sparkling with colours that prickled over its surface and faded as she watched.

  Even as she held it, it deflated somehow, its little bulb body collapsing in on itself. Black liquid like coagulated ink spattered out from between the tentacles and slicked across her fingers. It was warm and sticky and smelled of fish that had been left to rot in the heat and light and closeness.

  Helen gagged, spat, gagged again and then dropped the thing onto the side of the pool, far enough away so that it wouldn’t drip back into the water; she had no desire to clean the pool for a third time. She moved away from it before climbing out, not wanting to be near it, still feeling the bitter swirl of bile in her throat and stomach and unsure whether she was going to vomit or not. The smell of it still clung to her, the tepid clamminess of the liquid on her hand making her want to scream or cry again. She was so angry, and terribly sad at the same time. Whoever was doing this, and however they were doing it, this was horrible. The octopus thing, some local fish she assumed, had done nothing wrong except be unable to survive outside of saltwater and had been sacrificed for the sake of what she now thought of as a campaign of harassment. Well, no more.

  She washed her hands in the outside shower, went inside and got as far as picking up the phone to call the police before stopping. What, really, could she say to them? Really? The only time she had called them previously, when someone had tried to force a window one afternoon as she slept, had not been a good experience. The young policeman had listened to her concerns and looked at the scratched window lock and asked bored-sounding questions, but seemed more interested in letting his eyes crawl up and down her chest, making her wish she had put on something more covering than a sarong and swimsuit before he had arrived. He had told her, in halting English, that he would file a report and that she should not worry, and left and she never heard from him again.

  How would they treat her if she tried to report this, she wondered. Not well, she thought. They would, she imagined, see her as a silly old woman, come here to escape the casual cruelties of life and to die in peace but unable to stop seeing ghosts in the shadows of every corner. She was too easy to dismiss, neither rich enough nor well known enough to demand attention, another incomer who didn’t speak the language and who didn’t belong. She replaced the phone in the cradle without dialling. This was supposed to be her safe place, and she did not want to open herself to ridicule within its walls. She went to clean the mess of the dead thing up.

  The next day, she had a new idea. At the time she normally went back into the villa to escape the harshest of the afternoon sunlight, she instead slathered herself with the strongest sun cream she possessed and lowered herself into the pool. If whoever it was threw or dropped something in the pool today, fruit or beast, she would know. She would see it. See if they dare, she thought, and out loud said, “See if you dare, you little bastards.”

  Helen floated. She could swim well, but she enjoyed more letting the water support her, take her where it wanted to go. It was as though a huge hand was holding from below, cupping her buttocks and back and shoulders with the gentlest touch she had experienced in a long and not always easy life. In the water she wasn’t old or young, she was neither spinster nor maid, she wasn’t retired or working, she wasn’t a collection of aches and pains, she wasn’t even female, she was just Helen. Helen, who had learned to like her own company but sometimes would have liked to share it, Helen who could cook but rarely did, Helen who read books and wanted to write one but knew she never would. Just Helen, whole and complete and real.

  There was something in the water with her.

  It was something about the way the water moved, the way it rose and dropped again in a gentle swell, scooping her and then letting her down, that gave it away. Something large had passed below her; impossible, but it had happened.

  She rolled onto her front, more surprised than anything else, and dipped her face into the water. Her vision blurred, her eyes wanting to shut, treading water and seeing little but the fizzing blue of the water pressed against her pupils. She held it as long as possible, turning around and peering as best she could all around the poo
l. Nothing.

  Only, the pool looked deeper, felt deeper than it should be, the water chilled suddenly as though she had somehow floated far out into a place where the sun no longer had the strength to reach and reflect back from the tiled floor.

  Impossible.

  Helen raised her head, convinced that she’d spooked herself but not knowing how, and as she shook her face free from her wet hair, a shadow moved in front of her. It was under the water, large and dark and swift, moving around from her front to her rear. Circling her. Instinctively, she stopped swimming; there was something predatory and cold about the shape that made her imagine teeth and black eyes and mouths that stretched wide and gaping. As slowly as she could, Helen turned, letting the currents take her towards the poolside.

  It wasn’t there.

  Or rather, it was, but it wasn’t where it should be. The pool was only forty feet long and about twenty wide, but now the side looked as though it were a hundred yards or more away.

  The water was chilling further, darkening down to a slate grey and beyond, to the roiling near-black of storm clouds in leaden skies. The surface of the water was choppier now, wavelets breaking over her face and sending questing fingers into her nose and mouth, making her choke and cough.

  She could not see the shadow now, the water opaque and dark, but the moving thing was still there. Helen could sense it, feel the current buffet her as it circled, the play of the water stronger and stronger around her legs and belly as whatever it was drew closer. A haze gathered above the water like a heat flicker but denser, distorting the now-distant lip of the poolside, and she wondered for a brief, fractured moment if she had put too much chlorine in the water before dismissing the thought. This wasn’t a hallucination brought on by too many chemicals, nor too vivid an imagination. This was no longer her pool; it was somewhere she did not recognise, somewhere vast and chill, and then something bumped against her foot.

  The bump itself was not hard, but it was rough like sandpaper and it tore at her skin and she screamed and started to swim. All thoughts of motionlessness, of remaining a floating thing and not attracting attention were gone. The water rose and fell, knocking her, as the dark shape passed underneath her, close enough for her to make out scales and eyes like slick black plates and a fin curved like a sickle and then she was swimming with wild, thrashed strokes.

  She choked as she swam, water that tasted flat and stagnant filling her mouth and a smell of sour, flat bile burning in her nostrils. She didn’t know whether the smell was her own fear or the haze above the water, and didn’t care. The only thing that mattered was to reach the side.

  It was behind her. She knew it, could feel the water drive her forward as something pushed a bow-wave ahead of itself, the curl of it gathering behind her head and threatening to overwhelm her. She kicked her legs, urging her body on, pulling at the water with hands that felt numb and clumsy, sure she could feel lips kiss at her toes, teeth nip at her ankles. The side was still so far away, shrinking away from her rather than coming closer, the water bucking now, the air leached of colour and metallic-tasting, her hair draggling into her eyes and her body weighted and slow. She choked again, spitting out foul water, and struck out, trying to reach further, pull harder.

  Trying to swim faster.

  The thing in the water came at her from behind. Something banged into her legs and pushed her up, lifting her out of the water. Helen shrieked, kicking back and feeling her feet strike something rubbery and soft, going into a frenzy as the something clamped heavily around her calves and kicking even harder. Her left foot shifted within a writhing, sucking thing and she shrieked again, still rising from the water as she was pushed from below, water in her mouth and burning her nose. Her other foot scraped against a gelid mass and she kicked as best she could, feeling like her legs were wrapped in a heavy rubber sheet that constricted them and stole their strength. Her toes pushed against something that was warm and pulsed and she pushed, pushed, and then she felt it burst and her legs were suddenly enveloped in slimy warmth.

  The thing that had hold of her bucked, thrashed her further out of the water and she felt something like pulsing plastic ropes grip at her thighs and then she banged into the side of the pool and was gripping at the smooth tile surface and climbing. The thing gripping her legs pulled and she slammed down into the hard poolside and started to slip back into the water, the ropes around her thighs tightening and the sucking about her legs increasing. She screamed and spat, tensing her arms and pulling and kicking and dragging and then, with a noise like a tooth pulling from a rotten gum, she slithered out of the water, skin scraping against the edge of the wall. She flailed, pulling at the tiled floor and thrashing with her legs so that it could not grab her again and she heaved, heaved with everything she had, and she was out.

  Helen collapsed on the floor, gasping and weeping. Sunlight played across her face, warming her skin. She opened her eyes into a bright sky, wincing as the light lanced into them. She squinted and rolled over, rising to her hands and knees and looking out across the pool. It was twenty feet wide, and forty long, the water clear and blue and its surface, apart from the rapidly settling evidence of her own exit from it, was smooth and unbroken. There was nothing in its depths.

  Nothing? No. There was a shadow at its centre, a darker smear that dwindled as she watched, shrinking in upon itself until nothing remained except the tiniest patch of shade which broke apart into droplets and dispersed. It was like watching ink escaping from a bottle in reverse and she had the sense of something closing. Those droplets, though, were still there in the water even though she could not see them; it wasn’t completely closed, was still open the tiniest invisible fraction somewhere in the pool.

  Helen spat; the taste of the water was still in her mouth, rich and bitter and foetid. Was she going mad? Unexplained tastes were a symptom of brain tumours, she remembered. Was that it? Was she ill?

  No. The stain from the dead thing yesterday was still clear on the poolside; she could see it from where she knelt. Looking down at herself, she saw scratches across her legs, stark against her pale skin. Her thighs were marked with abrasions that curled around in spirals, rising from her knees to just below her crotch. A slick of some darker liquid like grey oil covered her up to her knees and under it, her skin prickled.

  She stood, unsteady but determined, and went to the outdoor shower. Turning it as hot as she could bear, she let the water flow over her, filling her mouth and swilling it around, spitting to clear the taste. It did not clear the slime on her legs until she rubbed at it and then it fell away in clumps, slithering down the drain like jelly. Helen cried as she scrubbed at her skin, the sick wash of old adrenaline and spent fear making her shake. When she vomited, thin strings of bile spattering from her mouth and disappearing down the drain with the pallid jelly, she hardly noticed.

  Later, Helen brought her old photo albums out to the table and leafed through them. Even though they were mostly colour, they appeared black and white to her, fragments of a life that had died the moment she stepped out from the plane in Alicante, collected her luggage and walked to the hire car office. Who were these people, she wondered. People in office clothes, in jeans, in gardens and on beaches, in winter, in summer, smiling and drinking and walking and posing, all of them forgotten by her and who almost certainly didn’t remember her. When were they taken, these endless photos of men and women, smiling and blank and unknown? She didn’t know. None of the photographs showed her in the villa; she had no friends here to take her photograph, no one to share this place with.

  No one to tell about the pool.

  She didn’t know what was happening in the water, or why, but she knew that it was real. She had seen it, smelled it. Felt it. She looked down at her photographs again and suddenly wished that she was home, not the home she had tried to make here but the dismal home she had left behind. In one of the photographs, she was smiling at the camera and wearing a heavy woollen hat. Had she still got that hat? She couldn’t
remember but suspected she had thrown it away, thinking she would never need it because she was moving somewhere hot. She was hit by a terrible sadness, wishing that she still had the hat, that things were different, that they were back to normal and dull and boring and grey and cold. Back to safe.

  The pool glittered in front of her, blue and calm in the Moreira sun.

  THANA NIVEAU

  The Pier

  THANA NIVEAU LIVES IN the Victorian seaside town of Clevedon, where she shares her life with fellow writer John Llewellyn Probert, in a Gothic library filled with arcane books and curiosities.

  Her short fiction has appeared in The Seventh Black Book of Horror and The Eighth Black Book of Horror, Delicate Toxins and the charity anthology Never Again, as well as the final issue of Necrotic Tissue. Her Jack the Ripper giallo, “From Hell to Eternity”, won first place in the Whitechapel Society’s short story contest and appears in an e-book collection of the same name.

  “The pier exists,” explains the author, “and yes, it is decorated with strange plaques and cryptic memorials, although none are quite as morbid as I’ve invented.

  “It’s mostly Clevedon Pier, which is where the story was born. I was reading the plaques one day and a couple of the quirkier ones made me wonder. What if they weren’t written by the living to remember the dead at all, but were instead a channel for voices from somewhere else?

  “Somerset is the original Wicker Man country, after all. It’s a place rich in pagan tradition and many of its strange rituals are lost to time. Or are they?”

  THE SEA WAS FLAT and grey, mirroring the leaden sky, yet offering no reflection of the Victorian pier that marched into the water on spindly legs. The charred remains of the central pagoda gave little hint of the pier’s former grandeur. Jagged bits of timber lay scattered across the pierhead where frock-coated gentlemen and wasp-waisted ladies once strolled. Alan glanced at the informational sign showing a sepia photograph of the pier in its heyday. It was hard to believe that this was the same place.