The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 16

by Stephen Jones

  LOL. How about you?”

  She agonizes over what to say next, feeling both curiosity and dread at continuing the conversation. She’s just about to type “I’m okay,” when her monitor goes dark and a voice from behind her says, “It’s better if we talk in person. I was never a good typist.”

  And there is Sheldon Perricone, whom she had loved and left so long ago it seems like another life. She hadn’t meant to be cruel. She never meant to be cruel. With any of them. Human interaction is not an exact science, so there’s bound to be mistakes along the way.

  Sheldon stands naked in the middle of a plant stand. Philodendron leaves surround his abdomen like a tutu. She sees straight through his chest, though his face seems more solid. His eyes, no longer an intense ocean blue shade, have dulled to grey, with milky quartz crystals as their centres. He’s watching her, waiting.

  “You’re forgetting something,” he says, and old memories wash over her. He had hinted of a plan to propose one morning and at night, instead of meeting him for dinner, she had gone out drinking, met someone new, enjoyed a very fun, very sexy one-night stand with a stranger. She remembers telling Sheldon it was over, remembers a face that grew angry, then despondent, remembers watching him fade away before her eyes. It was horrible. Her guilt has come and gone, but at the moment, the feeling pulses strong. “Sorry,” she says. “I guess I wasn’t very nice.”

  His expression is sorrowful and vast; she’s first to break away from eye contact.

  “Should I say more?” she asks.

  “Mistakes were made. It won’t help to talk about the past.”

  “I was young.”

  “Don’t make excuses,” Sheldon says. “I was young, too. I forgive you. Just don’t make excuses.”

  She wills herself to be quiet, sensing that she seeks something from him, something she cannot fairly ask. She would like to be pardoned for all mistakes, not just those mistakes she made with Sheldon. She doesn’t want to be a bad person. It’s just that being a good one is too costly. Sheldon, for example. What did being good buy him? He lost. “You have to move on,” she says. It’s a vacuous statement, one she immediately regrets. “How have you been?” she asks, though the answer is obvious.

  “You’ve met Inez, I hear,” he says. “I love her very much. I think she’s my soul mate.”

  Her jaw drops, and while she’s tempted to contradict him, she cannot believe what he has said. Does true love only happen after you’re dead?

  “No,” he says, reading her thoughts. “Not always. We find love where we can. I just wanted to warn you. Asher loves you. Don’t mess up. Not everyone gets another chance.”

  She’s recovered her cynicism. “Are you afraid I’ll dump Asher? Is he that much of a threat?” she asks.

  “You’ve got it all wrong,” he says. “You’re worrying about the wrong things.” He disappears without so much as a subtle whoosh.

  On the bus ride home from work a man across the aisle gives her a look that could be interpreted as simple friendliness, or could be interpreted as an invitation. Isn’t he worried about what she’ll do to him if she gets the chance? Is the urge to pair up so strong it would make a reasonable person risk his life? She has power over men, something they all recognize. It never stops them. It doesn’t stop her, either. Everyone thinks they are in control the situation.

  The man stands up and moves across to sit beside her. “Hey,” he says.

  “Do you want to die?” she asks and flashes a look she hopes signifies contempt. She stares ahead, refusing to meet the stranger’s glance.

  She notices she’s fidgeting. The ghosts of her past have unnerved her. She accidentally skips her stop and has to backtrack several blocks. Breaking up is hard to do, though she is better at it than most. But she really does love Asher. She’s sure he loves her, though if she’s wrong, it will be the end of one or the other. She wants more than anything to be right.

  Later, she’ll meet Asher at her place to watch Survivor, which now holds an especially ironic twist. She’s running late enough there will barely be time to call for pizza, let alone shave and straighten up. No choice but to settle for a spit bath and quick rubdown with a towel. She has already picked out a silk shirt to match her jeans. The bell chimes, signalling Asher has arrived.

  “Coming,” she yells, wishing she’d had time to change her bedding. Her sheets are old and threadbare, a suddenly significant fact. She can’t ignore all the ghosts who have slept beside her in her bed. Some part of them still lingers in her life. They get in her way, make it difficult for her to fully commit to love.

  She sets her towel on the bed and pulls up her panties and jeans, dabs Must de Carrier perfume at her pulse points, and wonders if it’s worth the effort to wear heels that will come off the second she sits on the couch. She picks up the shirt, no bra. The doorbell rings again.

  From behind her, she hears conspiring whispers. She turns around. Lying on their backs, smoking cigarettes, pale and naked, are three gossamer men she once thought she loved: Lenny, Sheldon, and a one-night stand whose name is hidden just a bit lower than the tip of her tongue. The worn sheet covers the lumps of their genitals.

  Terrific. Her ghosts have hard-ons.

  “Hey there,” says Lenny. When he exhales, his smoke has more substance than does he. He points to her shirt and moves his fingers in increasingly small circles. Her silk shirt flies up from her side and hangs fluttering in the air like a fabric kite.

  “Come sit beside me,” says Sheldon with a tap on the sheet. “Plenty of room,” he says. “I could use some company.” When he nudges the pillow his elbow passes straight through it.

  “You were something,” says the one-night stand. “But you said you’d call. Why didn’t you call?”

  They mean to scare her. But they are dead and she’s alive. The scariest thing that could happen has already happened, to them. “What do you want?” she asks. “It’s over. I won.” It sounds harsh when she says it straight out, yet true.

  Her ghosts smile with hollow lips. They act as if they don’t believe she’s the victor.

  Sheldon blows her a smoke kiss. “It’s not over ’til it’s over.” The room grows ominously cold.

  There’s a knocking at the door. In the distance, Asher shouts her name. He’s a punctual man who expects no less from the woman he dates.

  She checks her watch. “This has been fun but I gotta go.”

  “Stay,” says Lenny, his cold stare pricking like nettles.

  She stands up, feeling shaky, says, “Go away!”

  “Make us,” says Sheldon.

  They think she’s to blame, but she didn’t make up the rules. They knew what they were getting into when they hooked up with her. She tried to love them. It just wasn’t meant to be. She wasn’t ready. That’s not the kind of thing you know until it happens. She snaps her towel and the spectres disappear one by one, pop back up, and disappear again. Flustered, she throws her shoe. It passes through Lenny and bangs against the wall.

  “Come back with us,” says the one whose name she has forgotten.

  “Too late,” she says.

  Lenny sniffles. “You sure know how to hurt a guy’s feelings.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” she says and pulls the old sheet from the bed to wrap around her shoulders. She styles the sheet over her head and looks out at a room that is daytime foggy, with just enough light peeking through the blinds that her furniture looks like boxes. Her hands appear almost transparent. A creepy effect, but one that makes her laugh. Who says that being a ghost isn’t fun? She rushes from the room, toward the front door.

  She hears them rummaging through her things, hears their footsteps follow her into the living room. They make the lights dance and topple books from the shelves, but their efforts fall short. She’s made up her mind to forget them. They can’t touch her. “It’s too late,” she says. She says it again, louder. Shadows appear through the fabric of her sheet. The shadows lengthen and twist l
ike jungle vines. She trips on something she cannot quite see and pitches forward. “You can’t get me,” she says. She’s stronger than they are; she’s stronger than any of them. She’s proved that by surviving this long.

  Still, her pulse races.

  She anticipates what will happen when she opens the door. Asher will smile when she answers, when he sees his lovely, ghostly girl, hidden beneath her sheet. He’ll pull away the fabric, notice she isn’t wearing a shirt. They’ll make love on the carpet. Sex, when it’s good, makes her forget about the problematic things, like love. She’s afraid of love but with good reason. Loving can be dangerous. Is it really worth the risk? Fear is an icy river coursing through her veins. Fear is a dust devil in her throat that makes her cough and choke for air. Fear is the stabbing pain in the gut that comes from uncertainty. Marietta is afraid because she cannot know if it’s worth the risk until too late.

  The ghosts laugh and groan. Their voices strangle and then sputter out like a fire doused with sand. When she turns the ghosts are faint ripples. Their steps slow, come to a halt. Their rustling movements fade to silence. As suddenly as they appeared, their spirits vanish.

  She’s won again. It should feel good, but it doesn’t.

  Knocking.

  Asher waits for her to let him in.

  She can barely make out the frame of the door through the worn sheet. She stumbles forward, twists the lock open, pulls back the door. A dark form wavers on the other side of the threshold.

  Relief floods through her as she recognizes him. She hesitates before speaking. “Hey,” she says.

  “Hey,” he answers. Once he steps inside he winds his arms around her. The door closes softly behind him. “Missed you,” he says. There’s a slight warble to his voice, like he’s worried. He holds her so tight it’s difficult to breathe. He nuzzles her neck through the sheet, breathing in the sweet scent of her laundry soap, her spicy perfume, the salty fragrance of her skin. He’s told her how much he adores these things. “I love you,” he says. He waits for her response.

  It would be easy to comfort him, to say that she loves him. It would be easy to lose herself in love. Because she does love him. And that terrifies her. She wants to tell him, but she can’t make her mouth form the words. It’s too dangerous to admit how she feels. She can’t do it.

  He brushes her lips with his.

  She pulls away from his kiss. “I’m sorry,” she says.

  His arms stiffen. He lifts the sheet from her face and stares into her eyes. His complexion has the clarity of old bath water. His effect is flat. “Why?” he asks.

  “Asher,” she says. She doesn’t want to explain. She leans her weight into him, pressing her breasts flat against his chest, unable to feel the thrum of his heartbeat through her skin. A slow chill trickles like a tear along her spine. “Sorry,” she says. “I really tried.”

  “Congratulations. You won.”

  “I didn’t think this would happen,” she tells him, but that’s not exactly true. She suspected it would end this way. It always does. She feels bereft, alone, empty. For the first time in her life, she understands love, how it is best defined by loss, by what is missing, not by the transience of joy.

  “It hurts,” Asher says.

  She holds him tight, not to comfort him but more to hold her own feelings of regret. In the end, he slips through her grasp and floats upward, to a place where love has no boundaries, where it floats like the memory of artefacts trapped in amber.

  “I love you,” she says, too late for him to hear.

  L.H. MAYNARD & M.P.N. SIMS

  Flour White and Spindle Thin

  LEN MAYNARD AND MICK SIMS have written many books in the supernatural genre, and edited several more, as well as having numerous stories published in a variety of anthologies and magazines.

  Their collections include Shadows at Midnight (1979, revised and enlarged 1999), Echoes of Darkness, Incantations, Falling Into Heaven, the forthcoming When Darkness Answers, and two retrospective collections of their stories, essays and interviews: The Secret Geography of Nightmare and Selling Dark Miracles.

  Their novellas Moths, The Hidden Language of Demons and The Seminar have been published separately while, as editors, they have worked on seven Darkness Rising anthologies and co-edited and published F20 with The British Fantasy Society. As editors/publishers they also ran Enigmatic Press in the UK, which produced Enigmatic Tales, amongst other titles.

  According to Maynard and Sims: “ ‘Flour White and Spindle Thin’ was written on a palm-held organizer, during a few train journeys between Letchworth Garden City and Kings Cross, London. Revisions were made in a pub in Bishops Stortford, during possibly three pints of IPA bitter.

  “The theme of a reluctantly childless marriage is a personal one we have both experienced.”

  DAWN THE COLOUR OF honey rose slowly over the verdant expanse of Flatland Marsh. Tom Henderson breathed in the crisp morning air, pulled a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one, sucking in the tobacco smoke and rolling it around his mouth before drawing it deeply into his lungs. His first morning in his new job of marsh-warden and already he was grateful for his redundancy from the electronics company. The redundancy had given him an opportunity to reassess his life. With his wife Louise making enough money from book illustrating to cover most of their needs, his role as breadwinner had become more and more superfluous. It was time for a complete break, and he’d grabbed this chance to escape the rat race with both hands. Now he was glad he had done so.

  He surveyed the landscape, taking in the rough tussocks of scrubby grass and the torpid pools of water that harboured all manner of wildlife. To the west were outcrops of granite, dark soldiers standing guard over the marsh; to the east the town of Risley. And beyond the marsh, the cold grey waters of the North Sea, separated from the land by mud flats.

  He ground the cigarette under the thick rubber sole of his boot and headed back. The house that came with the job was nothing grand, no more than a two bedroomed cottage sitting in half an acre of land. There was a garden, an orchard and a large ornamental pond, but the garden was unkempt and running to weed, the orchard just a handful of diseased apple trees, with a couple of pears to give variety, and the pond was choked with weed and harboured undernourished frogs and newts, the fish having long died off. His predecessor obviously had no time for maintenance, either that or couldn’t be bothered, and the decor in the house mirrored the sad state of the garden with peeling wallpaper, chipped and browning paintwork, and the dishevelled feel of an old man long since past his prime.

  Louise saw the place as a challenge and had set about stripping walls and repainting doorways with all the passion of a zealot. She’d always supported him, always been there to bolster his confidence, and to embrace his sometimes hare-brained schemes, and he loved her for it.

  As he approached the house through the orchard, he picked up a windfall apple from the ground beneath one of the stunted trees, rubbed it on his jacket until the skin shone, then bit into it, spitting the flesh out quickly as sour juice filled his mouth. He tossed the apple away with a grimace. Perhaps he could use them to make cider. As he passed the large weather-beaten shed that occupied space to the right of the pond he noticed the door was slightly ajar. He could see the padlock that once secured it lying on the grass, the hasp hanging loose from the door.

  Inside the shed everything seemed much as it had the day before when he’d been looking for some shears. Nothing appeared to have been stolen, but there was something different about the place. In the corner a muddy tarpaulin was wrapped around a sleeping form.

  He approached silently, just getting a glimpse of a head poking out from under the tarpaulin. The sleeping figure was a young boy, who looked no more than twelve years old, with pale skin and a shock of white-blond hair. The tarpaulin rose and fell gently with the boy’s breathing, but other than that there was no movement.

  A sudden gust of wind caught the door and slammed it into the frame, ma
king Tom jump. He spun around at the noise, caught a small tower of terracotta pots on the shelf with his arm and sent them crashing to the floor. When he looked back the boy was awake and on his feet, staring at him wildly.

  He was tall for his age, almost as tall as Tom, and was dressed in clothes that were nothing more than rags. His feet were bare, scratched and muddy, the toenails filthy and unclipped. The pale hair flopped over a face as white as flour, and the boy’s limbs were spindle thin, looking as if they might snap at the slightest touch. Obviously malnourished and uncared for the boy presented a sorry sight. He regarded Tom with frightened eyes, looking past him at the door and his means of escape.

  “It’s all right,” Tom said. “I won’t hurt you.”

  Still badly frightened, the boy cocked his head to one side at the sound of Tom’s voice, puzzlement jostling with fear in his eyes, almost as if he’d never heard a human voice before, and was trying to ascertain what the strange sound was.

  Tom tried again. “What’s your name?” he said, and took a step towards him.

  The boy bared a row of brilliantly white teeth and growled deep in his throat, and then, with a movement so quick it took Tom completely by surprise, darted past him. Tom reached out and caught an arm, his fingers encircling thin flesh and bone. The boy ducked his head and bit Tom’s exposed wrist, the teeth cutting through the soft skin. Tom imagined them grinding against his bones. He cried out and swore, pulling his arm away and clutching it to his chest.

  The boy crashed through the door, sending it careening back against the shed wall. Tom screwed his eyes tight with the pain from his wrist and tried to follow, but his foot rolled over one of the fallen pots and he stumbled, falling down, one knee taking his full weight and sending fresh paroxysms of pain lancing through his body.

  By the time he got to his feet and stumbled outside, the boy was nothing but a pale shape disappearing through the trees towards the marsh. Tom rubbed at his bruised knee and limped back to the house.