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

by Неизвестный

  There was a bike leaning against the back of the jeep and Kapenda was suddenly struck with the image of David cycling down the centre of the road, his front wheel cutting a “V” though the water, his feet submerging and re-emerging with each revolution of the pedals, and it made him smile.

  “Now, let’s see this thing you were prepared to drown to get,” said David, also smiling.

  “Oh, I—” started Kapenda, about to say that it was still in the hedge, and then realized it wasn’t. He was holding it.

  It was a small figure, made from some dull metal. It had a suggestion of legs and arms and a face that was nested in tentacles, its eyes deep-set and its mouth a curved-down arc. Was it an octopus? A squid? A long chain dangled from it, fine-linked and dully golden. More figures were hooked to some of the chain’s links, tiny things like toads with swollen genitalia and fish with arms and legs. David held the figure up by the chain, peering at it.

  “What is it?” Kapenda asked.

  David didn’t answer. Instead, he span it, watching as it caught the pallid light. Its surface was smooth, but Kapenda had the impression it was the smoothness of age and wear, that the ghosts of old marks still lay under its skin. Finally, David spoke, muttering under his breath, words that Kapenda didn’t catch.

  “Do you know what it is?” asked Kapenda. He was starting to shiver, the shock and the cold catching him. He wanted to go back to the hotel and dry off, warm up.

  “Yes,” said David. “I saw one once, as a child, and I hoped not to see one again so soon. Still, I suppose it explains a lot.” He rubbed one of the patches of dry skin on his neck slowly.

  “The water’s coming, my friend,” he said, “and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. Its time is here again. Well, if you’re sure you’re okay to drive, I’ll leave you be. Take my advice, stay out of the water.”

  “I will,” said Kapenda, “and thank you.”

  “Think nothing of it,” said David and coughed again, his own private punctuation. He winked his sightless eye once more and then went and mounted his bike, wheeling it around to point back to Grovehill. Moments later all Kapenda could see of him was his back, hunched over the handlebars as he went down the road. Behind him, tiny waves spread out across the water and then broke apart.

  It was only when Kapenda got back into the jeep that he remembered the bite – sure enough, his jacket was torn in two semi-circles, to the front and rear of his shoulder, and the skin below bruised but not broken. He got back out of the jeep to try and see the cow but it must have floated off, and the only thing to see was the flood, ever restless and ever hungry.

  The house collapsed just after lunch.

  They were filming at the rope barrier again, this time framing the talent against a shot down the street to show how the water wasn’t retreating. “Forecasters say that, with the recent rainfall, the water levels aren’t expected to recede until at least tomorrow, and if more rain comes it could conceivably be several days or more,” Plumb intoned. “Great sections of the south-west are now under water, economies ruined and livelihoods and lives destroyed. Even today, we’ve heard of two more deaths, a woman and child who drowned in their lounge in the village of Arnold, several miles from here. Questions are being asked of the defences that the government installed and why the Environment Agency wasn’t better prepared. Here, the people merely wait, and hope.”

  Kapenda waited until Plumb had done his turn, letting him peer meaningfully down the flooded street, before lowering the camera. One of the other crews had found a flooded farm earlier that day and had proudly showed their footage to everyone, of the oilslick forming across the surface of the water in the barn and around it as the water worked its way into the abandoned vehicles and metal storage canisters, teasing out the oil and red diesel they contained. The rainbow patterns had been pocking and dancing in the rain, and the image had been oddly beautiful; Kapenda had been professionally impressed, and privately jealous.

  “Was that good?” asked Plumb, and then stopped and listened as the air filled with a dense rumbling, grinding sound like something heavy being pushed over a stone floor.

  “The building’s gone,” someone shouted, a runner with a phone clamped to his ear, “it’s completely collapsed. The flood’s surging!”

  As the man spoke, a fresh wall of water appeared between the furthest buildings, higher than those that had come before it, driven by the tons of brick and wood and belongings that had suddenly crashed into the flow. The wave was a dirty red colour, curled over like a surfer’s dream. Somewhere, it had picked up trees and a car, a table, a bed and other unidentifiable shapes – all of these Kapenda saw even as he was raising the camera. In the viewfinder, he caught the things in the water as they hit the buildings, saw the car crash through the window of a chemist, saw the bed hurtle into and buckle a lamp post, saw bricks bounce and dip like salmon on their way to spawning, and then the wave was upon them.

  He moved back, never stopping filming, cursing under his breath that he’d missed the actual collapse. Things churned through the water, dark shadows darting back and forward under the surface, their edges occasionally breaking through to the air only to roll back, splash their way under again.

  The water level rose rapidly, submerging the makeshift barriers and eating away at the bottom of the hill. As Kapenda and Needham and the talent moved swiftly back, jostling in amongst the other film crews, cars were lifted out of the side streets and began to jolt through the water. One of the lights exploded as the water reached the electric cables, and the others shorted in a series of rapid pops that left behind ghost spots in Kapenda’s eyes and an acrid smell of smoke in the air. Moments later, one of the generators made a series of groaning sounds from inside the community hall and black smoke breathed out from the windows as it, too, shorted out. The police pushed the crowd back, followed all the while by the water.

  By nightfall, Grovehill was lost. The rains, which had continued to fall all day, had finally abated as the light faded but the floodwater had continued to rise, submerging most of the houses and shops up to their roofs. In the pub, the conversation was subdued, slightly awed. Most of the crews had worked on weather stories before; Kapenda himself had been at Boscastle in 2004, filming the aftermath of the flash flood, but this was worse – it showed no signs of receding.

  Two cameramen had died when the building collapsed. One had been caught in the initial surge of water, swept away like so much flotsam. The other, further down the torrent, had been on the edge of the bank when something turning in the water, the branches of an uprooted tree it was supposed, had reached out and snagged him, lifting him from his feet and carrying him off. His talent, a pretty blonde stringer for a local news programme, had been taken off in shock talking about how the water had eaten the man.

  “I saw one of those in Russia,” said a voice from behind him.

  It was one of the other cameramen – Rice, Kapenda thought he might be called. Rice nodded at the thing Kapenda had pulled from the hedge, sat on the table by his glass of beer.

  “Russia?” asked Kapenda

  “I was in Krymsk in 2010 and in Krasnodar,” said Rice, “back in 2012, when the flash flood killed all those people. We found a few of those around the port in Krymsk and in the fields about Krasnodar. We did a segment about them, but it was never shown.” He picked up the figure and dangled it, much like David had done, eyeing it.

  “It’s almost identical,” he said. “Strange.”

  “What is it?”

  “We never found out, not really. I always assumed it was some kind of peasant magic, some idol to keep the floods away. If that’s what it was, it didn’t work though, the damn things were always where the water was at its highest. I found one hanging from a light fitting in the upper room of a school that was almost completely submerged.” He put the thing back on Kapenda’s table.

  “What happened to your segment?”

  “Got archived, I suppose,” said Rice. “Pretty much what
we expected. I didn’t mind, not really. Russia was a nightmare, and I had bigger things to worry about than whether the piece I filmed got shown.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. It was chaos, thousands of people made homeless, streets full of mud and water and corpses. In Krymsk, everything got washed into the Black Sea, and the harbour was blocked with debris for weeks after. The local sea life was well fed, though.”

  “Jesus,” said Kapenda.

  “Yeah,” said Rice. “You’d see them, dark shapes in the water, and then some floating body would suddenly vanish. The official estimate for Krymsk was one hundred and seventy dead, or thereabouts, but I’ll be damned if it wasn’t far higher though. I had a friend covered the Pakistan floods, was in Sindh and Balochistan, and he told me there were things like that there as well, hanging from the trees just above the flood line.”

  “The same things?”

  “Yeah,” said Rice again. “And I’ll tell you one other thing that’s odd.”

  “What?”

  “That old woman that died in the flood at St Asaph the other week? That drowned in her home? There was one hanging outside her house, and one outside the house of the mother and child that drowned yesterday.”

  “What? How do you know?”

  Rice merely smiled at Kapenda. I have my sources, the smile said, and I’m keeping them secret. “Keep it safe,” he said as he turned and went back to the bar, “you never know when you might need protection against the water.”

  Needham was in a bad mood.

  It was the next morning, and he had been trying to find someone local to interview. He wanted the talent to do some empathy work, get Plumb to listen sympathetically and nod as some teary bumpkin showed them their drenched possessions and talked about how their pictures of Granny were lost forever, but there wasn’t anyone.

  “They won’t talk to you?” asked Kapenda.

  “They’ve all fucking vanished!” said Needham. “There’s no one in the emergency shelters, no one worth mentioning anyway, and they certainly aren’t staying at any of the farms, I’ve checked. Most of them have been abandoned too. The police aren’t sure when anyone’s gone, or they’re not saying if they know.”

  “They must be somewhere,” said Kapenda.

  “Must they? Well I don’t know where to fucking find them,” said Needham.

  “Perhaps they all swam away?” said Plumb and laughed. Neither Kapenda nor Needham joined in.

  “It’ll be dead cows and flooded fucking bushes again, you’ll see,” said Needham, disconsolate. “Isaac, can’t you find me something new?”

  “I’ll try,” said Kapenda.

  David was standing in the water in one of the fields a little further out from Grovehill. Kapenda saw his bike first, leaning against the hedge and half under water, and pulled the jeep over to see what the man was doing. There was a stile in the hedge and David was beyond it, out into the field proper. Kapenda waded to the wooden gate and climbed it, perching on the top and calling, “Hello!”

  “‘For Behold’,” said David loudly, his voice rolling across the water, “‘I will bring a flood of water upon the earth to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life under Heaven’. Hello, Isaac. They knew, you see – they understood.”

  “Who knew? Understood what?”

  “We have always waited for the water’s call, those of us with the blood, waited for the changes to come, but now? Some of us have called to it, and it has come.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Kapenda. He wished he had brought his camera – David looked both lonely and somehow potent, standing up to his chest in the water, his back to Kapenda. It was raining again, the day around them grey and murky.

  “What are you doing?”

  “It has been brought this far but I worry,” said David, his voice lower, harder for Kapenda to hear. “How much further? How much more do we want? And what of what comes after us? The sleeping one whose symbol you found, Isaac? It wants the world, drowned and washed clean, but clean of what? Just of you? Or of everything – of us as well? We should have stayed in the deeps, but no, we have moved into the shallows and we prepare the way as though we were cleaning the feet of the sleeping one, supplicants to it. We might be terrible, Isaac, but after us? Do you have a god? Pray for its mercy, for the thing that comes after us – the thing that we open the way for – will be awful and savage beyond imagining.”

  “David, what are you talking about?”

  “The water, Isaac. It’s always about the water.” David turned – in the fractured, mazy light, his face was a white shift of moonlike intensity. His eyes were swollen, turning so that they appeared to be looking to opposite sides of his head. His skin looked like old linen, rough and covered in dry and flaking patches. He seemed to have lost his hair and his neck had folded down over itself in thick, quivering ridges. “It would be best for you to leave, Isaac. You have been saved from the water once, but I suspect that once is all.”

  “David, please, I still don’t know what you mean. Tell me what you’re talking about.”

  “I thought we had time, that the calling that cannot be ignored would never come, but it is too late. Others have hastened it, and the water calls to us even as they call to it. I can’t stand against it, Isaac. The change is come.”

  “David—” Kapenda began, but the older man turned and began to move off across the field, bobbing down shoulder deep into the water with each long stride, sweeping his arms around as though swimming.

  “David!” Kapenda shouted, but the man didn’t turn. Just before he was lost to view, the water around him seemed suddenly full of movement, with things rising to the surface and looking back at him. Kapenda, scared, turned away and returned to the jeep.

  “I’ve found us a boat!” said Needham when Kapenda got back. He didn’t seem bothered that Kapenda hadn’t found anything new to film.

  “Your idea about the fields yesterday, about how smooth they are, it got me thinking,” Needham continued. “Now the flow’s slowing down, it’s safe to go out in a boat, not in the fields but around the houses. They got film of the barns yesterday, didn’t they? Well, we’ll go one better, we’ll get film of the houses, of Grovehill!”

  Plumb was already in the boat, bobbing gently at the edge of the flood. It was a small dinghy with barely enough room for the three of them. Kapenda had to keep the camera on his shoulder as Needham steered the boat using the outboard on its back. Why had he come? Kapenda wondered.

  Because, he knew, this was where he belonged, recording. Whatever David had meant, whatever this flood and the ones that had come before it were, someone had to catch them, pin them to history. Here, in this drowned and drowning world, he had to be the eyes of everyone who came after him.

  Needham piloted the boat away from the centre of Grovehill, down winding lanes among houses that were under water to their eaves. They went slowly – here and there, cars floated past them, and the tops of signs and traffic lights emerged from the flood like the stems of water plants. Kapenda filmed a few short sequences as they drifted, with Plumb making up meaningless but portentous-sounding phrases. Mostly, the imagery did the talking. At one point, they docked against a road emerging from the water that rose up to a hill upon which a cluster of houses sat, relatively safe. Kapenda focussed in, hoping for footage of their occupants, but no one moved. Had they been evacuated already?

  Several minutes later, they found themselves drifting over a playing field, the ghostly lines of football pitches just visible through the still, surprisingly clear water. While Plumb and Needham argued a script point, Kapenda had an idea – he fixed the water cover to the lens of the camera and then held it over the side of the boat and into the water. The surprising clarity would hopefully allow him to obtain good images of the submerged world, eerie and silent. Leaning back and getting as comfortable as he could, Kapenda held the camera so that it filmed what was below while he listened as the talent and the director argued.

&nb
sp; “Hey!” a voice called, perhaps twenty minutes later. It was distorted, the voice, coming from a loudhailer. Kapenda looked up. Bouncing across the surface towards them was one of the rescue boats, a policeman in its bow waving at them.

  “Oh fuck,” said Needham.

  “What?” asked Plumb.

  “I didn’t actually ask permission to come out here,” said Needham.

  “Shit!” said Plumb. “We’ll be fucking arrested!”

  “We won’t. Isaac, have you got enough footage?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then we play innocent. Plumb, charm them if you can.”

  “You have to go back!” the policeman called. Needham raised an arm at him and as the launch pulled alongside them, the talent began to do his stuff.

  By the time they sorted out the police, with many mea culpas from Needham and much oleaginous smiling from Plumb, it was late. The water had continued to rise, its surface now only a few feet down the hill from the pub’s door. Plumb made a joke about being able to use the boat to get back to it, but it was almost true and none of them laughed.

  Inside, most of the crews were quiet and there was little of the talking and boasting and arguing that Kapenda would have expected. There were less of them as well; some had already left, retreating north to the dry or hunting for other stories. In Middlesbrough and Cumbria, rivers were bursting their banks and Kapenda watched footage on the news of flooded farmland and towns losing their footing to water. In one tracking shot, he was sure he saw something behind the local talent, a tiny figure hanging in a tree, spinning lazily on a chain as the water rose to meet it.

  Back in his room, Kapenda started to view the film he had taken that day. The first shots were good, nice framings of Plumb in the prow of their dinghy with Grovehill, drowned, over his shoulder. He edited the shots together and then sent them to Needham, who would work on voiceovers with Plumb.

  Then he came to the underwater footage.

  They were good shots, the focus correct and imagery startling. The water was clear but full of debris – paper and clothing and unidentifiable things floated past the lens as it passed over cars still parked in driveways, gardens in which plants waved, houses around which fishes swam. At one point the corpse of a cow bounced languidly along the centre of a street, lifting and falling as the gentle current carried it on. The dead animal’s eyes were gone, leaving torn holes where they used to be, and one of its legs ended in a ragged stump. It remained in the centre of the shot for several minutes, keeping pace with the boat above, and then it was gone as they shifted direction. Kapenda’s last view of it was its hind legs, trailing behind as it jolted slowly out of sight.