The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 22

by Stephen Jones

  “It’s amazing, Em. You need to come look at this.” She holds up what appears to be a tiny steamer trunk, then slips a fingernail beneath the lid and pops it open. Inside is a small square of tartan cloth, about the size of a matchbox, folded into quarters like an old woollen blanket packed away for the winter. “Fricken details, huh?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t think you should be playing with it.”

  “Why not?”

  “’Cause it’s probably worth more than my car.” Emma pictures her Corolla’s intimate new friend, the telegraph pole, and grimaces. “Definitely, now.”

  “She wouldn’t have it here if she didn’t want people to touch it.”

  “Hol, this is her spare room. How many houseguests do you think that lady actually gets? Just be careful, okay?”

  Holly’s eyes narrow, the frown lines returning to furrow her brow. “I’m not five years old, you know.”

  Sometimes I fucking wonder. But Emma bites her tongue. She’s tired – more than tired, damn near exhausted, caught deep in a post-adrenaline crash – and she doesn’t want to fight. Not now, not here in this house with Mrs Jacoby right down the hall, blankets pulled up to her chin as she wonders just what it is that two young l-e-s-b-i-a-n-s get up to when the lights go out. Emma steps out of her jeans, modestly donned for the brief trip from bathroom to here, and slips an arm around Holly’s waist.

  “Have a shower and come to bed, baby.” She squeezes the girl’s hip. “Please?”

  “I don’t feel like doing anything.” Holly doesn’t look up from the little red chaise longue she’s turning over and over in her hands.

  Emma sighs. “Neither do I.” Her arm drops to her side. “To be honest, I don’t think the bed does either. Creaky old thing sounds worse than the one at your gran’s. Remember when we stayed over that time?”

  “Yeah,” Holly says with a smile. “She couldn’t even look at me at breakfast.”

  “Baby, things we did, I couldn’t look at you at breakfast!”

  Grinning now, Holly returns the little chaise to the doll house. “There’s a secret room or something under the staircase, I think. See those seams in the wall?”

  “Come on, let’s just get some sleep.”

  “Help me find the catch first. Don’t you want to know what’s in there?”

  “Just leave the stupid house alone and come to bed!” Not meaning to raise her voice, but the sound of Holly’s fingernails scrabbling around in the stairwell sparked a tight, queasy feeling in her guts which needed to be quelled.

  Holly isn’t smiling anymore, and that feels even worse.

  “I’m sorry, Hol. It’s been a real shitty day and I’m tired.”

  The girl says nothing, merely turns her shoulder and retrieves a small wooden cabinet from the doll house. It has a glass-fronted door that opens and closes on tiny brass hinges, and Holly spends a second or two doing just that.

  “Okay, fine.” One pissy little straw too many and Emma stalks over to the bed, pulls back the musty, seldom-used sheets. “Do whatever you want, as always.”

  “Fuck you, Em,” Holly hisses. “I wish I could!”

  “Fuck you right back, baby.” Emma curls her bare legs to her chest and pulls a pillow over her head to block out the overhead light. Faintly, she thinks she hears Holly starting to cry. Soft, muffled sounds that tear at her heart, tear at her resolve, and fuck you, Holly, she says to herself, for herself. Fucking crybaby.

  You know where to find me once you’re done.

  It’s dark, new moon dark, and the grass is slippery-wet beneath her feet, even though she doesn’t think it has rained for a long time. Up ahead, Holly calls out again, calls out her name and something else that Emma can’t make out above the cicada song that rises and falls like slow-drawn breath. Holly? Hol, wait up, she shouts but her voice is lost to the night and to the insects, and so she just starts running again.

  She doesn’t want to open the door, doesn’t want to even touch that tar-black wood, but her hand is already on the knob, fingers grasping, wrist turning, and she holds her breath as it swings away from her. Look at this, Holly is saying, you need to look at this. Kneeling by the doll house which seems bigger now, or maybe Holly is smaller, Holly in a pretty red sundress that Emma has never seen before – never? never ever? – Holly kneeling with her palm outstretched and on it, something small and yellow and crumpled. A toy car, matchbox size, and, That’s not right, Emma says, it’s doesn’t fit, it’s too small. See, Holly, it’s only as big as the steamer trunk. But the girl just smiles. You need to look harder.

  Because it is the steamer trunk and Holly pops the lid again, pulls out that little scrap of tartan and unfolds it. Unfolds it again and again and again, that shonky old magician’s trick, the blanket growing bigger, heavier, and Emma has to grab one end to keep it off the floor. The wool so rough against her cheek, dry as old dust, as she pulls it up over her shoulders, tucks herself in like a good little girl sitting here in the corner beneath the sloping attic ceiling, and watches Holly play with the doll house on the other side of the room. Do you know where you are? Em, do you know?

  Running, still running, breath painful as broken glass in her lungs, and all around her the damn cicadas continue fill the air with their manic, buzzing chorus. It can’t be more than a dozen steps away, that huge Victorian house with its porch light shining the way home, not more than half a dozen now and there’s Holly waiting for her at the front door, bare arms outstretched and waving. Waving her away, warding her off, and Leave me alone, the girl shrieks, tears streaming dark as blood down her face.

  It’s not right, Holly says and turns her back. You don’t fit. She’s right, the doll house is too small, way too small for Emma to get more than an arm and a leg inside and only then if she starts smashing down walls. Holly is crying, and Emma reaches out to touch her, to pull her close, because that might quell the ache in her arms, the ache in her heart, only it’s not Holly she’s holding onto now. Let me go, Mrs Jacoby whispers, not even the ghost of a smile left on those thin, pale lips. And Emma begins to scream.

  Light, the harsh light of early morning streaming through the curtainless window, and for a few dream-dazzled moments Emma has absolutely no idea where she is. Only when she reaches out a sleepy arm to find the bed empty beside her, empty and cold, does she remember.

  “Holly? Baby?”

  No answer, no indication that the other side of the bed has been slept in or even sat upon, no trace of Holly at all. Okay, fine, so the girl stayed pissed with her and crashed somewhere else. Downstairs maybe, sprawled on Mrs Jacoby’s red chaise longue like some absinthe-soaked poetess and—

  No, that’s wrong. The red chaise isn’t downstairs, it’s in the doll house. But even that thought is wrong, because there is no downstairs. Not in this house, not in the real house.

  Emma shakes her head, rubs at her eyes until stars begin to spark behind her lids. Too many damned dreams, too much time spent chasing her own frightened tail; no wonder she’s still exhausted. At least her jeans are where she left them. And, as she pulls them up over her hips, Emma finds herself staring at the doll house, wondering if it’s just the daylight that makes it look different this morning.

  Because it really does seem smaller, more crowded somehow.

  Then she sees the dolls and her breath catches hard in her throat.

  There are two of them, about half the length of her hand in height, their tiny porcelain faces painted with such exquisite attention to detail that Emma can even see the familiar smatter of freckles across the nose of the one with the long, brown hair. The one dressed in purple shorts and a white peasant-style blouse far too similar to what Holly was wearing yesterday for coincidence to lay any claim. Definitely not if you count the second doll, the one wearing blue denim jeans and a T-shirt that might once have been black before too many rides round the washing machine rendered it a dirty, charcoal grey.

  The doll with short-cropped hair grown back long enough to curl. Frizzy bl
onde ringlets like those Holly once begged her to leave alone, to let grow out, just to see what they would look like.

  Lil’ Orphan Annie with a serious peroxide problem, Emma joked.

  The dolls stare at her, their unblinking gaze the most frightening thing she has ever seen, and Emma has to force herself to snatch each one up in a trembling, white-knuckled fist before she flees the bedroom, expecting all the while to feel the frost-sharp bite of tiny porcelain teeth.

  Calling Holly’s name as she runs down the hall, bare feet slapping on old floorboards, ridiculously thankful that there still is a hall – long and empty and leading straight to the front door – and not a winding Victorian staircase. But no answer, no sign of anyone in the house at all until she reaches the living room and there’s Mrs Jacoby standing by the window in a lilac terry-cloth robe, hands wrapped tightly around a steaming mug. Mrs Jacoby who turns now to regard her with a look that Emma doesn’t like one bit: disappointment blended with resignation, the look of a parent whose daughter has failed yet another important exam.

  “I thought you might be gone,” the woman says, and sighs. “I thought, maybe, if I didn’t check the room, if I waited . . .”

  “Where’s Holly?”

  “Oh, she’s gone.”

  “Gone where?” Emma crosses the room and holds out her fists, opens them without looking because if she sees those frozen little faces one more time she might start screaming. “What the fuck are these?”

  Mrs Jacoby doesn’t flinch, merely takes a sip from her mug as she glances at Emma’s flattened palms. “Where did you get those things?”

  “From the doll house.”

  “Odd,” the woman says. “That one’s almost certainly a Greengrocer. The other might have been a Black Prince, perhaps a Black Friday. Hard to tell.”

  Confused, Emma looks down to see not dolls in her hands but two smaller, stranger shapes, desiccated and almost weightless, their spike-stiff legs sickle-curved to scratch at her skin.

  “I think a Prince,” says Mrs Jacoby. “We’re too far south for Fridays.”

  Emma cries out, shakes the empty cicada husks to the floor and very nearly stomps them to pieces, has one foot already raised before she stops herself. No desire to feel the crack and split of those things against her bare sole, no desire to touch them again at all, and only realises that she’s actually backing away from them when her hip bumps against the open door. “What is this?” Raising her voice against the immanent threat of tears. “What the fuck is going on?”

  But Mrs Jacoby only shakes her head. “You need to ask your friend.”

  “Holly? Where is she?” Nails digging into her palms – deeper deeper deeper – because this has to be another of those whacked-out dreams, right? And she just needs to wake herself up, right? Right? “Where’s Holly?”

  “She went to wait by the car.”

  “Bullshit, why would she do that? Why wouldn’t she tell me?”

  “Perhaps she’ll tell you now.” And with that Mrs Jacoby turns away from her, turns to stare out of the window once more, and when she speaks again her voice sounds weary and old. “Just go, Emma. For once, just go.”

  Amazingly, Holly is there. Sitting in the dirt by the rear wheel of the wrecked Corolla, knees drawn up to her chest and head bowed, and Emma almost sobs to see her.

  “Holly!”

  At the sound of her name, the girl looks up. Shades her eyes with one hand to watch Emma crab-hobble the rest of the way down the dew-slick hill, but doesn’t smile or call back a greeting, just sits and waits as though she’s been doing it her whole life and doesn’t expect to have to stop anytime soon.

  “What are you doing here?” Emma asks when she reaches the road. “Why didn’t you wake me?”

  A shrug, and Holly looks away, looks back down the road from where they’d come the night before. Emma follows her gaze but there’s nothing, just empty black-top already starting to simmer in the morning heat, barren brown fields on either side, and above them the sky sprawling vast and cloudless as a faded sheet.

  “Get up, Hol. We have to go.”

  But the girl just shakes her head. “Where? Where are we going, Em?” A grim, razor-thin smile splits her mouth as she whacks the side of the car. “And how we gonna get there?”

  She’s right, they’re pretty much stranded out here. No one and nothing within even the most ambitious of walking distances, just that crazy old woman with her crazy old house, and ten seasons in hell won’t get Emma to trek back up there. So they, what, just sit on their butts in the dirt until a car comes by and picks them up? Might as well get moving anyway then, two feet and a heartbeat all that’s needed to get them up and away and out of sight of that damn spooky house. Two feet that Emma now remembers are bare, her Docs still in the bedroom where she kicked them off last night before her shower, and she swears, punches the car roof, and swears again as pain shoots up her wrist.

  Holly is muttering at her feet and for one blood-seared second Emma wants to kick her, takes a deep breath instead. “What did you say, Hol?”

  “Look in the front seat,” the girl says flatly. “You need to see it.”

  No, she really doesn’t need to see anything, certainly not anything that has Holly so cowed, but she’s already moving around to the front of the car, wincing because in this light she can see how bad – write-off bad – the damage is to the front end, and it’s a damn wonder that—

  That—

  It flickers, the thing that is – that isn’t – that is – in the front seat.

  Impossible blacklight flicker that gives Emma a headache, turns her spit to dust, and she blinks, and she squints, and she tries to look at it from the corner of her eye, and still the damn thing isn’t there. And is there, still.

  “You need to look harder,” Holly whispers in her ear and Emma yelps, tries to take a step backwards, several of them, but Holly is behind her, pushing her closer to the crumpled yellow car with its windscreen that isn’t shattered so much as caved in, the safety glass cracked and streaked with blood and shit and matted fur from the animal that lies half-in, half-out of the driver’s seat. The flickering over and done with now, but Emma would give anything to have it back, to have what is in front of her returned to the realm of what isn’t.

  The young woman slumps in the passenger seat, bloodied face and bloodied throat and bloodied God knows what else beneath the tartan blanket someone has pulled up over her shoulders. Tucked in like a child on a long drive home, eyes closed and blonde hair smoothed back from her face, as much as unruly curls can be smoothed, but it’s wrong. It’s all wrong, and Emma wants to pull the blanket higher, up and over that waxy, bruise-blemished face because that’s what you do for dead people, that’s what would be right, because that woman is—

  Is—

  Then Holly is tugging at her sleeve, steering her away from the car and over to the side of the road, where Emma stumbles on something sharp and hidden in the long scraggly grass that grows there, and doesn’t even try to stop herself from falling.

  “Are we?” she whispers. “Did we?”

  Holly sinks down beside her. “No,” she says, squeezing Emma’s shoulder. “No, Em, we didn’t.” Intensely sweet, the feeling of relief, but it lasts for less than a second before Emma gets her meaning.

  We didn’t.

  “I’m so sorry,” Holly says. “I tried, I really tried, but there was so much blood and no one drove past, not one fricken car the whole time.” Weeping softly as she describes dragging Emma across to the passenger seat, admitting that maybe she shouldn’t have moved her at all but the kangaroo was impossible to shift, so heavy, and she couldn’t just leave Emma entangled like that. Thick and black, the claws which did all the damage, those powerful hind legs thrashing about in panic and pain after the animal came through the windscreen, and Emma’s throat right in their path. Emma’s face and arms and chest as well, more blood than Holly had ever seen in her life, and she couldn’t stop the spill of it.

&
nbsp; She just couldn’t stop it.

  “The blanket,” Emma whispers. “It’s from the doll house.”

  Holly shakes her head. “It’s from the boot. My picnic blanket, remember, from when we went up to Mount Dandenong? I left it in your car.” She rubs at her bare arms. “You were cold, you kept saying how cold you were, so I went to find a jumper or something and the blanket was right there, too easy, but when I got back . . .”

  Emma swallows.

  “I didn’t know what to do, Em. I just covered you up and waited, and finally this truckie came by in a semi and called the cops on his CB.” Holly sniffs and wipes her nose. “He waited with me, too. Pretty nice guy, gave me half his sandwich and some coffee from his thermos. Didn’t have to do that, didn’t have to wait either, but he did. Nice guy, you know.”

  “I don’t understand, Hol.”

  Holly sighs. “What?”

  “You didn’t die?”

  “I didn’t die.”

  “So what are you doing here? It doesn’t make sense, if you’re still alive.” Emma thinks about that, and frowns. “Are you still alive?”

  “Oh, I’m still alive.” Holly rises to her feet, brushes dust and grass from her backside and shades her eyes again as she looks up towards the hill opposite them. “I bought that house almost ten years ago now. Ten years come October.”

  Emma shakes her head. “Ten years ago you were fourteen.”

  “Then,” Holly says. “Well, now I guess. Here.”

  “Hol, please. Try making some sense.”

  Holly swings around to face her. “What year is it, Em?”

  “Stop fucking around.”

  “1984, right? The year you died. But up there?” – waving her hand in the direction of the hill and the house that perches upon its crest like a weather-beaten vulture, a house Emma doesn’t even want to so much as glimpse again, so she keeps her eyes firmly locked on Holly’s and finds that vista only marginally less terrifying – “Up there, it’s years later. Decades. And it’s where I live.”