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

by Неизвестный

  He changed course again in 1987 when he directed the movie Hellraiser, based on his novella “The Hellbound Heart”, which became a cult classic, spawning a slew of sequels, several lines of comic books, and an array of merchandising. In 1990, he adapted and directed Nightbreed from his short story “Cabal”. Two years later, Barker executive produced Candyman, as well as the 1995 sequel, Candyman 2: Farewell to the Flesh, both based on his story “The Forbidden”. Also that year, he directed Scott Bakula and Famke Janssen in the noir-esque supernatural detective tale, Lord of Illusions. Gods and Monsters, which Barker executive produced in 1998, garnered three Academy Award nominations and an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.

  His literary works include such bestselling fantasies as Weaveworld, Imajica, and Everville, the children’s novel The Thief of Always, Sacrament, Galilee and Coldheart Canyon. The first of his quintet of children’s books, Abarat, was published in 2002, followed by Abarat II: Days of Magic, Nights of War and Arabat III: Absolute Midnight. He is currently working on the fourth in the series.

  As an artist, his neo-expressionist paintings have been showcased in two large-format books, Clive Barker: Illustrator Volumes I and II, and in 1999 he joined the ranks of such illustrious authors as Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Annie Dillard and Aldous Huxley when his collection of literary works was inducted into the Perennial line at HarperCollins, who then published The Essential Clive Barker, a 700-page anthology with an introduction by Armistead Maupin.

  The following piece of flash fiction was originally published in the Souvenir Book of the 2013 Bram Stoker Awards Weekend in New Orleans, where he was a recipient of the Horror Writers Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award. It is, perhaps, every writer’s nightmare …

  IRETIRED TO BED a little after one, exhausted. Sleep came readily enough, but it wasn’t an easy slumber.

  Somewhere in the middle of the night I dreamed a story of great elaboration.

  It involved, as far as I remember, a race of miniature men, and a pair of escalators which I was pursued up and down, up and down, for reasons I have now forgotten, but which seemed, in the grip of this dream, essential to the plot.

  I was highly excited by my story; so much so that in the midst of it I thought to myself: When I’ve dreamed it all, I’ll wake up and write it down. This is a bestseller; I’ll make millions!

  The story came to a wonderful conclusion, satisfying every question it posed. I woke up, and hurriedly started to write. Oh, I could scarcely believe it! Every idea – every image – was crystal clear. And yes, it was just as riveting now as it had been when I dreamed it. My body ached by the time I’d finished, but I was ecstatic.

  I turned off the lamp and lay back in bed. But as sleep seemed to come over me again I realized, with a kind of leaden disappointment, that I had not truly woken; merely dreamed that I’d done so.

  The story was still unrecorded.

  I fumbled to recollect what had seemed so pungent moments before, so inevitable, while telling myself, Wake! Wake, damn it! Quickly now before you lose it!

  It seemed to work. Again, I took the pen in my hand and scribbled out the dream I’d had. But this time I didn’t get through half of it before I realized that it was delusory.

  I let the dreamed pen drop, and struggled to catch hold of what was left of the story. Miniature men, yes! Escalators, yes! A woman in a gold dress, perhaps? Or was that something I’d read before I went to bed? And the dog with the blue tail; where did he belong? Had he been an intrinsic part of my immaculate plot, or had he strayed in from somewhere else?

  Oh Lord, it was getting muddier by the moment.

  I woke again. And again I picked up the pen. This time I was deeply suspicious of my state. With reason. After just a few words I knew I was still dreaming. And now my previous story was little more than a few senseless wisps. I would never catch it now, I knew.

  I despaired of it. And once I relinquished all hope of having my vision intact, I was at last awake.

  It’s pathetic, I know, to be setting down these words, as though the tale of how a glorious thing was lost can be the equal of the thing itself.

  And as I write – now, this very word, this very syll ab le – the suspicion rises in me that even this faint echo is insubstantial, and must be given up if I am ever to open my eyes.

  ROBERT SHEARMAN

  The Sixteenth Step

  ROBERT SHEARMAN HAS written four shortstory collections, and between them they have won the World Fantasy Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Edge Hill Readers’ Prize and three British Fantasy Awards.

  His background is in the theatre, as resident dramatist at the Northcott Theatre in Exeter, and regular writer for Alan Ayckbourn at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough. His plays have won the Sunday Times Playwriting Award, the Sophie Winter Memorial Trust Award, and the Guinness Award in association with the Royal National Theatre. He regularly writes plays and short stories for BBC Radio, and he has won two Sony Awards for his interactive radio series, “The Chain Gang”. However, he is probably best known for reintroducing the Daleks to the BAFTA-winning first season of the revived Doctor Who, in an episode that was a finalist for the Hugo Award.

  The author’s latest collection, They Do the Same Things Different There, is published by ChiZine.

  “I love big hotels,” says Shearman. “I love the anonymity of them. I love the fact they’re clean and tidy and when I arrive – I haven’t yet messed them up with all my rubbish. And that I can imagine the politeness of the staff and the way they clean my bath and leave me fresh soap is because they like me and enjoy my being there, right up to checkout when the bill is paid.

  “But bed and breakfasts are another matter altogether. You’re invading some family’s home. Oh, they’re polite enough, but it’s a cool politeness – they have lives, these people, and they inflict them upon you by putting up photographs of their children, they’ve got all sorts of personal possessions and they’ve left them blatantly all over the house where you can see. They resent me. I know it. When they make me a fried breakfast in the morning. When they purse their lips as they spoon on my plate a runny egg. So I resent them right back.

  “When I worked in the theatre I stayed in a lot of bed and breakfasts. Sometimes I did it for weeks on end. I’d get to my bedroom and I’d lock the door behind me and I’d keep the family out. And if I had to use the bathroom, I’d run across the corridor as fast as I could so no one could catch me.

  “This is a story about all those dreadful nights in one particular seaside hotel, where the seagulls kept me awake.”

  SO, WAS THE house haunted? Probably not; but it certainly had some peculiar quirks, and Mrs Gallagher always felt obliged to tell her guests of them. She’d warn those taking the box room that they might be able to hear weird whispering sounds in the night – but there was no doubt it was simply an effect of the wind coming in off the North Bay, sometimes in the winter the wind off the coast could be pretty fierce. There was a spot in the breakfast room, she said, upon which if you stood for too long you’d get a chill right down to your very marrow; I never found that spot, although I looked hard enough, I might have felt a chill in any number of different places but never anything that touched my marrow even closely.

  And there was the staircase, and that was harder to explain. There were fifteen steps leading upwards to the first floor, the first nine straight up, the tenth curving around to the left as you ascended. They were covered with a thin shag carpet, and supported by wooden banisters. Fifteen steps in all – but if you went downstairs in the dark, there, at the bottom, you would find a sixteenth.

  It only happened in the dark. If you put the lights on to count, there’d always be the fifteen, looking perfectly ordinary. If you took a candle downstairs with you, the sixteenth couldn’t be found, and nor on nights when the moonlight was pouring in neither. But if it were pitch-black, if when you looked down you couldn’t see your feet or where they might be leading, then that extra step wo
uld be waiting for you. And only as you went downwards, never on the way up.

  It was a strange thing, but not especially unnerving. Mrs Gallagher only told her guests of it so they wouldn’t stumble, not so they should feel spooked or scared. Especially in the holiday season, she said, when the arcades were open late, and the sea was warm enough for night-time paddling, guests might come back once she’d gone to bed, and she didn’t want anyone waking her if they tripped. They’d be fine if they went straight to bed themselves, of course; it would be if they came down afterwards for a glass of water, say, that they might run into problems.

  You’d get guests trying it out, of course. Especially the young ones, newly-wed husbands trying to show off to their wives, squaddies on leave egging each other on. We could tell the sort. We could tell that, first chance they’d get, they’d brave it for themselves. We were smart. We’d encourage them to get it out of the way on the first night, we’d do it before anyone had gone to bed so it wouldn’t disturb. We’d turn out all the lights and pull the curtains and let them have their fun. Down they’d come, counting off the stairs as they did so, maybe laughing a bit, maybe trying to scare each other. They’d reach the sixteenth step, they’d laugh a bit more, they might even kick at it to make sure it was real. We’d give them a minute or two, and then they’d lose interest, and we could turn the lights back on and get on with more important matters. It wasn’t as if the extra step did anything once you’d found it; it was just a step, after all.

  George and I tried it too, the first night we arrived. Mrs Gallagher asked whether she should turn off the lights so we could check for ourselves, and George smiled in that charming way he sometimes had and said he was quite sure he didn’t need to put her out. Even I was fooled, I assumed he wasn’t interested. But late that night, once he’d had his business with me, and we were lying in the dark, he said that we should go down the stairs and see what this extra step palaver was all about. I couldn’t sleep either, the waves were noisy; in years to come I’d realize there was no more reassuring sound in all this world, but I wasn’t used to it yet. I was a bit afraid, and I told George so, but he pooh-poohed that; he said it would all be nonsense anyway.

  George was in his pyjamas, I was in my nightie, and I remember neither of us wore slippers. He held on to my hand, and told me to count the stairs off with him. I was frightened, yes, but it wasn’t a bad frightened, and I told myself it was like all those things at the funfair on the beach, this was the dodgems and the ghost train, all rolled into one. George was even whispering jokes at me, and he had a nice voice when he whispered. We reached the fifteenth step, and George said, “Shall we go on?” And I was going to say no, let’s not, let’s turn back and go to bed, but he was only teasing, of course we went on; he took another step downwards, and he pulled me after him. We stood on the impossible step. “It has to be a trick,” said George, and he sounded a bit angry, the way he did when he thought the foreman was cheating him. My bare feet were cold. The carpet had run out at the fifteenth step – this one beneath seemed to be made of stone – but then, no, not stone, because it wasn’t so hard as all that, and it was getting smoother, like it was old mud breaking under our combined weight or even loosening to our body heat, it was getting softer, even liquid now, and I was sinking into it, and yet it was still so very cold.

  I tried to pull away, but George was still holding me. So I pulled harder, I wrenched myself out of his grip, and that’s when I stumbled. I felt myself beginning to fall and I couldn’t stop myself, and all I could see was the black and I didn’t know how far away the ground might be.

  It was just a few feet, of course, and I was more shocked than hurt. And there was suddenly light, and there was the landlady, holding a candle, and leaning over the banister down at us. “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Sorry.”

  “I did warn you. Please go back to bed.”

  She stayed on the stairs so she could light our way. As we passed her she didn’t bother to hide her disapproval. “Sorry,” I said again. George didn’t say a word.

  George was cross with me that night. I told him about the cold step, but he said he’d felt only carpet, just like on all the other steps, and that I was being stupid.

  You asked me for the truth. And this is the truth as I understand it.

  George was not a good man, but he was not a bad man either, not entirely. Mrs Gallagher would say I was justifying again. She said I did a lot of justifying, and I suppose she was right. But I know what’s fair, and I want to be fair to George. I’ve known some bad men. There’s no tenderness to bad men, and George, he could sometimes be tender.

  He said what we did wasn’t theft. We’d come into town, and would stay at a little hotel, a bed and breakfast maybe, nothing grand. And then when it was time to move on, we’d sneak away without paying. He said that proper theft would have been if we’d taken the silver with us as we went, but we never did that, George had too much pride. But the idea was there in his head, wasn’t it? He’d spoken it out loud. With George, I knew, if it was in his head, if that little seed of an idea was planted, it was the beginning of everything.

  But for the time being it wasn’t theft, not really – and we would come into a town, and George would spend the days out looking for work. He’d go to the factories, he’d go to the warehouses. He said that as soon as he got a job he’d return to the bed and breakfasts, every single one, and he’d pay them back. I’m sure at the start he even meant that.

  George would come back to the hotels and tell me there was no work to be found – but he’d heard talk of work a few miles away, the next town along, just over the hill, just across the moors, wherever. And off we’d go chasing it. I hated it when we had to move on, but George always looked so much happier, he’d suddenly beam with hope, and that made up for it. He might carry my bags as we walked; he might even sing.

  One day we reached the coast. And there was nowhere further for us to go, not unless we changed direction.

  “I could be a fisherman,” George said. “I would enjoy catching fish all day long. Good honest work. It’s all going to work out. You’ll see.” As far as I knew, George hadn’t been inside a boat his whole life, but it was wiser not to say anything.

  There were lots of bed and breakfasts to choose from. It was a holiday town, but off-season, everything was empty. I don’t know what brought us to Mrs Gallagher’s. Fate, I suppose. Who knows why things happen, they just do.

  George rang the doorbell, and doffed his hat, and gave that smile he was good at. I did my best to look like the respectable housewife on holiday that I always wanted to be.

  Most landladies would ask for a deposit. We had to hand over the deposit without appearing to mind, as if there were plenty more where that came from. Sometimes it was the hardest bit of acting I had to do. Mrs Gallagher didn’t want a deposit.

  “No deposit?” said George. “Well, well.” And he smiled wider, but he also frowned, as if suspecting he was being conned.

  “No deposit,” agreed Mrs Gallagher. “All my guests pay when they leave.”

  She told us about the whispering in the box room, but the hotel was empty, we could pick any room we wanted, and I was glad George allowed us a room that wouldn’t scare me. She told us about the strange chill in the breakfast room. She told us about the step you could only find in the dark.

  *

  In the morning she served us breakfast. She didn’t mention the night’s disturbance, and nor did we. She asked us how we wanted our eggs. “Fried, and runny,” said George. I told her I’d like mine poached. She gave a curt nod, then went into the kitchen.

  She brought us out plates of sausage and bacon and fried bread. I had a poached egg. “Where’s my egg?” George demanded to know. Mrs Gallagher said she only had one egg, and apologized.

  George glowered. He managed a few bites of sausage, then pushed his plate away. I knew how hungry he must be, but he had such pride. He lit a cigarette, stared
at me through an ever thickening cloud of smoke. I pretended not to notice. I wanted to eat as much of my breakfast as I could. I hoped that, if I ate fast enough, he wouldn’t say anything until I’d finished.

  “You enjoying that?” he said too soon, softly, dangerously softly.

  I knew there was no right answer. I looked at him. I tried to keep my expression as neutral as possible.

  He took my plate. He held it up, as if to inspect it closely, as if to ensure it was fit enough for his queen. He spat on it. Then he put the plate back down on the table, and ground out his cigarette in the middle of the food, in the middle of the egg.

  “I’ll be back later,” he muttered, got up, and left.

  I was still so hungry. But I didn’t want to eat from my plate, even though the spit was only my husband’s, and I loved my husband. And I didn’t want to eat from his, in case he came back.

  Mrs Gallagher took away the plates, and if she was surprised they were still heavy with food, she didn’t comment.

  I stayed the day in the bedroom.

  That evening George came back, and he was all smiles. He said maybe he’d found a job after all – a fisherman had said he would take George out on his boat in the morning, try him out for size. He’d brought back a couple of bottles of beer, I don’t know where he’d got them, and he let me have a little bit. When that night he did his business, he was kind and quick.

  The next morning he left early. I got to eat my breakfast on my own. It was delicious.

  That same night George came back to the hotel angry. The fisherman hadn’t waited for him. It had all been some bloody big joke. I asked him where he’d been all day, and that was a mistake. Later that night he apologized. He said the fisherman had waited for him, he’d gone out in the boat. But the waters had been very rough, and he hadn’t been well. The fisherman found it funny. He supposed it was funny, come to that. I mean, he’d get used to the sea if he had to, but in the meantime, it was funny. Didn’t I think it was funny? It was all right, he said, he didn’t mind if I did, we could laugh at it together, like we used to laugh at things. I gave him a kiss, and that made him feel better.