The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 16

by Stephen Jones

  She said, “I’ve been having trouble with my car. Is there anyone who could have a look at it for me? I’ve got some money.”

  “Andy’s the mechanic,” he said.

  “Is he here?”

  “He’s never here.”

  “Is it worth me waiting for him? Can I do that?”

  “You can do whatever you want,” and then added, as if it was his all-purpose charm to ward off evil, “I’m just the brewman.” And then he trudged off.

  She went back to the car.

  “I’m fed up of this,” Jack said.

  “I can’t help it, Jack,” Holly said. “Try to understand.”

  “No,” he said, barking it out like a little dog with all the passion and venom he could manage.

  Rather than argue or get angry, Holly got out of the car again to watch for Andy the Mechanic.

  The site wasn’t quite as deserted as it looked, but it took a while to become attuned to it and to pick up the signals; the sound of a door opening and closing somewhere, a glimpse of a figure passing from one building to another.

  She paced a little. She looked toward the motorway. For something to do, she raised the Toyota’s bonnet and took a look at the engine in the vague hope that her car problems might have some blindingly obvious solution. But it looked like engines always did to her, grimy and complex and meaningless. There was a smell as if something had been burning, and when she held her hand out over the block she could feel the heat rising from it. She poked at a couple of the leads, to no effect other than to get her hands dirtier than they already were.

  A voice called out, “Are you looking for someone?”

  A man was walking across the open ground toward her. He was short, dark, powerfully built. He had at least six upper teeth missing on one side, but from the way that he grinned the loss didn’t seem to trouble him.

  “Would you be Andy?” she said.

  “I might.”

  “Then I’m looking for you.”

  She quickly explained her problem in case he started to get the wrong idea, and he moved her out of the way so that he could take a look. It didn’t take him long.

  “Look at your fan belt,” he said. “If your drawers were that slack, they’d be down around your ankles. When that starts to slip, your battery runs down and you run out of power.”

  “Is it hard to fix?”

  “If I said yes, you’d be more impressed,” he said, and it was then that he noticed the two children inside the car. They were staring out at him.

  “Yours?” he said.

  “Yes,” Holly said. “We’ve been to the seaside.”

  He looked at her, and then he looked at the car.

  And then he said, “You take the kids and wait in the brew hut while I have a go at this. Tell Diesel to make you a cup of tea.”

  “Is Diesel the brewman’s name?”

  “It’s what his tea tastes like, as well.”

  The brew hut was the oldest-looking and most battered of the site buildings. It was up on blocks, and reached by three stairs. The floor sagged as they stepped inside. There were about a dozen folding card tables with chairs around them, and a sense of permanent grime everywhere; it was as if engine oil had been ground into the floor, rubbed into the walls, coated onto the windows.

  The brewman was sitting by a plug-in radiator, reading a copy of The Sun. It wasn’t a cold night, but the radiator was turned up high and the air inside the hut was stifling. He looked up as they entered.

  Holly said, “Andy told us to wait in here. Is that all right with you?”

  “Whatever you like,” the brewman said. “I’m Matty.”

  “He said you were called Diesel.”

  Matty’s face fell, and he looked out of the window.

  “The bastard,” he said, and he got up and stamped off.

  Given his mood and the likely state of his crockery, Holly decided not to press him about the tea. She ushered the children onto grimy plastic seats that stood against the wall. On the wall itself was tacked a selection of yellowing newspaper cuttings, all of them showing the debris of spectacular motorway crashes.

  Jack said, “It stinks in here.”

  “Shh,” Holly said.

  “It does.”

  She couldn’t tell him it didn’t, because it did. And she couldn’t agree that it did in case Matty was listening. So she only said, “It won’t be for long.”

  They waited. There was a clock on the wall, but it was wrong. Jack swung his feet, Lizzie stared at the floor. Outside, a massive engine began to rev up somewhere close behind the building, making their chairs vibrate.

  Jack said, “I’m bored.”

  “Play I-spy,” Holly suggested.

  “I’m not playing with him,” Lizzie said. “He can’t spell.”

  Holly said, with an unexpected tightness in her tone, “Then why don’t we all just sit here quietly?”

  There was silence for a while and then Lizzie muttered, rebelliously, “It’s true. He can’t.”

  And Jack agreed with her. “I’ve got a giant brain,” he said, “but I can’t spell.”

  Holly covered her eyes. She wasn’t sure whether she was laughing or crying and the two children, equally uncertain, were watching her closely for clues.

  This night would pass. It would somehow all be fine.

  Keep thinking that, she told herself, and it might even come true.

  “Mum . . .” Lizzie said.

  Holly looked at her and saw the unease and the apprehension in her eyes. She might be sharp, but she was still only twelve years old.

  “When this part’s over,” she said, “what then?”

  She was choosing her words carefully because of Jack, but Holly knew what Lizzie was trying to say.

  “We’ll carry on as normal,” she said.

  “Can we do that?”

  “We’ll have to,” Holly said.

  There was a tap on the window. Andy was standing there outside, raising himself up on tiptoe so that he could look in, and he beckoned to her.

  She went out, and they walked over to the car together. He told her he’d left the keys inside it.

  “Best I can do,” he said. “I’ve tightened your fan belt and cleaned off your plugs. They were blacker than Matty’s fingernails.”

  “Thanks, Andy.”

  “You’ve got a lot of oil down there. I don’t know where it’s coming from. You might need a new gasket.”

  He showed her what he’d done and got her to feel the difference in the fan belt, which she pretended to appreciate. She offered him twenty quid and he took it with no embarrassment. Then she went back for the children.

  The brew hut door was open. Lizzie was alone inside.

  Holly said, “Where’s Jack?”

  Lizzie had slumped down into her coat as if it was a nest, hands in her pockets and legs outstretched, looking at the toes of her shoes as she clacked them together. She said, “He followed you outside.”

  “I didn’t see him.”

  “He wanted to look at the big trucks.”

  Holly went out. Jack hadn’t gone over toward the car, or she’d have seen him. She stood in front of the brew hut and called out his name.

  Nothing.

  Lizzie was in the doorway behind her now.

  “It’s not my fault,” she said defensively.

  Holly went around by the side of the brew hut and found herself in an area lit by the most powerful of the overhead floodlights. Under the lights stood a few parked cars and a variety of dormant machines. She could hear the massive engine whose note had been shaking the brew hut’s foundations, and could tell that it was somewhere close.

  She looked back and saw that Lizzie had followed her some of the way.

  “You look around the buildings,” Holly said. “I’ll look here.”

  She didn’t wait to see how Lizzie responded, but started to make her way through the machine yard. It was like a giant’s bazaar of heavy engineering, the night su
n casting deep, dark shadows under the gear. These were machines for ripping up the land, and they had spikes and claws and teeth on a saurian scale. Encrusted with clay and battered by hard use, they stood like bombed-out tanks.

  She hauled herself up and looked in the cab of a well-rusted bulldozer on tracks. Jack wasn’t in it, but by hanging on she could look out over the yard. Down the next row, a wagon was being inched up onto a flatbed trailer by some driver she couldn’t see. The tyres on the wagon were enormous, and the ramps were bending under its weight.

  She looked all around and called Jack’s name, but she had little chance of being heard. The big engine roared and the great tonnage slowly rolled. In her mind’s eye she saw Jack crushed or falling or struggling to get free of some unexpected snare. She saw gears turning, teeth meshing, pulling him in.

  She called his name again, louder, and then hopped down to continue the search. She stumbled a little when she landed. The ground here was nothing more than churned-up dirt into which stones had been dumped to give it some firmness. It was no playground.

  “Jack!” she called, moving forward.

  As she came around by the bulldozer onto a firmer stretch of concrete road, she saw him. She could see all the way to the perimeter fence, where he was climbing.

  Climbing? What was he doing?

  And then she understood, and started to run.

  It was a storm fence, about eight feet high. Jack was already over the top of it, and climbing down the other side. The fence rocked back and forth under his weight as the concrete posts shifted in their holes, but he clung to it like a bug; its close weave offered ideal purchase for his small feet and fingers.

  Holly stumbled on the rough ground, but caught herself and went on. On the other side of the perimeter fence was an unlit country lane.

  Out on the country lane stood the red coupé with the pop-up headlights.

  “Hey,” she shouted. “Hey, Jack, no!”

  He was descending with his face set in a look of utter concentration. Behind him, the car was making a low purring sound with its engine off but its electric fan sucking in the cool night air. The driver hadn’t stepped out, and she could barely see anything of him. She could only guess that he was watching her.

  Holly reached the fence, looking through it and up at him. “Jack,” she said. “Come down, Jack, please. You can’t go over there. That’s not your daddy. Believe me. There’s no way it could be.”

  But Jack didn’t look at her, and didn’t even show any sign of having heard. He was moving like a monkey. He reached down with his foot, found another space in the diamond pattern, and hooked his scuffed trainer into it before lowering the rest of his weight.

  She could touch his fingers as they hooked through, right in front of her eyes; her breath through the wire could fall onto his face. “Jack,” she said, “no!”

  But he wouldn’t look at her, and although he was only inches away she couldn’t reach him. She was powerless.

  “Jack,” she said, “Look at me, please. Don’t do this. Don’t go to him.”

  She made a move as if to try and catch his hands through the wire, but it was pointless. She couldn’t hold him if she caught him. All she could do was risk hurting him.

  “Lizzie’s looking for you as well,” she pleaded. “Oh, Jack . . .”

  He jumped, and hit the dirt on the far side with a thump. Holly made a leap at the wire and felt the entire fence lean before her, but she didn’t have his agility and couldn’t begin to climb the way that he had.

  He was running for the car, now, and the car’s passenger door was opening to receive him.

  Holly was screaming, although she didn’t immediately realize it. The car door slammed and its laser eyes opened. The engine started, and its nose swung around as it began to turn in the narrow lane.

  Her hands were up at the sides of her head. She’d heard of people tearing at their hair, but she’d always thought it was just an expression. She looked around wildly.

  Then she started to run along the inside of the fence, ahead of the turning car.

  The country lane ran close on the other side. If there was a gap anywhere, she’d get through it. The car wouldn’t pass her. No way was she going to let that happen.

  Here was a gate. It was a back way into the site, little-used. A big double gate, wide enough for a lorry but chained and padlocked in the middle. There was enough play in the chain to make a gap of a foot or so.

  It was a squeeze, but not an impossible one. She came out on the other side and all that she could see were the twin lights, the laser eyes of the beast that she had to impede.

  She put on a burst and dived into its way, sliding to a halt in the middle of the lane and raising both of her hands. When it hit her, she felt nothing other than her own sudden acceleration; no impact, no pain, just the instantaneous switch from rest into motion as her legs were knocked from under her and she was spun down the side of the car.

  Afterwards she’d never know whether she really saw it or only imagined the memory, but Holly went down hard in the wake of the moving car with a mental picture of her son’s blank face only inches away on the other side of the glass.

  She lay there.

  She couldn’t move. She could hear that the car had stopped and she wanted to lift her head to look, but nothing happened. Oh God, she was thinking, I’m paralysed. But then when she made an enormous effort, her hand came up and braced itself against the ground. As she was doing it, she heard a car door opening.

  She wasn’t paralysed, but she’d no strength. When she tried to push down with her hand to raise herself, her arm trembled and nothing happened.

  Someone was walking up behind her.

  Before she could muster the energy to turn and look, strong fingers gripped the back of her head and thrust her face down into the mud. In an instant, she was blinded and choking.

  She found her strength now, all right, but it did her no good as a sudden knee in her back pinned her further to the ground. She struggled and flapped like a fish, but her face stayed under. The blood roared in her ears and lights exploded before her eyes.

  Then in an instant, the pressure was off.

  That first deep breath nearly drowned her on the spot, as she sucked in all the mud that had filled up her mouth. She retched and coughed, blowing it out of her nostrils and heaving up what she’d both swallowed and inhaled.

  She felt a lighter touch on her shoulder and lashed out, only to hear a cry from Lizzie. She was there when Holly’s vision cleared, keeping back and holding her arm where she’d been struck.

  “I’m sorry, mum,” she said.

  Holly stared dumbly for a moment before an understanding started to form. Lizzie was backing toward the waiting car.

  “No, Lizzie!” she said. She tried to rise, but one of her legs wouldn’t support her.

  “I know how you want me to feel about it, but I can’t. I wish I could. I’m sorry. It’s never going to be right after tonight, whatever we do. Ever.”

  Holly made another massive effort and this time made it up and onto her feet, putting all of her weight onto the uninjured leg.

  “Wait,” she managed.

  Lizzie had reached the car.

  “I’m the one that he wants,” she said. “But he’ll take Jack if I don’t go with him.”

  The passenger door popped open about an inch.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said again, and she reached out and opened it all the way.

  Holly wasn’t close enough to see how it worked, but Jack popped out of the vehicle as if propelled on a spring. He landed on both feet, and Lizzie quickly slipped around behind him and into the car.

  The door closed like the door on a well-fitting safe, and the car’s engine started to rev. It was all as swift and as decisive as that.

  Holly started toward them, half-hopping, half-limping, but the car was already moving off and starting to pick up speed.

  “Frank!” she shouted. “You bastard! Give her
back!” and at the sound of her voice, Jack seemed to wake as if from a daze.

  He looked about, as if suddenly remembering something, and spotted those red tail lights receding off into the darkness.

  He gave a strangled cry.

  “Dad!” he called out, and started to run down the lane after the car, slapping down his feet so hard that the ground almost shook.

  Holly hadn’t yet reached him, and her cries couldn’t stop him. Neither of them had any chance of catching the car. But both of them tried.

  She caught up with him a full ten minutes later, still standing on the dark spot where his breath and his hopes had finally given out.

  “He forgot me!” he wailed. Holly dropped to her knees and pulled him to her.

  For once, he let her hold him.

  TANITH LEE

  Israbel

  TANITH LEE LIVES WITH her husband, the artist, photographer and writer John Kaiine, on the south-east coast of England.

  She began writing at the age of nine and published three children’s books with Macmillan in the early 1970s, becoming a full-time author in 1975, when DAW Books published her novel The Birth-grave.

  Lee has now written and published around seventy novels, nine collections and more than 200 short stories, and her work has been translated into sixteen languages. She also scripted two episodes of the cult BBC-TV series Blake’s 7. Her short fiction has twice won the World Fantasy Award and she was awarded the British Fantasy Society’s August Derleth Award in 1980 for her novel Death’s Master.

  Her more recent books include two pirate novels for young adults, Piratica and Piratica II: Return to Parrot Island. Lionwolf: Cast a Bright Shadow and Here in Cold Hell are the first two volumes in an adult fantasy series, while Metallic Love is a sequel to her 1981 novel The Silver Metal Lover. She also has new stories appearing in such magazines and anthologies as Weird Tales, H.P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror, Winter Moon and The Ghost Quartet.

  “The dawn of this story happened at night,” explains the author. “John and I were eating dinner. We often talk about work and ideas at meals. This time he held up a piece of artwork he had that day created.