Best New Horror: Volume 25 (Mammoth Book of Best New Horror)

by Неизвестный

  Chris snorted.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said. “And she hooked up with you? No wonder she killed herself.”

  Andrew lunged. The punch went wide, and he stumbled forward, off-balance. Chris leapt back, allowing his roommates to seize hold of Andrew’s arms. They dragged him to the door and pushed him into the corridor, slamming the door behind him.

  Chris just laughed.

  I woke up curled around the toilet, lips caked in yellow bile. There was vomit on the seat, streaks down my shirt-front. For a time I didn’t know where I was or how I had ended up there but merely lay with my knees tucked into my chest, a foetal position.

  Then I heard voices from the showers and recognized my floor-mates’ and realized I couldn’t have been unconscious for more than an hour or two. I waited until the men’s room was empty before creeping from the stall and skulking back to the room.

  2:00 a.m.

  Andrew’s bed was empty, his laptop closed. I sat down at my desk and nudged my computer out of standby. The screen flickered, flooding the room with bluish light. I doubleclicked Instant Messenger and took down my away message.

  A chat window opened, filling the screen.

  IsaaC81.

  Hey, he typed. U there?

  I hesitated, still drunk, the taste of bile on my tongue. I closed my eyes to stop the room from spinning and heard the chirp of a received message.

  He had sent me a link. A Quicktime file.

  Click.

  It was the same room, the same dim lighting. Shadows eddied from the desk lamp, spreading in webs to obscure the cheap furniture, the whitewashed walls. A man sat at the desk. In one hand he held a shard of glass, a thin piece hooked like a crescent moon. He was shirtless, his chest matted with coarse dark hairs, and his forearms, too, were bloodied. The bones of his left wrist were visible where the flesh had been stripped away.

  He stood. His shadow climbed the wall behind him, doubling his every movement. Darkness dripped from his hands, spattering the floor, but his face was hidden, hooded by its own shadow. He whimpered. The glass flashed, glittering as he drove it into his gut. An oily liquid bubbled up from the wound, spilling free, black and noxious like the depths of loneliness, loathing: his hatred, mine.

  He looked at the camera. Andrew.

  I opened the chat window with IsaaC81.

  Yes, I typed, frantic now. I’m here.

  But he was already offline.

  Andrew didn’t come back to the room that night. I waited up for him, watched the sky lighten beyond the green blinds. But he never returned, and I fell asleep with Instant Messenger open before me and the blankets wrapped round, my hands twined in the fabric, still shaking.

  I woke to an empty room: nauseous, hung-over, temples pounding. I called Andrew’s cell, but he didn’t answer. I left a voicemail, waited an hour, then walked to the library, where I spent the rest of the evening reading, or trying to read, unable to distract myself from thoughts of Isaac.

  Who was he? I knew nothing about him except those few details I had managed to glean from his online journal. There was the girl called S, his obsession with dead musicians, his final note of apology. And the link. For S, he wrote.

  He was dead, a suicide. He had filmed it with his webcam and posted the video online, forwarding the feed to his ex-girlfriend via IM. It was intended as a final gesture, one last grasping at the light before the darkness hooked him and gathered him to its breast.

  But if the Web is a place then he lived and died there and now he haunted it in the same way. I recalled the video he had sent to Andrew and the news of Annie’s death that followed. Chris had known her, as had Andrew. “I went home with her,” he said, wherever that was, and later, I had seen him in the same room, bloodied and naked and moaning softly.

  I walked back to the dorm.

  From the footpath I spied the yellow light in our room and assumed that Andrew had returned. But the room was empty. His things were gone: his laptop, his clothes, his bedding. The mattress had been stripped bare, sickly stains visible in the glare of the light overhead. He had taken down his posters as well, and the walls gleamed, white as teeth, a field of snow over which my shadow moved.

  I went downstairs. I found the RA in the Rec Room, where he sat watching the eleven o’clock news. He muted the TV and rose from the couch.

  “I was looking for you,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “You haven’t heard?”

  “Heard what?”

  He explained.

  Saturday night, after leaving the party in Chris’ room, Andrew had walked down to the village. He had found a house party and bluffed his way inside. Nobody knew him there, but they all thought he must have taken something, because he was crying when he left, sobbing like a child as he struggled uphill towards the college.

  He almost made it. He was nearing the crest of the hill when he passed out by the roadside. He could easily have been killed, of course, but a driver chanced to spot him where he lay and brought him to the hospital.

  I swallowed.

  The room blurred, retreating rapidly, and I remembered that I had not eaten in days.

  “Is he … ?”

  “Oh, sure, he’s fine. He’s going home, actually. That was what I wanted to tell you. His father flew in this afternoon and helped pack up his things. He was due to be released this afternoon, so he might even be home by now. Try giving him a call, maybe?”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll do that.”

  The RA scrutinized me closely.

  “Are you okay? You look – tired.” “I’m fine.”

  The RA smiled – a little apologetically, I thought – and wandered off towards the stairwell. After he was gone, the TV continued to play, still muted, unfurling its endless scenes of blackened buildings, ruined streets, smoke standing in plumes above the rubble.

  The next Sunday, around dusk, I heard singing from the campus chapel and paused outside to read the announcements. A memorial service was in progress. ALWAYS WITH US, the notice read, accompanied by a grainy photograph of the girl who had died.

  Annie. In the photograph, she was smiling, seemingly happy, but her arms were terribly thin and her hair was long and messy. She wore a tank-top, and her shoulders were visible, the bones of them, jutting from the coils of her black hair.

  It snowed that night, the last of the season. I walked into town. Sleet raked the sidewalks, showing red then green as the stoplights changed. It swept down the empty roadways, freezing when it struck the concrete, making glass out of the shade trees.

  There were no salt trucks or road crews. The whole of Falmouth, it seemed, had retreated indoors to wait out the spring snow. The stillness seeped into me and whirled on my lips, rising on the winds which came, stronger now, shearing limbs from the ice-encrusted trees.

  Lines came down. On Canal Street, the lights flickered and fell away. I slunk past darkened houses, a world transformed by silence into silence itself, the same room-less room that Isaac had created: a virtual space in which his shadow persisted, detached from the body he had learned to despise and which he had cut away. For S.

  Annie, too, had made an offering of herself, first to one man then another and finally to the dark. Andrew had felt responsible and perhaps he was. But I remembered the night that I had seen him outside the arts building when he looked as cold and isolated as I had always felt. “Are you awake?” he asked me, later, but I didn’t answer him, and in the end, he surrendered to it, as Isaac had done, and Annie. He lay down by the roadside and closed his eyes, freezing slowly as he waited – and for what?

  I had no idea. Even now, I’m not sure I understand any of it, though I carry the memory of that room inside me: bloodied knuckles, shadows on white walls. I’m older now, and reasonably happy, but I haven’t left that place, not really. I transferred from Falmouth and moved away, but a part of me remained behind – the smallest part where others had given everything.

  That night, I walked as far as
the river. My steps carried me out over the bridge, where the waters plunge to the falls, frothing and white, and I must have stayed there for hours, since it was morning when I turned around. The light came blue-grey through the sleet, a chilling dimness through which I passed, thinking of Isaac and Andrew, their ghosts and mine, unconscious of the rooms we had fashioned for ourselves, the places we would haunt forever.

  ANGELA SLATTER

  The Burning Circus

  SPECIALIZING IN DARK fantasy and horror, Angela Slatter is the author of the Aurealis Awardwinning The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales, the World Fantasy Award finalist Sourdough and Other Stories, and the Aurealis finalist Midnight and Moonshine (with Lisa L. Hannett). Recent titles include The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings, Black-Winged Angels and The Female Factory (again with Hannett). She is the first Australian to win a British Fantasy Award (for “The Coffin-Maker’s Daughter” in A Book of Horrors).

  In 2013 she was awarded one of the inaugural Queensland Writers Fellowships. She has an MA and a PhD in Creative Writing, and is a graduate of Clarion South 2009 and the Tin House Summer Writer’s Workshop 2006. She blogs on her website about shiny things that catch her eye.

  “When I was percolating the idea that would eventually become ‘The Burning Circus’,” recalls the author, “the main image I had in mind was of a woman walking unevenly because only one of her shoes had a heel. I already had the title, but not all the steps the story would take. For a long while all I could imagine was this pair of feet walking along through different landscapes, always offbeat, the rhythm strangely broken, kicking up dust and small pebbles.

  “When I got the name in my head of Semiramis (an ancient Armenian queen/goddess) I had my tale – with her name came her history of being illused, unjustly punished and determinedly seeking revenge. And the connection of the ancient Semiramis with the doves of Ishtar gave me my weapon of vengeance.”

  SEMIRAMIS HASN’T BEEN to the circus in such a long time.

  Other circuses, yes. The circus, no.

  Above the stand of trees, over to the left where the road curves around to encircle the big park, the striped canvas of the Big Top can be seen, the flame-red pennants waving in the breeze. While she’s pinning her eyes there as though it might disappear if not watched, she’s not paying attention to her feet, and she stumbles, trips, does a kind of progressive dance but doesn’t fall. The heel of her right Mary Jane, though, gives up the ghost – the shoes were old before she got them – and she tries to hammer it back to the sole with nothing but her callused hands. About as effective as using spit for glue. She surrenders, and sets off once again, her gait now the strange staccato roll of a woman with unequal leg lengths.

  When she goes up on the left foot it feels, just a little, like flying. Just a little like the old days, that sense of ascending without a tether, then the downswing onto the right, down further than you know you should go, just like that too. Just like wondering if someone was going to catch you. Semiramis knows now only she can catch herself.

  The outside still makes her nervous, even though the breeze feels like a kiss. All that space, no confines. Silly, she thinks; it wasn’t always so. Only she’d gotten so used to being inside, so used to the sight of walls and an entrance that didn’t open, not in such a long time. And that window, so tiny and up so high, with the bars, up too high for her to see if he was coming; she wondered some days if that was why he didn’t come, coz she wasn’t able to look out for him. But the sun arrived regularly, spearing in to wake her each morning; sometimes the rain, too. After the first few years, after she got to know every inch of the walls, the ceiling, the floor, she started living inside her skull, only surfacing when they pushed food in through the trap at the bottom of the metal portal. Sometimes not even then.

  But then one day, oh one day, the door opened; the whole, entire, actual door. Pushed hard to break the rust on the hinges, and two men standing there looking embarrassed as if they’d discovered her crouching over the stinking hole in the corner. That was it. No fanfare, no shining light, no great revelation, just a couple of fat deputies staring at her like she was something they were surprised to find.

  Truth be told, she didn’t recognize them; then again, she’d never been able to keep faces straight in her head from the time she walked into the Sheriff’s Office. The only ones that stayed were from before. The folk she’d known and thought of as her family. And she remembered how the world looked each time she flew; she remembered the scenes from every time she let go mid-air and was ever so briefly weightless. Those were the things she remembered. The before things.

  “Semiramis Baxter?” One of them asked, his voice weak to match his chin. She paused. Recalled. Yes. Someone had called her that once. Someone had breathed it in her ear like it was the most precious thing to cross his lips. Yes, that was her.

  As she walks, she says it, says her own name, just to hear it hang in the air, just to know it’s real. That she’s real and so is this, this freedom. This terrifying freedom to do whatever she wants.

  “Semiramis Baxter, you’ve served your time.” But she didn’t think she had. Because there hadn’t been a trial, she was very sure; there hadn’t been anything. Just talking to a man with a big hat and a star pinned to his shirt; talking to him and saying “I saw the one who did it, he had red hair, and a brown suit, a moustache and his teeth were all crooked.” And he nodded, nodded and called a grieving woman into the room, a woman who looked at Semiramis blankly but stared ever so hard at the brooch she wore. Stared and stared and stared. Yes, the woman said, yes, that was the piece of jewellery her husband had given her. And next there was a lock being turned. Turning on Semiramis Baxter and she vanished for such a very long time.

  Then those men at the door, and her standing, trying hard to stretch her calves, her thighs, tripping in her haste to get to the exit, fearful that this offer of liberty, of air, would be rescinded. They handed her over to a nun, a penguin of a woman who seemed not to sweat in spite of the heat. The nun took her to a chapter house outside of the town – what was the town called? All this time and she couldn’t bring it to mind. The other sisters took care of her, gave her a bath, washed and cut her hair (turned white far too soon), gave her two dresses, neither new. Washed myriad times till they were pale and thin, but she didn’t care. They were hers. And the shoes, the battered, brown leather Mary Janes with the wobbly heels. An equally battered suitcase and some plain underwear, a cloche hat that hadn’t really had a shape for long years before it came to her. They gave her some money, dry paper dollars and coppery coins; they took her to the station and put a note in her hand with the name and address of a woman in Chicago who was expecting her to come and be the help.

  She thanked them and smiled and got on the bus. She woke from a dream of his face as he gave her the brooch; she heard him saying “I’ll come get you, my honey, my little peach, my one special girl. Only do this little thing for me – I can’t help you if I’m locked up, can I?” She didn’t say, “If I don’t do this little thing I won’t need your help.” She was a good girl. She walked right into the Sheriff’s Office, just like Gabe asked, told the man exactly what he told her to say, wearing that damned brooch, the one that she knew too late Gabe had pulled from the woman’s collar while she’d hunched over her husband as he bled out. Semiramis should have known it all along, when she found that scrap of green silk stuck to the pin when she unclipped it to put it on.

  She’d opened her eyes, stared through the dirty windows, out at the wheat fields and the silos for a while, then got off the bus well before Chicago.

  She kept moving, making money when she needed, not fussy about how she did it. Moving, moving, moving, always moving. Looking for them, looking for the troupe to which she’d once belonged; looking for him. So many states, so many cities, so many tiny, tiny little townships. It was so easy to disappear in this land, even a circus could find places to hide. Even one as queer as the Burning Circus.

  She
found other things along the way, other people who could and did help. The kindness of strangers was the strangest thing she’d ever encountered. And in New Orleans there’d been a woman with soft lips, gentle hands and dangerous knowledge; a woman who’d showed her tastes she hadn’t even known she had. This was the one who suggested what Semiramis might need, how she might get the amends due to her. This woman was the one who’d conceived them, such small things, so simple, not at all voracious; just needing some blood now and then, a bitty bit of meat. The soft part of Semiramis’ upper arms, the inner flesh, was scarred over many times. And they took in a little of her pain, a little of her bitterness, a little of her righteous need for an accounting, each time they fed.

  Then, having given Semiramis what she’d come for, having handed her the weapon of her requirement, the woman begged her not to leave – but she did anyway. Semiramis had wandered, here and there, following old posters and rumours, stories and lies and wishes. And she spent so much time thinking about how the circus had fled. How not a one of them had come to see her. Not a one had warned her. Not a one had stepped up in her defence. They were happiest attracting just enough attention to entertain people and encourage them to part with their coin for it. But anything more than that? Anything that might make someone take a hard look at Gable Brandt? Gabe who was gold to them all, coz he brought the crowds.

  Didn’t matter to Gabe that he pulled down the largest income of them all. It didn’t stop him supplementing his income with creative acquisition. That night wasn’t the first time he’d followed some fool woman to a dark corner and scared the gems off her – although it was the first time he’d left a corpse behind – and it wouldn’t have been the last, Semiramis was sure. So she sat in diners, listened to gossip, followed whispers of theft, sometimes asking questions but not too many.

  Then one day, there it was – the poster. Not old, either, not yellowed by wind and months past, not blurred by rain and sun; not looking so worn that she knew she’d missed it. Them. Him.