The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 10 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  His credit card on the counter, bright and toy-like, the clerk brushing hair from his eyes: “Do you want a box or anything? A gift box?”

  “No,” he said. “Just put it in a bag.”

  * * * *

  Raining, still, and nearly dark as he pulled into the driveway, heart in peculiar race and he called her name when he entered, made his voice normal, called her name again as he walked through the darkened house with the bag tight in his hand, room to room: nothing: she was nowhere so circle back to the living room, silent and dark, rain like voices to make a chorus, secret chorus in a language all its own as

  “Here I am,” her voice, very quiet and then again, as if he had not heard: “Here I am.”

  Past the sofa, in the corner where wall met wall and she was naked: and hooded, draped in a hood so shapeless and so black as to give no breath of the female, no hint of the human inside. If there were eye-slits, he did not see them; there must be holes for breathing, but in this light he could not be sure. Gaze without words but an alien shudder, as if some other creature, bullet-shaped, past fathoming, were rising from the fragile flesh of her body, the sloping shelf of shoulders made from bone.

  The bag made a sound as it touched the floor; his fingers trembled on the straps, the heavy red buckles of the mask.

  “I brought you something,” he said.

  Silence: arms crossed, her breath in hitching motion, both of them waiting for him to strip and cross the room.

  <>

  * * * *

  CHAZ BRENCHLEY

  The Keys to D’Espérance

  Chaz Brenchley has made a livingas a writer since he was eighteen, and 1999 marks his twenty-third anniversary in the job. He is the author of nine thrillers, most recently Shelter, and is also the creator of a major new fantasy series, The Books of Outremer, based on the world of the Crusades. He is a prize-winning former poet and has also published three fantasy books for children and close to 500 short stories in various genres.

  He was Crimewriter-in-Residence at the St. Peter’s Riverside Sculpture Project in Sunderland, which he describes as “a bizarre experience” and which led to the collection Blood Waters. His novel Dead of Light is currently in development as a movie, and he won the British Fantasy Society’s 1998 August Derleth Fantasy Award for the sequel, Light Errant.

  “ ‘The Keys to D’Espérance’ is one of those very rare stories that I wrote because I had to, without any market in mind,” explains the author. “I was - as ever - broke, and supposed to be working on a book that was already late; and for a month there was nothing I could do but put that aside and work on ‘D’Espérance’. Which then sat around for years, waiting for the right publisher to turn up.

  “I was so pleased when Bill Schafer of Subterranean Press offered to do it as a chapbook, that was perfect. It is very much the first of a series of stories about the house, in which I hope to write obliquely about the history of Britain through this century. I have the next couple of stories in my head, only waiting for me to find the time to write them.”

  * * * *

  A

  ctually, by the time the keys came, he no longer believed in the house.

  It was like God, he thought; they oversold it. Say too often that a thing is so, and how can people help but doubt? Most facts prove not to be the case after all, under any serious examination. Even the Earth isn’t round.

  One day, they said, D’Espérance will be yours. You will receive it in sorrow, they said, and pass it on in joy. That is as it is, they said, as it always is, as it should be.

  But they said it when he was five and he thought they meant for Christmas, they’d never make him wait to be six.

  When he was six they said it, and when he was seven and eight and nine.

  At ten, he asked if he could visit.

  Visit D’Espérance?they said, laughing at him. Of course you can’t, you haven’t been invited. You can’t just visit. You can’t call at D’Espérance. In passing, looking at each other, laughing. You can’t pass D’Espérance.

  But if it was going to be his, he said at twelve, wasn’t he entitled? Didn’t he have a right to know? He’d never seen a painting, even, never seen a photograph...

  There are none, they said, and, Be patient. And, No, don’t be foolish, of course you’re not entitled. Title to D’Espérance does not vest in you, they said. Yet, they said.

  And somewhere round about fifteen he stopped believing. The guns still thundered across the Channel, and he believed in those; he believed in his own death to come, glorious and dreadful; he believed in Rupert Brooke and Euclidean geometry and the sweet breath of a girl, her name whispered into his bolster but never to be uttered aloud, never in hearing; and no, he did not believe in D’Espérance.

  * * * *

  Two years later the girl was dead and his parents also, and none of them in glory. His school would have no more of him, and the war was over; and that last was the cruellest touch in a long and savage peal, because it took from him the chance of an unremarked death, a way to follow quietly.

  Now it must needs be the river, rocks in his pockets and thank God he had never learnt to swim. There would be notice taken, that was inevitable; but this would be the last of it. No more family, no one more to accuse or cut or scorn. The name quite gone, it would simply cease to matter. He hoped that he might never be recovered, that he might lie on the bottom till his bones rotted, being washed and washed by fast unheeding waters.

  Quite coldly determined, he refused to lurk withindoors on his last long day. At sunset he would go to the bridge, rocks in my pockets, yes, and no matter who sees, they shan’t stop me; but first he would let himself be seen and hissed at and whispered about, today as every day, no craven he. It was honour and honour only that would take him to the river; he wanted that clearly understood.

  So he walked abroad, returning some books to the public library and settling his accounts with the last few merchants to allow him credit. He took coffee in town and almost smiled as the room emptied around him, did permit himself the indulgence of a murmured word with the cashier on his way out, “Please don’t trouble yourself, I shan’t come back again.”

  And so he went home, and met the postman at the door; and was handed a package, and stood on his doorstep watching as the postman walked away, wiping his hand on his trousers.

  * * * *

  The package was well wrapped in brown paper, tied with string and the knots sealed. It was unexpectedly heavy for its size, and made softly metallic noises as he felt its hard angles shift between his fingers.

  Preferring the kitchen in his solitude to the oppressions of velvet and oak, of photographs and memories and names, he went straight through and opened the package on the long deal table under the window.

  Keys, three separate rings of keys: brass keys and bronze and steel, keys shorter than his thumb and longer than his hand, keys still glittering new and keys older than he had ever seen, older than he could believe, almost.

  For long minutes he only held them, played with them, laid them out and looked at them; finally he turned away, to read the letter that had accompanied them.

  An envelope addressed to him in neat copperplate, nothing extravagant; heavy laid paper of good quality, little creased or marked despite its journeying in with the keys. A long journey, he noted, unfolding the single sheet and reading the address at the top. His correspondent, this remitter of keys was apparently a country solicitor; but the town and the company’s name were entirely unfamiliar to him, although he had spent two months now immersed in his parents’ affairs, reading everything.

  My dear lad, the letter said - and this from a stranger, strange in itself - I believe that this will reach you at the proper time; I hope you may learn to view it as good news.

  In plain, you are now the master of D’Espérance, at least in so far as such a house may ever be mastered by one man. The deeds, I regret, you may not view; they are kept otherwhere, and I have never had sigh
t of them. The keys, however, are enclosed. You may be sure that none will challenge your title, for so long as you choose to exercise it.

  I look forward to making your acquaintance, as and when you see fit to call upon me.

  Yours, etc.

  * * * *

  His first impulse was to laugh, to toss the letter down, his resolution quite unchallenged, quite unchanged. Just another house, and what did he want with it? He had one already, and meant to leave it tonight and forever.

  But he was a boy, he was curious; and while he would welcome death, while he meant to welcome it, come, sweet Death, embrace me, he was very afraid of water.

  His hands came back to the keys and played upon them, a silent music, a song of summoning. Death could surely wait a day, two days. So could the river. It was going nowhere; he’d be back.

  * * * *

  And so the train, trains, taking him slow and dirty into the north country. Soon he could be anonymous, no name to him, just a lad too young to have been in the war, though he was old enough now. That was odd, to have people look at him and not know him. To have them sit just across the compartment and not shift their feet away from his, not lour or sniff or turn a cold, contemptuous, ostentatious shoulder.

  One woman even tried to mother him, poor fool: not knowing what a mother meant to him, bare feet knocking at his eyeballs, knocking and knocking, knock knock. He was cold himself then, he was savage, gave her more reason than most had to disdain him, though still she wouldn’t do it.

  And at last there were sullen moors turned purple with the season, there was a quiet station with a single taxi waiting and the locals hanging back, no, lad, you take it, it’s only a ten-minute walk into the town for us and we know it well, it’s no hardship.

  He wouldn’t do that, though. Their kindness was inappropriate, born of ignorance that he refused to exploit; and he had no need of it in any case. It was after six o’clock, too late to call on the solicitor, and he didn’t plan to seek lodgings in town. His name was uncommon, and might be recognised. Too proud to hide behind a false one, he preferred to sleep in his blanket roll under whatever shelter he could find and so preserve this unaccustomed anonymity at least for the short time he was here.

  * * * *

  Leaving the station and turning away from the town, he walked past a farm where vociferous dogs discouraged him from stopping; and was passed in his turn by a motor car, the driver pausing briefly to call down to him, to offer him a ride to the next village. He refused as courteously as he knew how, and left the road at the next stile.

  Rising, the path degenerated quickly into a sheep-track between boulders, and seemed to be taking him further and further from any hope of shelter. He persevered, however, content to sleep with the stars if it meant he could avoid company and questions. Whenever the path disappeared into bog, he forced his way through heather or bracken until he found another; and at last he came over the top of that valley’s wall, and looked down into an unexpected wood.

  He’d not seen a tree since the train, and here there were spruce and larch below him, oak and ash and others, secret and undisturbed. And a path too, a clear and unequivocal path, discovered just in time as the light faded.

  He followed the path into the wood, but not to its heart. He was tired and thirsty, and he came soon to a brook where he could lie on his stomach and draw water with his hands, fearing nothing and wanting nothing but to stay, to move no more tonight.

  He unrolled his blankets and made his simple bed there, heaping needles and old leaves into a mattress between path and brook; and only at the last, only a little before he slept did he think he saw the girl flit between trees, there on the very edge of vision, pale and nameless as the light slipped.

  Pale and nameless and never to be named; nor seen again except like this, a flicker of memory and a wicked trick of the light. He closed his eyes, not to allow it passage. And breathed deeply, smelling sharp resins and the mustiness of rot, and so cleared his mind, and so slept.

  * * * *

  Slept well and woke well, sunlight through trees and a clean cool breeze and no fear, no anger, nothing but hunger in him. With the river’s resolution to come, all else was resolved; there was, there could be nothing to be afraid of except that last great terror. And why be angry against a town he’d left already, a world he would so shortly be leaving?

  Breakfast was an apple from his backpack, eaten on the march: not enough for his belly, but that too was no longer the driving force it had been. He had higher considerations now; with time so short, a grumbling gut seemed less than urgent.

  Oddly, with time so short, he felt himself totally unhurried. He would walk back the way he had come, he would find his way into the town and so to the solicitor - but not yet. Just now he would walk here, solitary among trees and seeking nothing, driven by nothing...

  * * * *

  Which is how he came to D’Espérance, called perhaps but quite undriven: strolling where others before him had run, finding by chance what was his already, though he meant to take only the briefest possession.

  The path he took grew wider, though no better cared for. Tree roots had broken it, in places the fall of leaves on leaves had buried it; but logic and light discovered its route to him, not possible to lose it now. It turned down the slope of the valley and found the brook again, and soon the brook met something broader, too shallow for a river, too wide for a stream. The path tracked the water until the water was suddenly gone, plunging through an iron grid into a culvert, an arch of brick mounded by earth. Steps climbed the mound, and so did he; and standing there above the sound of water, he was granted his first sight of D’Espérance.

  * * * *

  Never any doubt of what he saw. He knew it in that instant, and his soul sang.

  The house was dark in its valley, built of stone washed dark by rains and rains. Even where the sun touched, it kept its shadow.

  A long front, with the implication of wings turned back behind, though he couldn’t see for certain even from this elevation, with the house full-face and staring him down. A long front and small windows, three storeys and then a mansard roof with dormers; in the centre a small portico sheltering a high door, and he wasn’t sure even the largest of his keys would open such a door. Wasn’t sure that it deserved to.

  No lights, no movement: only dark windows in a dark wall, and the sun striking brightly around it.

  Between himself and the house there were formal gardens wrecked by growth, rampant hedges and choked beds; but the hedges and beds stood only as a frame to water. Long stone-lined pools were cut strict and square at the corners, though they were green and stagnant now and the jutting fountainheads were still; and below the gardens, lapping almost at his feet now lay the deeper, darker waters of a lake. No need for the return journey after all. No need for anything more, perhaps, now that he’d seen the house. He could run down the slope before him, twenty yards at a good flying sprint and he’d be too fast to stop. And so the plunge into cold cold water and the weight of his pack, the saturated blankets, even the keys helping to drag him down...

  But this side of all that water, on the verge of unkept grass between trees and lake stood a building, a small lodge perhaps, though its weight of stone and its leaded dome spoke of higher ambition. Ivy-clad and strange, seemingly unwindowed and halfway at least to a folly, it must look splendid from the house, one last positive touch of man against the dark rise of the wood. And it would be a shame not to have set foot in any part of D’Espérance, all this way for no more than a glimpse; shame too to go on an impulse, on a sudden whim, seizing an unexpected opportunity. No, let it at least be a decision well thought through, weighed carefully and found correct. Nothing hasty, no abrupt leap into glory or oblivion. He needed to be sure of his own motives, to feel the balance of his mind undisturbed; there must be no question but that it was a rational deed, in response to an untenable situation.

  So no, he didn’t take the chance to run. He walked carefully d
own the steep slope and turned to parallel the lake’s edge as soon as the ground was level, skirting the last of the trees, keeping as far from the water as he could. Looking across to the further shore, where the gardens’ gravel walks ended in a stone balustrade and a set of steps leading down into the lake, he saw a man he thought might have been his father. Blindfold and blundering in the bright dry light, the man teetered on the steps’ edge, on the rim of falling; and then there was dazzle burning on the water as a soft breeze rippled the sun, and when his eyes had cleared he could no longer see the man.