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

by Неизвестный

  Afterwards, for a stroll, he visited the Cathedral. It was only yards away and he had not set foot inside for years. He was surprised to find the interior so vast and daunting, more so than he ever remembered feeling before. A massive, overwhelming, empty space. A space in which you could fit several normal-sized cathedrals, certainly. He thought of it now, quite literally. Dozens and dozens of churches, stacked like Lego bricks. He wondered if there was any limit to how large the masons could build an edifice to proclaim their faith? How big does Faith have to be to fill a space the size of this? How much love does God need?

  The last tourists of the day moved around the aisles, looking up in awe and wonder, but he was the only one who knelt in the pews and prayed.

  With his eyes tightly closed, he heard a baby crying. The sound echoed distinctly in the Cathedral’s canyon of stone, but when he stood and looked all round, he could see nobody. No baby. No mother. Nothing. And all was absolutely quiet again. Except for the side door creaking gently as it closed to keep out the sun.

  He did not know how long he had been sitting in the bath but the water was stone cold and the Imperial Leather had turned it milky and opaque. He felt pins and needles in his bony buttocks so he thought he’d been there a long while, but it worried him he didn’t know how long and now his shoulders were shivering and he was sure that under the scummy water his penis had shrunk to nothing. He wanted to pull the towel off the rail but it was slightly out of reach. Then the door of the bathroom opened and Christopher Lee came in, dressed exactly as he had been in the first Hammer Dracula in that formidable entrance descending the staircase. Immaculate hair. Virile. Vulpine. The top of his head almost touched the ceiling as he paced back and forth beside the claw-foot bath in his ankle-length black cloak. He looked terribly upset. “Where’s my wife?” he was saying. “Where is she?”

  Cushing could do nothing. He felt frozen and invisible.

  He woke feeling the millstone presence of death, its crushing inevitability, in a way that he hadn’t been so frightened by, or made helpless by, since he was seven years old.

  Staring at the ceiling, he thought of the youth in the Pilgrim Tea Rooms, but instead of the pimply, hunched teenager in the parka, the boy sitting there was Carl Drinkwater, his hands wedged between his thighs, staring down at the plastic tabletop which his mother was wiping with a wet cloth. Carl looked up and stared, just as the other boy had done. He had tiny smears of blood on his cheeks like the squashed bodies of dead insects.

  Like massing vultures they gathered in the sky over the concourse of carrion, an echo of the prehistoric and primal. As the soles of his wellington boots pressed into the shingle with a hushing musicality of their own, their beckoning grew louder, a virulent and unforgiving choir. An announcement, spiteful heralds of his coming. Had he been blind, he thought, he could have purely followed the direction of the cries of the seagulls and found his way to the Harbour, where death was perpetually on the menu.

  He carried a shopping basket. Not exactly becoming for a gentlemen, but he didn’t care. It was his late wife’s, and now it was his. He remembered the two Harvesters in the 1950s, when he and Helen had first come here, often used as umpire boats during the regatta. The remains of the railway were still there, the lamp standards still in evidence though the tracks were gone. Two whelk boats still operated on East Quay, commercial ships came in carrying stone and timber, Danish stuff, he was told, and beyond West Quay he often saw grain boats unloading into lorries with a hopper.

  Meanwhile fishing boats unloaded their silvery spoils and the gulls were there, hovering, fighting the wind, ready to clash and kill for the pickings they could get from what bloody morsels fell before the trucks loaded up and shipped it out. Old families tended to work the trawlers. Generations. Fathers, sons, grandfathers.

  A sheen of blood and seawater striped the concrete. His wellingtons crossed the mirror of it in the direction of the ugly store shed on South Quay, corrugated asbestos on a breeze-block frame, both its barn doors open to the wide “U” of the Harbour, the air punctuated by the tinkling of pulley metal and puttering slaps of wet ropes and lapping water.

  It wasn’t hard to find out the time of the tides and discover when exactly the boats came in, and he wasn’t the only one who gravitated to the Harbour to get the pick of the “stalker” – as they called the odds and sods, small fry not sorted with the prime fish already boxed up and ready on its way to London. If they were regulars, they’d know when a certain boat would berth and they’d be there waiting for the bargains when it returned on the flood tide.

  He watched as fishermen in sou’westers and oilskins hurried up and down the ladder on and off the vessel. They weren’t hanging around, even with a small crowd present. Business took precedence. A small truck waited, taking the stacked plastic boxes – the catch already sorted during the two-hour steam back from fishing off Margate in Queen’s Channel – straight to market.

  Les Gledhill was one of them, strands of long wet hair hanging from his hood, cheekbones shiny and doll-like over his damp beard. The stalker was bagged up and marked at the quayside beyond the parked cars, some of it wrapped in newspaper. No airs and graces. 5 DOVER SOLE’S £1. The misappropriated apostrophe was almost obligatory. Others who’d arrived first were helping themselves, and Gledhill was taking their cash in a wet, outstretched palm, skin peeled pink from the scouring weather.

  Seeing Cushing out of the corner of his eye, Gledhill at first attempted to ignore him. A transistor radio set on an empty oil drum was playing the recent Christmas hit, “Grandad” by Clive Dunn. Unable to avoid doing so any longer, Gledhill stared at him as he rinsed his hands under a cold-water tap on the quayside and wiped them in a towel. The DJ on the radio switched to the current single at the top of the charts, George Harrison singing “My Sweet Lord”.

  “What do you have today?” Cushing presented himself as bright-eyed and bushy tailed.

  “Depends what you’re after.”

  “Oh, I think I’m open to suggestions.” Cushing smiled broadly.

  “Well. Got a load of dabs,” Gledhill said, forcing a retaliatory smile to match. “Sprats. Herrings. Good winter fish. Dover sole. Skate. Nice skate backbone, if you know what to do with it.” His hands looked frozen and painful to the older man as he watched him turn to serve an elderly woman who had the right change. A great deal of nattering was going on between the other customers and the other fisherman – quite sprightly, good-natured banter – and to an onlooker, this conversation would seem no different.

  Cushing adjusted his scarf, scratched the side of his chin and pointed at one of the packages lined up before him. “That one will do perfectly.”

  “Pound.”

  “Thank you.” Cushing happily delved into his purse.

  Gledhill picked up the fish in newspaper and handed it to him, and as he did so Cushing saw the blue blur of an old tattoo on the back of his wrist, together with blue dots on his finger joints.

  “You know, I was reading the other day …” He placed a pound note in the other man’s palm. “The fish, it’s the old symbol of Christianity. Older even than the cross.”

  “Fascinating,” Gledhill said.

  “Yes, it is, rather. Some people say religion has lost its way, but we are all God’s children, when all is said and done. Whether we choose to see that or not. Don’t you think?”

  “You’ve got a bargain there, squire. I’d go home very happy if I were you.”

  Turning his back, Gledhill went back to the tap of icecold water and washed his red-raw hands with the thoroughness of a surgeon. Cushing had researched surgeon’s methods for the Frankenstein films and it was the kind of thing he watched and made a mental note of, habitually. He found it interesting, vital, that there were telltale rituals and practices that made a profession look authentic, or inauthentic if wrong. It was essential to make the audience believe in the part one was playing, however ludicrous the part may be on paper. That was one’s job. That was why t
hey called it “make believe”. Make. Believe.

  Cushing waited.

  Believe in yourself, Peter …

  “Anything else you want, mate?” Gledhill turned his head and stared at the old man. “Apart from the Dover sole?”

  Peter Cushing decided he would not be hurried. Why should he be?

  “Let me see …”

  He lingered. And the more he lingered the more he realized he was enjoying the discomfort his lingering engendered.

  Les Gledhill did not do anything so obvious as a quick, shifty look towards his colleagues to reveal his unease. He would never have been that blatant. Nor did he become twitchy or self-conscious in any way. In fact his motions became slower and more considered. That, in itself, told a story – that the very presence of the old man in wellington boots made him uneasy. And he didn’t like it. A person who got a certain thrill from the control of others seldom enjoyed the feeling that someone else had control of him.

  “Have you ever tasted oysters, Mr Cushing?” Gledhill picked up one of the shelled creatures from a plastic bucket in front of him.

  “I thought the oysters round here had all succumbed to disease and pollution.”

  “Not if you know where to look. I think of it as a hobby. Go out on a Sunday. Maybe get a hundred. You haven’t answered my question. Sir.” His intention was to intimidate, rather than be intimidated. That much was clear.

  “My preference is towards plain food.”

  “Then you don’t know what you’re missing. Marvellous stuff.” Gledhill took a knife from a leather satchel. It was a short, stubby one with a curve in the blade. “You break them open.” Metal scraped against the shell. He turned the object in his hand and opened it as if it were hinged. “Dab of vinegar if you prefer. Or just as it comes.” He ran the knife under the slimy-looking bivalve, cutting its sinewy attachment. It sat in its juices. “Then into the mouth they go.” He slid it off the half-shell onto his tongue, savouring it for a second or two, no longer, then swallowed. “One bite. Two at the most. Then down like silk. Nectar. Nothing like it.”

  “Not for me.”

  “Not for everybody, that’s for sure. Some people find it repulsive. Some can’t even bear the idea and run a mile. But to gourmets, those who appreciate the good things in life, well … they’re a little taste of Heaven.” Gledhill’s eye was steady again. Unblinking. “Acquired taste, of course …”

  “If you say so.”

  “Don’t knock it till you try it. As they say.”

  “Something eaten whilst it is still alive, simply in order to give a person pleasure? I find that rather … obscene.”

  “In a way. In another way, it’s the peak of civilized behaviour. The stuff of banquets and kings. Of aristocracy and riches and palaces. The supreme indulgence. The Romans introduced them here two thousand years ago. Long ago as the time of Christ. Makes you think, doesn’t it?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Lot of algae and low in salinity, the Thames Estuary. Knew a thing or two, those Romans.” He tossed away the empty shell into a bucket half-full of them, shortly to add to the cultch bed upon which the “spat” of the next generation would settle. “Besides. If we humans don’t live for pleasure, what do we live for?”

  Cushing thought for a moment.

  “Love?” he suggested. But really it was nothing like a question, to his mind.

  Gledhill gave a snort, as if it were a bad joke, and wiped his hands in the grubby towel.

  “Anything else I can do for you, sir? Or will that be all?”

  “Actually there is one thing.” Cushing was careful to maintain a matter-of-fact air. “I’m going to a matinee at the Oxford Picture House this afternoon. I rather thought you might like to join me.”

  Gledhill did not look away. “I don’t like going to the cinema as a rule. Not in the daytime.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re afraid of the dark?” Cushing’s wit fell upon deaf ears. “I’m sure you can make an exception.”

  “I’m busy.”

  “I think not. Your working day is evidently over.”

  “I didn’t say I was working, I said I was busy.”

  “Oh. That’s a shame.” Cushing feigned disappointment. “It really is a shame. Because I’ve been to see your ex-wife and son, you see. Yes. Sue and I had a most edifying chat, and I thought you might be interested in what she had to say. It was quite – what can I say? Quite – special. I’m being dreadfully presumptuous. I shall go alone.” He placed the wrapped Dover sole deep in his shopping basket and walked away a few steps before turning back, as if the next thing he said was a mere afterthought. “I believe the main feature commences at half past two. I do so hate missing the start of a picture, don’t you? You can’t really enjoy a story unless you see it from the beginning, right through to the bitter end. Don’t you find?”

  Gledhill was still staring at him. A few foolishly courageous seagulls descended in a flurry on the “stalker” in front of him and took stabs at it, one trying to skewer some fish offal in rolledup newspaper. Gledhill stamped his feet and clapped his hands, yelling sharply and waving his arms to scare them off. “Go! Go! Bloody pests!” Behind him, another fisherman directed a high-powered hose to wash down the flagstones. The gulls took to the skies.

  Cushing tapped his shopping basket before walking away.

  “Thank you for this. I shall enjoy it.”

  *

  Fetching coal to build the fire for that coming evening, he remembered entering the same way from the garden, closing the door with his foot, finding Helen hunched on the divan looking like a frightened child. “I thought you’d left me.” “I’m not going anywhere,” he’d reassured her. She’d closed her eyes. He’d wrapped a blanket around her and made a fire, as he did now on his knees before the grate. He screwed up sheets of old newspaper in makeshift balls and laid a criss-cross pattern of kindling on top of them.

  Maisie Olive had brought tea and said, “She’ll be all right, sir.”

  He’d been smoking a cigarette. “Thank you, yes. She’ll be all right.”

  At nine o’clock the night nurse helped Helen to bed. The last thing she said, clutching his hand, was, “Goodnight, Peter. God bless you.”

  At three o’clock some instinct he could not explain woke him, and he found her skin cold and clammy to his touch. He switched on the light and the electric blanket and went down to make tea. Her pupils were small dots. He fluffed up pillows and prised them behind her. When he returned with the tea, the night nurse was there saying her breathing was painful and then what breathing there was, painful or not, stopped.

  The nurse looked at him and shook her head.

  He looked down at Helen and saw all pain and suffering gone from her face. She was serene and at peace. The nurse must have seen his stricken features because she extended her arms, then lowered them.

  At that moment Cushing had felt nothing, just a supreme hollowness inside. He’d thought, most strangely of all, if this was in a film I wouldn’t be reacting like this at all. I’d be shouting and jumping around and wailing.

  “You’d better get dressed now, Mr C,” the night nurse said. He was still sitting in the armchair with the tea tray on his lap and it was daylight.

  When the undertakers came, they showed him an impressively shiny catalogue of headstones. Many of them reminded him of the ones made out of polystyrene in the property shop at Bray. He’d been in a few graveyards in his time. Most of them taken apart afterwards to be reconstituted as other sets: barn, ballroom, bedroom. If only life could be dismantled, he thought, remade and reconstructed the way sets were, with a fresh lick of paint, good enough for the camera to be fooled. After looking at the brochure, he’d given the undertaker only one absolute specification for the gravestone: that there be a space left beside Helen’s name for his own.

  In that last year her weight had diminished drastically to under six stone, while he himself lost three. It was as if, unconsciously, he’d been keeping pace wit
h her decline, wanting to go with her every step of the way – and beyond, if necessary.

  The previous summer he had dropped out of filming Hammer’s To Love a Vampire, the follow-up in the Sheridan Le Fanu “Karnstein” saga (even though the part of occultist schoolmaster Giles Barton had been written for him) because Helen had become gravely ill, yet again.

  “No more milk train,” he’d said.

  When she’d been rushed to hospital that last time and he’d been telephoned by Joyce at the studios, he was shocked how tired she looked when he arrived at her bedside. It was immediately clear this was not just a case of a few checkups, as he’d deluded himself into thinking. He’d held her hand tightly and said to her he wasn’t on call the next day and he’d bring in a picnic lunch. She smiled and said that’d be lovely. But when he’d arrived with the wicker hamper, like some character from a drawing-room farce, the nurses had told him he was not to be admitted under any circumstances. The doctors said his wife had had a serious relapse and her heart and lungs were terribly weak. He heard very little after that.

  He succeeded by sheer persistence in persuading the specialists to let her home. Nobody precisely said that these coming days were her last, but their acquiescence made it obvious. Cushing shook their hands and thanked them profusely. The Polish doctor long ago had said he feared there were no miracles, and this was clearly what he meant, he knew that now. And he knew his wife would need constant medical assistance for the short, precious time she had left.

  He arranged day and night care, and rang his agent to cancel his role in the Mummy picture they’d started shooting. He was not irreplaceable. Other people in this life were.

  Now he remembered the crew sending flowers to the funeral.

  As families do, of course.

  He remembered, too, sitting at her bedside, tears streaming down his face. “I’ve made mistakes. I’ve done things of which I have been entirely ashamed, foolish things … Yet through it all, you have been perfect. You forgave …”

  “I told you so many times, my love,” Helen had said. “I never wanted you to feel I possessed you. That was our bargain, remember? What I know doesn’t hurt me, so why on earth should it hurt you? It’s unimportant. Those things simply didn’t happen. You hear?” She’d wiped his cheeks with a corner of the bed sheet. “Not a person in the world could have done for me what you have done … But I’m tired, my darling … I can’t talk now …”