The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 22

by Stephen Jones

  “What, with that Jacoby woman?”

  Holly smiles, and that’s worse than what Emma saw in the front seat of the Corolla. Possibly worse than anything she has seen anywhere, ever.

  “Every time I think you’ll realise,” the girl tells her. “Every time I think you’ll finally catch on, but you never do. Add a good twenty-five years to my age, Em – no, make it a bad twenty-five years – cut my hair and turn it grey, throw in some wrinkles, lots of wrinkles, plus an extra twenty kilos or so. What do you see then?”

  Emma shakes her head. “You can’t be her. You can’t be her and you both. How is that even possible?”

  Holly runs her hands through her hair, a gesture of exasperation Emma knows only too well, and she wants to grab those hands, squeeze them tight and never, ever let go. But Holly has already turned her back again, is kicking at the grass with one white-sneakered foot, and Emma is afraid to move because the world now feels so unstable, so insubstantial, that even a misdrawn breath might send it spinning off its axis and into the hungry dark.

  “You won’t let me leave,” Holly says in a small, thin voice. “All these years, I’ve tried so many things but nothing works. I can be doing the dishes, or watching a movie, or trying to enjoy my honeymoon for godsake, and you just . . . call me back. And I’m here, in that car, and there’s nothing I can do. I’ve tried explaining things to you over and over, showing you, but you never listen. Or you listen, but mustn’t remember, because you . . .”

  Her voice breaks on that last heavy syllable.

  “Holly, baby I—”

  “Shut up!” Turning on Emma with flashbright eyes, furious eyes, one skinny finger stabbing right in her face, and Emma obeys instantly. “I bought that damn house because of you. I thought if I was closer to this place, maybe I’d be stronger as well, stronger than you. But it didn’t work and now all I can do is set stupid little traps and tripwires and hope that maybe the truth will slip in sideways and wake you the fuck up, or send you on your way, wherever the hell that might be. But it never does, every time we end up back here . . .”

  Traps and tripwires.

  Emma closes her eyes. Mrs Jacoby, the carousel painting, the damn doll house she had refused to examine – did she always refuse? always? – and who knew what other subtle hints and whispers Holly kept hidden in plain view up in that house. Because she’s right, clever girl: truth wields a razor blade with more finesse than a sledgehammer, and now Emma knows (remembers? relives?) what happened

  —glass and claws and pain and blood and cold—

  what always happens. Every time. How every time she pushes it away, aside, asunder, because she doesn’t want to believe, doesn’t want

  —blood and cold and dark and fear—

  to die. Doesn’t want to die.

  And doesn’t ever want to be alone.

  “You know what the worst part is?” Holly is crouching in front of her now, gloss-damp eyes red round the edges. Emma shakes her head mutely, not sure she wants to know, but sure she always has. “We were over, Em. That stupid cave trip was my idea, you didn’t even want to go. You didn’t love me anymore, you’d told me that, but I thought if maybe we just went away, just the two of us . . . and now you’ve swapped it all around inside your head somehow. As if that will fix everything.”

  Holly picks up Emma’s hand, presses it against her cheek. “You don’t love me, Em. You don’t love me, but you still won’t let me go.”

  And Emma swallows hard, and nods, and feels the thin cold blade slide between her ribs. “I’m sorry, baby. I’m so sorry.”

  “You always say that.”

  “I know, I remember.” She studies Holly’s face, those gentle curves that she really did love once, those pale blue eyes that could break her heart a million times over and still be able to put it back together. “And I will remember, I promise. Next time, okay? Next time it’ll be different.”

  Holly smiles, empty-sad twist of her lips that Emma can’t stand to look at.

  “You always say that, as well.”

  No answer she can make which won’t taste like a lie, salt and ashes and bitter-cold dirt, so she says nothing. Just sits there with Holly’s fingers entwined in her own, watching the slow roll of tears dampen the girl’s face as, behind them, the darkness seeps ever closer, ever colder.

  “Please,” Holly whispers. “Just let go this time. Please, Em?”

  And Emma nods, and squeezes Holly’s hand, and tries not to think about all the sweet and terrifying ways a person can fall.

  CHRISTOPHER FOWLER

  Oh I Do Like to Be

  Beside the Seaside

  CHRISTOPHER FOWLER WAS BORN in Greenwich, London. He is the award-winning author of thirty novels and ten short story collections, and creator of the “Bryant & May” series of mysteries.

  His memoir Paperboy won the Green Carnation Award. He has written comedy and drama for the BBC, has a weekly column in the Independent on Sunday, is the Crime Reviewer for the Financial Times, and has written for such newspapers and magazines as The Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Daily Mail, Time Out, Black Static and many others.

  His latest books are a homage to Hammer horror called Hell Train, The Memory of Blood, and a two-volume collection of twenty-five new stories entitled Red Gloves. Forthcoming are two further novels, Dream World and The Invisible Code.

  As Fowler explains: “‘. . . Seaside’ came about firstly because I was commissioned to write a story for the World Horror Convention souvenir book and, as the event was to take place in Brighton, it seemed logical to set a tale on the South coast of England.

  “I had written a fantasy novel, Calabash, some years earlier, hinting at the dark madness of such seaside towns, which are the antithesis of their Mediterranean counterparts. I thought of the depressing Morrissey song “Every Day is Like Sunday”, which captures the awfulness of English resorts.

  “Coincidentally, Kim Newman and I were discussing the inherent creepiness of pantomime dames, and I decided it was time to give vent to my horror of these coastal pleasuredomes. I wish I’d thought to include screaming gangs of hen-nighters as well. And I thought it was a nice touch to have everyone in the story telling the hero to ‘fuck off’ until he finally does.”

  TOBY PUSHED THE NAIL deep inside the piece of bread, placed it in his steel catapult and fired it high over the side of the pier. A seagull dropped from the steel-grey cloudscape, its yellow beak agape, and swallowed it.

  “Choke, you fucker,” Toby yelled. He turned to Harry. “Got any more?”

  “That was the last one,” said Harry. “We’re wasting our time. They can eat broken glass without dying. They’ve got special stomachs.”

  “What about barbed wire?”

  “Same. My dad’s got some rat poison in the shed. He saved it from when he was in the military. They’re not allowed to sell it in shops.”

  “Nah.” Toby kicked at the railing until a chip of blue paint came off. “Do you think the pier would burn?”

  “The one in Brighton burned.”

  “Let’s get something to eat.” He cast a cheated look back at the gull, which had alighted on a post further along the pier. It gave a healthy shriek as he passed. He threw a pebble at it and missed.

  The funfair was empty. A boy with a Metallica tattoo across his shoulders was mopping patches of rainwater from the steel plates on the bumper car floor. Everyone teased him because the tattooist had spelled the band’s name wrong, with two “T”s and one “L”.

  “Oi Damon, you wanna be careful, you’ll electrocute yourself,” Toby called.

  “Fuck off,” Damon shouted back. “It only works if you touch the ceiling.” He raised his metal broom handle and thrashed the mesh above his head, spraying sparks, forgetting he had bare feet. “Fuck!” He hopped back and swung the broom at them.

  “What a moron.” Toby and Harry laughed together. Damon had ingested so many drugs during his clubbing years that he could barely remember his own name.

&nb
sp; They passed Gypsy Rosalee the fortune teller, who was actually a secretary at Cole Bay Co-Operative Funerals, making a bit of money on the side by building sales pitches for lay-away burial plans into the predictions for her elderly clients.

  Once Toby had paid to have his palm read, and she had told him he would go to the bad. “You’re not satisfied with your lot,” she had said, sitting back and folding her arms. “You think you’re too good for us. Lads like you always come unstuck.”

  “You’re not a real fortune teller.”

  “I know enough to recognise someone living under a curse when I see one.” She dug out his money and threw it back at him. “Go on, fuck off.”

  Now he skirted the helter-skelter, where rain had removed so much lubrication from the slide’s runners that it was common to see someone getting off their mat halfway down and giving it a push. Ahead was the big dipper that had been closed ever since a pair of toddlers were catapulted into the sea when their carriage braking system failed. Apparently one of them was still in a coma.

  He hated the pier even more than he hated the rest of the town.

  Cole Bay, population 17,650, former fishing village, was like a hundred other British seaside resorts, a by-word for boredom, a destination that might have amused the Victorians, but was hopelessly outpaced by the expectations of modern day-trippers, who wanted something more than rip-off amusements, a few chip shops, some knackered beach donkeys and a floral clock. By day sour-faced couples huddled in shelters unwrapping sandwiches and opening thermos flasks. By night every teenager in town was out in the back streets, getting pissed and goading their friends into punch-ups. Where the land met the sea, all hopes and ambitions were drawn away by the tide.

  Ahead, a bored girl was rolling garish pink spider-webs of candy floss around a stick. Her name was Michelle, and she had originally planned to work at the fair on Saturdays until she could get away to London, but now she seemed to be on the Pavilion Pier every day. As she blankly swirled the stick, strands of reeking spun sugar flicked onto her bare midriff.

  “What the fuck are you lookin’ at?” she said, popping a pink bubble of gum at Toby.

  “Why do you keep making that shit when you haven’t got any customers?” Toby stuck his finger in the tub and allowed sugar to cover it.

  “It gets bunged up if I stop. We get flies in it and all sorts. The punters don’t notice. I’m not going out with you so don’t ask.”

  “Wasn’t going to. You’re too old for me, and you’re getting fat. Anyway, I thought you were leaving Cole Bay and going to London.”

  “Changed my mind, didn’t I. Went full-time. It’s easy work ’cause there’s no one here mid-week.”

  “Boring, though.”

  “Not as boring as being at school. Which is where you and your mouthy mate are supposed to be.”

  “Double games period. We bunked off. We’re going to see a horror film.”

  “The living dead thing? You don’t need to watch a movie for that, just hang around here. And you ain’t gonna pass for eighteen, neither of you.”

  “The ticket guy goes out with my sister. If he doesn’t let us in I’ll put the blocks on his chances.”

  The first fat drops of rain spattered on the pier’s floorboards. “Go on then, take your grubby fingers out my tub and fuck off to your film.” Michelle tugged at the striped awning of her stall, dismissing them.

  They ran back along the pier, past pairs of shuffling pensioners in plastic rain-hoods. They still had an hour to kill before the film started.

  The Punch and Judy Man was on the beach packing up his theatre. They called down as they passed. “No show today, Stan?”

  “Fucking weather,” Stan called back. “I’d make the effort and stay open, but we had a gang of kids in earlier, right tearaways, the little bastards were making fun and chucking stuff. Puppets not good enough for them now there’s video games.”

  “You should try putting in some new material,” said Toby.

  “I’ve tried that. Blue jokes, new songs. I had Mr Punch perform a yodelling number, but the last time I tried it I swallowed me swozzel.”

  They headed up to the promenade, where the old folk sat in hotel greenhouses trying to ripen like tomatoes. The air reeked of doughnut fat and seaside rock. Outside the Lord Nelson, a drunk fat girl in a tiny halter top was sitting on the kerb, stoically attempting to be sick between her spread legs.

  Dudley Salterton was sitting on a bench outside the Crow’s Nest playhouse, looking more than ever like a tramp. He pulled the withered roll-up from his lips as the boys stopped before him and coughed hard, spitting a green globule onto the pavement.

  “You all right, Dudley?” asked Toby. “You got a piece of cigarette paper stuck on your lip.”

  “Fuck off, will you? I’m on in a minute.”

  “You’re not in the panto, are you? I thought it started ages ago.” Toby looked up at the poster for Aladdin, which starred someone from Steps and a runner-up from Big Brother. Dudley was the resident compère at the Crow’s Nest’s variety nights, filling the gaps between acts with lame magic tricks and banter he had first used in the years after the war, halfheartedly updated to include jokes about modern TV personalities. Not that his elderly audience cared; they came to catch up with each other, to wave and eat and chat. They came because it was raining, because there was nothing else to do in Cole Bay on a wet Wednesday afternoon, because they were afraid of dying alone.

  Dudley was ancient and yellow with nicotine, but vanity required him to dye his hair and eyebrows a peculiar shade of chestnut. He never shaved properly, and had been living in a single room in a bed and breakfast joint on the front ever since his wife killed herself. He smelled of sweat, rolling tobacco and Old Spice.

  “I’m doing a guest spot in the second act because their comic got fired for always being pissed during rehearsals. But I told them I’m not doing it Chinese, I’ll play it straight, thank you very much. I sing ‘Windmills of Your Mind’, do some newspaper tearing and balloon animals, let Barnacle Bill tell a couple of off-colour jokes, then I’m off over the Lord Nelson for a pint.”

  Barnacle Bill was Dudley’s ventriloquist’s dummy. Quite what he was doing in Aladdin was anyone’s guess. With its lascivious wink, rolling eyes, peeling lips and dry, startled hair, the dummy tended to have a terrifying effect on children. Lately, Dudley had been dyeing his hair darker and was starting to look more like his dummy than ever. Both had been at their peak of popularity during the war, and were soon to be shut up in boxes.

  “What’s it like, being in a panto?” Harry asked.

  “Fucking awful. Widow Twankey went to prison for child molesting a few years back. How he got the job here I’ll never know. Must know someone on the council. It’s not right. We have to get children up on stage and make them do a dance. Barnacle Bill shouted at one of them last week and the little fucker pissed himself. I gave his arm a right good pinch as he left the stage. It stinks up there.”

  “Do you get comps?”

  “I wouldn’t bother, there’s nobody in except a party of spastics from Rhyll, and they’re making a hell of a noise. I don’t think they’re getting any of the jokes. They’re probably throwing shit at each other by now.”

  “You’re not supposed to say spastics.”

  “Who fucking cares down here? It’s not exactly the London Palladium, is it?”

  “Is there an orchestra?”

  “No, Eileen’s on the piano and there’s a bloke with a drum kit. But he’s only got one arm.”

  “Shark?”

  “Thalidomide. There’s a wiggly little hand at the end. Gives me the creeps.”

  Toby and Harry kept walking. They passed the rock shop, where stretches of sickly peppermint folded back and forth on metal spindles like elasticated innards. The window was filled with edible novelty items: giant false teeth, bacon and eggs, an outsized baby’s dummy, a bright pink penis. Behind the counter an enormously fat girl in hoop earrings and a tiny skin-
tight top stared at them as if she was wondering how they might taste.

  At the next corner, four old people stood watching while a fifth attempted to park his car. The car was small and the space was huge, but the driver managed to hit both the vehicle behind and the one in front several times over. The pensioners stood there watching, without offering any advice or help. Finally the car was parked two feet from the kerb and the group crept on, their excitement over.

  “You know that Morrissey song, ‘Every Day is Like Sunday’?” asked Harry. “Do you think he wrote it about Cole Bay?”

  “What, ‘. . . the coastal town they forgot to close down’? Yeah, probably. How much longer?”

  Harry checked his mobile. “Forty-five minutes. Wanna go in the funfair?”

  “Not really, but we’re here now.” They walked in beneath the broken coloured bulbs of the Cole Bay Kursaal and headed for the ghost train. The Kursaal used to be called Funland, but the council changed the name after too many accidents gave the place a bad reputation.

  The ghost train’s plywood frontage had been painted with crude copies of Scooby-Doo characters, along with some skeletons and demons cribbed from old Marvel comics. From within came a shriek of unoiled metal and a wail like a ghost calling through a hooter. Toby and Harry bypassed the deserted ticket counter – Charleen, the girl who worked there, was around the back having a fag – and flicked on the power as they passed the ride’s main junction box.

  Jumping into the first narrow carriage, they rolled off, banging through the doors into darkness. An acrid tang of electricity and damp cloth filled their nostrils. The car twisted about on its miniature track, its wheels crackling with errant voltage as they passed a dummy of Dracula that looked more like a leprous orchestra conductor.

  “So, are you in?” Toby shouted as they juddered around a day-glo graveyard.

  “It’s up to you,” said Harry, who always followed Toby’s instructions. “I guess so. Are we really going to the pictures?”