The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 16

by Stephen Jones

  I bent down to put the cigarette out in the snow. It was extinguished in a hiss that seemed very loud.

  We continued in the direction we’d been heading. We walked maybe another five, six hundred yards.

  It was Henry who stopped.

  Keyed up as we were, Pete and I stopped immediately too. Henry was leaning forward a little, squinting ahead.

  “What?”

  He pointed. Down at the bottom of the rocky valley was a shape. A big shape.

  After a moment I could make out it was a building. Two wooden storeys high, and slanting.

  You saw that kind of thing, sometimes. The sagging remnant of some pioneer’s attempt to claim an area of this wilderness and pretend it could be a home.

  Pete nudged me and pointed in a slightly different direction. There was the remnants of another house further down. A little fancier, with a fallen-down porch.

  And 30 yards further, another: smaller, with a false front.

  “Cool,” Henry said, and briefly I admired him.

  We sidled now, a lot more slowly and heading along the rise instead of down it. Ruined houses look real interesting during the day. At night they feel different, especially when lost high up in the forest. Trees grow too close to them, pressing in. The lack of a road, long overgrown, can make the houses look like they were never built but instead made their own way to this forgotten place, in which you have now disturbed them; they sit at angles which do not seem quite right.

  I was beginning to wonder if maybe we’d done enough, come far enough, and I doubt I was the only one.

  Then we saw the light.

  After Pete asked his question in the bar, there was silence for a moment. Of course we remembered that night. It wasn’t something you’d forget. It was a dumb question unless you were really asking something else, and we both knew Pete wasn’t dumb.

  Behind us, on the other side of the room, came the quiet, reproachful sound of pool balls hitting each other, and then one of them going down a pocket.

  We could hear each other thinking. Thinking it was a cold evening, and there was thick snow on the ground, as there had been on that other night, when we were fifteen. That the rest of the town had pretty much gone to bed. That we could get in Henry’s truck and be at the head of a hiking trail in 20 minutes, even driving drunkard slow.

  I didn’t hear anyone thinking a reason, though. I didn’t hear anyone think why we might do such a thing, or what might happen.

  By the time Pete had finished his cigarette our glasses were empty. We put on our coats and left and crunched across the lot to the truck.

  Back then, on that long-ago night, suddenly my heart hadn’t seemed to be beating at all. When we saw the light in the second house, a faint and curdled glow in one of the downstairs windows, my whole body suddenly felt light and insubstantial.

  One of us tried to speak. It came out like a dry click. I realized there was a light in the other house too, faint and golden. Had I missed it before, or had it just come on?

  I took a step backwards. The forest was silent but for the sound of my friends breathing.

  “Oh, no,” Pete said. He started moving backwards, stumbling. Then I saw it too.

  A figure, standing in front of the first house.

  It was tall and slim, like a rake’s shadow. It was 100 yards away but still it seemed as though you could make out an oval shape on its shoulders, the colour of milk diluted with water. It was looking in our direction.

  Then another was standing near the other house.

  No, two.

  Henry moaned softly, we three boys turned as one, and I have never run like that before or since.

  The first 10 yards were fast but then the slope cut in and our feet slipped, and we were down on hands half the time, scrabbling and pulling – every muscle working together in a headlong attempt to be somewhere else.

  I heard a crash behind and flicked my head to see Pete had gone down hard, banging his knee, falling on his side.

  Henry kept on going but I made myself turn around to grab Pete’s hand, not really helping but just pulling, trying to yank him back to his feet or at least away.

  Over his shoulder I glimpsed the valley below and I saw the figures were down at the bottom of the rise, speeding our way in jerky blurred-black movements, like half-seen spiders darting across an icy window pane.

  Pete’s face jerked up and I saw there what I felt in myself, and it was not a cold fear but a hot one, a red-hot meltdown as if you were going to rattle and break apart.

  Then he was on his feet again, moving past me, and I followed on after him towards the disappearing shape of Henry’s back. It seemed so much further than we’d walked. It was uphill and the trees no longer formed a path and even the wind seemed to be pushing us back.

  We caught up with Henry and passed him, streaking up the last 100 yards towards the fence. None of us turned around. You didn’t have to. You could feel them coming, like rocks thrown at your head, rocks glimpsed at the last minute when there is time to flinch but not to turn.

  I was sprinting straight at the fence when Henry called out. I was going too fast and didn’t want to know what his problem was. I leapt up at the wire.

  It was like a truck hit me from the side.

  I crashed to the ground fizzing, arms sparking and with no idea which way was up. Then two pairs of hands were on me, pulling at my coat.

  I thought the fingers would be long and pale and strong but when I realized it was my friends and they were pulling me along from the wrong section of the fence, dragging me to the side, when they could have just left me where I fell and made their own escape.

  The three of us jumped up at the wire at once, scrabbling like monkeys, stretching out for the top. I rolled over wildly, grunting as I scored deep scratches across my back that would earn me a long, hard look from my mother when she happened to glimpse them a week later.

  We landed heavily on the other side, still moving forward, having realized that we’d just given away the location of a portion of dead fence.

  But now we had to look back, and what I saw – though my head was still vibrating from the shock I’d received, so I cannot swear to it – was at least three, maybe five, figures on the other side of the fence. Not right up against it, but a few yards back.

  Black hair was whipped up around their faces, and they looked like absences ill-lit.

  Then they were gone.

  We moved fast. We didn’t know why they’d stopped, but we didn’t hang around. We didn’t stick too close to the fence either, in case they changed their minds.

  We half-walked, half-ran, and at first we were quiet but as we got further away, and nothing came after us, we began to laugh and then to shout, punching the air, boys who had come triumphantly out the other side.

  The forest felt like some huge football field, applauding its heroes with whispering leaves.

  We got back to town a little after two in the morning. We walked down the middle of the deserted main street, slowly, untouchable, knowing the world had changed: that we were not the boys who had started the evening, but men, and that the stars were there to be touched.

  That was then.

  As older men we stood together at the fence for a long time, recalling that night.

  Parts of it are fuzzy now, of course, and it comes down to snapshots: Pete’s terrified face when he slipped, the first glimpse of light at the houses, Henry’s shout as he tried to warn me, narrow faces the colour of moonlight. They most likely remembered other things, defined that night in different ways and were the centre of their own recollections. As I looked now through the fence at the other forest I was thinking how long a decade had seemed back then, and how you could learn that it was no time at all.

  Henry stepped away first. I wasn’t far behind. Pete stayed a moment longer, then took a couple of steps back. Nobody said anything. We just looked at the fence a little longer, and then we turned and walked away.

  Took us 40 minute
s to get back to the truck.

  The next Thursday Henry couldn’t make it, so it was just me and Pete at the pool table. Late in the evening, with many beers drunk, I mentioned the fence.

  Not looking at me, chalking his cue, Pete said that if Henry hadn’t stepped back when he did, he’d have climbed it.

  “And gone over?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  This was bullshit, and I knew it. “Really?”

  There was a pause. “No,” he said, eventually, and I wished I hadn’t asked the second time. I could have left him with something, left us with it. Calling an ass cute isn’t much, but it’s better than just coming right out and admitting you’ll never cup it in your hand.

  The next week it was the three of us again, and our walk in the woods wasn’t even mentioned. We’ve never brought it up since, and we can’t talk about the first time any more either. We killed it. I think about it sometimes, though. I know I could go out walking there myself some night, and there have been slow afternoons and dry, sleepless small hours when I think I might do it: when I tell myself such a thing isn’t impossible now, that I am still who I once was. But I have learned a little since I was fifteen, and in the end I just go smoke another cigarette on the porch, or out back of the diner, because in my heart of hearts I know that was then, and this is now.

  TIM LEBBON

  Remnants

  TIM LEBBON IS THE winner of two British Fantasy Awards, a Bram Stoker Award and a Tombstone Award. His novels include Face, The Nature of Balance, Mesmer, Hush (with Gavin Williams), Until She Sleeps, Desolation and Berserk.

  White, Naming of Parts, Changing of Faces, Exorcising Angels (with Simon Clark), Dead Man’s Hand and Pieces of Hate are separately published novellas, and his short fiction is collected in Fears Unnamed, As the Sun Goes Down and White and Other Tales of Ruin.

  Forthcoming titles include The Dead of Night: Dusk and Dawn, Hellboy: The New Ark, and more books with Cemetery Dance, Night Shade Books and Necessary Evil Press, amongst other imprints.

  “When I wrote ‘Remnants’ I’d just come off a bit of an Algernon Blackwood reading frenzy,” Lebbon reveals. “I love Blackwood’s wide range of themes, his fearlessness, and I also like the classic idea of a stranger being drawn into a story from outside: the protagonist receiving a telegram from a long-lost friend, saying ‘Come quickly! Something terrible has happened!’

  “I suppose there’s an element of autobiography here as well (isn’t there always?), in that sometimes I wish I was the one scampering across deserts, through mountain ranges, delving beneath the surface of things . . . and in real life, instead of through my writing.

  “But then I get all sensible and middle-aged, and I realize that doing it this way is far safer, less wearing on the joints, and the kettle’s never far away.”

  SCOTT ALWAYS LOVED DIGGING down to history. When we were nine years old we would spend time in the local woods, me climbing trees and searching for birds’ nests and damming the local stream, Scott excavating through the accumulated carpet of leaves and other forest debris in his search for hidden things. Usually he found nothing but mud, muck and crawling things, but on those rare occasions when he went home happy instead of dejected, he would be carrying something of interest. A small skeleton once, easily identifiable were we to ask our parents, though we did not because we preferred the mystery. He also found a buried box, about the size of a house brick, and we undertook to smash the lock with a rock. Those few seconds were a magical time – the impact of stone on metal reverberating through the woods, the endless possibilities rich and coloured by our childish imaginations – and even when the lid flipped open to reveal nothing but rust, we weren’t truly disappointed. It was empty of treasure or maps or hidden truths, but the box itself was still there, and that was good enough for us. Scott walked home that day happier than I had ever seen him, the box tucked beneath one arm, his small trowel dirtying his trousers where it protruded from a pocket. He was beaming. “There’s always something there,” he said. “Everyone reckons that what we see is it. They forget about all the buried stuff.”

  His progression from school, to university, to a career in archaeology was no surprise to anyone. We kept in touch, even though my work took me on a vastly different route. Scott would disappear from my life for years on end, and then I would receive an e-mail or letter out of the blue, inviting me to join him in Bolivia or Uzbekistan or Taiwan. More often than not I would have to decline, but several times a rush of excitement grabbed me. It was often his young, enthusiastic face I thought of as I sat there in my office at home, dreaming, persuading myself that I should go. The wonder in his eyes. The knowledge that when I saw him again, that wonder would still be there.

  I was a jealous friend. Jealous when we were nine, and jealous when we were thirty-nine. Scott had always known what he wanted from life, and he pursued it with vigour. I lived my life unfulfilled, and worse, felt that I had no potential to fulfil.

  So I would talk to my wife and children and, with their blessing, jet off to some far-flung corner of the world to spend two weeks in a tent with my old friend. He never changed, only became fuller. Each time I saw him he seemed more alive and I felt more dead, ground down by life and work, impulsiveness slaughtered by necessity. And each time, Scott seemed to be digging much deeper than even he knew. It was not only lost things he was looking for, but things unknown, and even things that had never been. He was looking past history and into the abyss of unadulterated truth.

  He sometimes told tell me what he had unearthed. I was no longer a child, so I often found it difficult to believe, a leap of imagination that I was not able to make. He would smile and shake his head, and that simple gesture hurt me to the core. He was so used to miracles.

  His final calling came in a series of brief, enigmatic e-mails.

  I’ve found a city that no one has dreamed of in centuries, the first said. I smiled at the words on the screen, my heart quickening in unconscious sympathy with the excitement bleeding from them. I imagined Scott’s eyes wide and child-like in their amazement.

  The following night: it must be a city of ghosts. A thrill went through me. Scott could imbue text on a screen with so much emotion and feeling . . . but then I knew that my memories of him were providing that effect. He gave me sterile, blank words, and I fleshed them out with his passion.

  Matthew is here.

  Matthew was Scott’s son. Scott had had a brief, passionate affair when he was twenty, and six years later he learned from his ex-lover that he had a child. She only told him because the boy was dying of leukaemia.

  This wasn’t even funny.

  What the hell are you talking about? I mailed back, angry and disturbed at the same time. Scott was a dreamer, a thinker, someone whose imagination led him places not only unheard of, but long forgotten. I had never thought of him as a fool.

  Come to me, Peter, Scott mailed back. Please. It was the ‘please’ that convinced me I had to go. I was certain that Scott needed my help, though perhaps not in the way he believed. Perhaps, somewhere deep inside me where I did not care to look, there was a smugness. Here was the great adventurer – glamorous, passionate, so rich in intellect and enthusiasm – asking for my help. Not outright, but I could read between his digital lines, perceive a desperation that I had never expected to find. A desperation, and perhaps a fear. Up until now he had always invited my presence, not requested it.

  Matthew is here, he had said.

  What could that mean?

  I stood from my computer desk after receiving that last message and walked around my home. My wife was at work, my two children in school, and I should have been working through some submissions. But Scott’s words had fired my comatose imagination, their mystery setting a fire in the dried out landscape of my mind and struggling to light its shadowed corners. I walked from room to room, bathing in the history of my life as it lay revealed in photographs. Here was Janine and me standing by Victoria Falls, our glasses splashed wi
th spray, wide smiles as magical as upside-down rainbows. And here, the two of us in hospital with our daughter a bloody bundle at her breast, suckling her way into the world. Another picture sat on the dresser in the hallway showing us on our honeymoon, sheltering beneath a heavy palm tree while a tropical storm thundered its ways across the small island. Neither of us could remember who had taken the photo.

  There was an old shelf of books in the living room, various first editions I had collected over the years. I liked to think of myself as something of a detective, hauling out my guide to British bookshops every time we found ourselves in a strange town or city, exploring a few here and there, searching old cobwebbed shelves and delving deep into overflowing bargain bins in my search for that elusive rare time. My collection filled one glass-fronted shelf and was worth over ten thousand pounds.

  Worthless. Meaningless. If this was all I had to show for a life . . .

  A dried nut, as large as my fist, sat on the fireplace. I had climbed a tree for it in Australia, supposedly braving spiders and snakes to grab a piece of that country for myself. Janine had been watching, camera at the ready in case I slipped and fell. I had been in no danger at all.

  I tried to think of the most daring thing I had ever done. I had abseiled over 300 feet down the side of a cliff. It was raining, the rock was slippery and, in places, loose. I had a safety line attached, and an expert climber stood on top of the cliff slowly feeding me rope. I had raised £500 for charity. At the time, I had felt on the edge.

  Scott once showed me his collection of scars. Shark off the coast of South Africa, snake in Paraguay, a goring from running with the bulls in Spain, a bullet in his hip from a brush with Chinese soldiers in Tibet, the ragged wound in his throat where he had given himself a tracheotomy after being stung by a deadly scorpion, airways closing, life fading away in his poisoned blood, his knife so sharp and sure. He had a tattoo on one shoulder-blade, put there by an old woman in Haiti who claimed it would keep him alive when death came knocking. On the other shoulder, a gypsy woman in Ireland had painted a bird, hugely feathered and colourful, the carrier of Scott’s soul. The ink had never faded, and sometimes it still looked wet. Scott could not explain that, but it did not concern him. He simply accepted it. He had a wooden mask dating from one of the great Egyptian Dynasties, a Roman soldier’s spear-tip found in Jerusalem and dating from around the time of Christ’s crucifixion, and around his neck hung a charm, diamond inset in white gold, the heart of the diamond impossibly black with the sealed blood of a saint.