The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 20

by Stephen Jones (ed. )

  “How are things going?” I said. “You seem pretty busy.”

  He shrugged and wouldn’t look at me. “I’ve been writing,” he said, “but when I get back and look at the pages, I don’t remember putting down what I see there, and what I see scares me.”

  “What do they have you doing in the office there?” I was curious; there was no mixing between the blue- and white-collar folks at the yard.

  “I print reports and collate them, and compare long lists of figures with other long lists, but listen to this, after I get far enough down the lists they stop being numbers and they start being other kinds of marks, things I’ve never seen before. Also, I write letters for some of the executives. I wrote down the names of some of the places they were being sent to, places I never heard of, but when I looked them up later I could never find any of them.” His face looked clammy and pale when he was telling me this.

  “You made an appointment to see a doctor about those headaches yet? I know one in town’d see you.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think this has anything to do with those headaches.”

  “Still.” I had a feeling Gary’d come to us because he was at the end of his rope, that it had been more than headaches and fear of skyrocketing medical bills that had driven him. I didn’t know how to ask him if he had any money at all, but I didn’t need to; knowing Gary, he’d have offered to pay us for room and board if he’d been able.

  “Listen, Neil, I got to ask you something that sounds crazy. Do you ever think maybe you wind up in a place and everything in your life has been about moving you to that moment, preparing you for something momentous even? Like your life’s work?”

  “I hope you’re not talking about Cold Rest. Anything moving you toward something here can’t be good.”

  “Why’d you stay?”

  “Why do people stay anywhere? My family’s here.”

  “Why do they stay?”

  They don’t, I wanted to say, but I couldn’t think that way. Emma would come back to us. It was simply not possible to acknowledge any other outcome. “It’s different for folks born here.”

  Gary put his hand out to touch the piece I was working on. “Careful,” I said, “wet paint,” but wet paint or no, I didn’t want anyone touching those structures but me.

  “What are they?”

  “Instruments,” I said. “Instruments for the summoning of dead races.”

  “The hell’s that supposed to mean? That sounds fucked up.”

  “It came to me. In a dream. I thought about trying to put on some kind of show, you know, like a real artist, and I pictured that title printed up on little cards and hanging above them.”

  “I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”

  “In a way, I don’t either. Anyway, I’d have to hold it out here in the shop. Cold Rest isn’t much for art exhibitions.”

  Gary reached in his shirt pocket and took out a pack of cigarettes.

  “I thought you quit.”

  “I did.” He lit one, took a long drag, staring off into the woods, and said, “I think we ought to go look for Emma.”

  “Where would we start?”

  “You don’t want her to come back here, do you?”

  I said, “I miss her so much sometimes I can’t breathe.”

  Gary watched me for a while. “Over at the yard, Neil, who runs that place?”

  “Nowadays,” I said, “Bree Cold and her brother Ambrose. He’s kind of a half-wit, though. The Colds always ran it. Town wouldn’t be here without the company. They came here from – well, hell, nobody knows where, but they started it up during the Depression, and people came from all over that couldn’t get work anywhere else.”

  “What goes on there? What are y’all digging out of the ground all day?”

  “What are you pushing papers round the office for?”

  Gary finished his cigarette and lit another one off that. “I don’t know,” he said. “I got some ideas. I think it’s time I cut my losses and hit the road, but there’s something I haven’t told you and Sarah.”

  “You don’t owe us any explanations.”

  “That last book, though, it sort of tanked. They’ve been doing that for a while, actually.”

  “Well.” I put down my paintbrush. I wondered if he was going to try to borrow some money; we didn’t have anything to give him. “It’s not all bad here. Sarah says at least in Cold Rest we can get at the edges of something miraculous.” The price of living is dying, Sarah had told me, and even when Cold Rest has swallowed up the last of you whole you know you’ve been in the presence of something divine.

  “Something miraculous,” Gary said. “Is that how she sees it?”

  Emma called us last night.

  Her voice sounded so far away on the telephone. Sarah started crying. She asked Emma if she needed anything, if we could send her money, if there was anything at all she’d let us do. Emma said no. She just wanted to let us know she was all right.

  “Baby, sooner or later you’ll have to come home,” Sarah said, but Emma had already hung up.

  I couldn’t sleep after that; I’d be dropping off and I’d think I heard her voice. Then a storm moved over us, thunder and lightning and wind to wake the dead. I got up and prowled around for a while, looking out the windows like I was waiting for something, and finally I braved the torrent of rain to make a sprint out to my workshop. I tried to work on a new piece. Sarah had stopped going out there at all. She said it upset her stomach to see the things I was making nowadays. She said she couldn’t even look at them, that she had to look around them, because they just seemed like objects gone wrong somehow.

  It occurred to me while I was out there hammering bits of bone I’d salvaged from carcasses of deer and dead birds – filthy work – that I could do the kind of thing a decent man would never do. I could leave. I could just disappear and put Cold Rest behind me. I could make the last twenty years of my life vanish just like that. Start anew. I was still young enough to have another family even.

  At the same time I had a funny feeling I’d missed the chance to do anything like that, that whatever was set in motion couldn’t be stopped any longer.

  We have always known in Cold Rest that we were waiting on something. We didn’t know what, or if we’d see it in our lifetimes, but without ever talking about it among ourselves we all knew we were preparing for something bigger than any of us could conceive.

  There is not much of a social life in Cold Rest except among the teenagers. Sarah and I had never had any real friends. I wondered what kind of devices other people were constructing behind the walls of their homes. I wondered what kind of poems Sarah was writing that she wasn’t showing to me.

  Gary found me in my workshop just as dawn was breaking. The storm had blown over but the sky had a tattered look about.

  “I got the truck all loaded,” he said. “I’m taking off. Sure you don’t want to join me?”

  I said, “I don’t think it would do me any good.” And, “What about your headaches?”

  His eyes, I realized with a shock, were bright with tears. “I tell you,” he said. “I’ve been scared shitless all along it’s a brain tumour. I think something’s bad wrong. I just want to get somewhere bright and warm. Thinking of heading down to Tybee Island. Remember, when we were kids?”

  Laughing like fools splashing into waves big as houses. Crab legs at the restaurant with the red and white checkered oilcloth where you threw the shells into a hole in the middle of the table. The 178 steps to the top of the old lighthouse and the rumours of pirate gold.

  I had a couple of twenties on me, but he wouldn’t take them. “I just want to sit on the beach and take it all in,” he said. “I don’t think I’ll need that.”

  “For gas money, then,” I said. It seemed important that I try to do something for him. I watched him leave, his taillights disappearing down the driveway, and then I turned back to my sculptures. In the gathering morning light they glowed and seemed to
sing to me.

  Sarah was fixing breakfast when I went in, pancakes and sausage. “Gary left,” she said, not a question. I nodded anyway and helped myself to some coffee. The clock above the sink that played Westminster chimes on the hour struck, and went on striking, and both of us counting and trying to look like we weren’t. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen.

  “Goodness, that was strange,” Sarah said when it finished, with a nervous laugh.

  I have never tasted a meal less than I did that breakfast.

  I looked out the window toward my workshop, and I kept seeing things. Holes in my vision like Sarah describes when she gets one of her migraines, only my head felt fine. I think I said I better head on to work. Sarah looked anxious and said, did I have to go?

  Once I turned onto the main road through town I saw I might not get far. The storm had been worse up that way; tree limbs torn and blown into the road, pieces of asphalt chunked into rubble like there’d been an earthquake. It was still passable, barely, but I couldn’t see any reason to pass. I turned around and headed back home.

  Only now I’m here and Sarah’s gone. I’ve called her name, and I’ve gone looking for her, and her cup of coffee is half-drunk and still on the table where she was sitting when I left. I tell myself she went on to work, too, but there’s only one road into town and I didn’t pass her on my way back. I don’t dare look in the garage because I don’t want to see her car there. I don’t dare leave the house now, in fact, or even look out the windows.

  It has gone blacker than night outside, although I believe it is about eleven in the morning; I cannot be sure because my watch has begun running in reverse and the clock is chiming weird hours at uncertain intervals. A little while ago there was a splitting sound, and I heard things scuttling and then swarming the sides of the house; it is only a matter of time now before what is out there gets in. We have always known there was something hidden in Cold Rest, something murmuring in a pitch not known to us, something waiting just outside our field of vision. We have obliged it with our reticent ways; we have nurtured it in our guarded, secret souls; we have made it potent with our lies; and now it is upon us all, all of us dreamers, whispering of promises we didn’t mean to make, and cold as the stars.

  NEIL GAIMAN

  * * *

  Feminine Endings

  OVER THE PAST COUPLE of years, Neil Gaiman has co-scripted (with Roger Avary) Robert Zemeckis’ motion-capture fantasy film Beowulf, while both Matthew Vaughn’s Stardust and Henry Selick’s Coraline were based on his novels.

  Next up, his Newbery Medal-winning children’s novel The Graveyard Book is being adapted for the movies, with Gaiman on board as one of the producers.

  The ever-busy author also has out a book of poems, Blueberry Girl, illustrated by Charles Vess; Crazy Hair, a new picture book with regular collaborator Dave McKean, and the graphic novel compilation Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? (with art by Andy Kubert). The Tales of Odd is a follow-up to the 2008 children’s book Odd and the Frost Giants, while The Absolute Death and The Complete Death from DC/Vertigo feature the character from the author’s Sandman comic.

  The author is also working on a non-fiction volume about China, following his visit to that country in 2007.

  “‘Feminine Endings’ was written for a book of love letters,” explains Gaiman.

  “In my head it is set in Krakow, in Poland, where the human statues stand, but it could be anywhere that tourists go and people stand still.

  “Readers have assumed that the person writing the letter is male, and they have assumed the person writing the letter is female. I have been unable to shed any light on the matter.

  “There is an odd magic to writing love-letters, I suspect, even if they are scary-strange fictional love letters. Shortly after I wrote this story I met and, eventually, fell in love with a former human statue, and have been trying to tease out the cause and effect ever since – and, of course, whether or not I should be worried . . .”

  MY DARLING,

  Let us begin this letter, this prelude to an encounter, formally, as a declaration, in the old-fashioned way: I love you. You do not know me (although you have seen me, smiled at me, placed coins in the palm of my hand). I know you (although not so well as I would like. I want to be there when your eyes flutter open in the morning, and you see me, and you smile. Surely this would be paradise enough?). So I do declare myself to you now, with pen set to paper. I declare it again: I love you.

  I write this in English, your language, a language I also speak. My English is good. I was some years ago in England and in Scotland. I spent a whole summer standing in Covent Garden, except for the month of Edinburgh Festival, when I am in Edinburgh. People who put money in my box in Edinburgh included Mr Kevin Spacey the actor, and Mr Jerry Springer the American television star who was in Edinburgh for an Opera about his life.

  I have put off writing this for so long, although I have wanted to, although I have composed it many times in my head. Shall I write about you? About me?

  First you.

  I love your hair, long and red. The first time I saw you I believed you to be a dancer, and I still believe that you have a dancer’s body. The legs, and the posture, head up and back. It was your smile that told me you were a foreigner, before ever I heard you speak. In my country we smile in bursts, like the sun coming out and illuminating the fields and then retreating again behind a cloud too soon. Smiles are valuable here, and rare. But you smiled all the time, as if everything you saw delighted you. You smiled the first time you saw me, even wider than before. You smiled and I was lost, like a small child in a great forest never to find its way home again.

  I learned when young that the eyes give too much away. Some in my profession adopt dark spectacles, or even (and these I scorn with bitter laughter as amateurs) masks that cover the whole face. What good is a mask? My solution is that of full-sclera theatrical contact lenses, purchased from an American website for a little under 500 euros, which cover the whole eye. They are dark grey, of course, and look like stone. They have made me more than 500 euros, paid for themselves over and over. You may think, given my profession, that I must be poor, but you would be wrong. Indeed, I fancy that you must be surprised by how much I have collected. My needs have been small and my earnings always very good.

  Except when it rains.

  Sometimes even when it rains. The others as perhaps you have observed, my love, retreat when it rains, put up the umbrellas, run away. I remain where I am. Always. I simply wait, unmoving. It all adds to the conviction of the performance.

  And it is a performance, as much as when I was a theatrical actor, a magician’s assistant, even when I myself was a dancer. (That is how I am so familiar with the bodies of dancers.) Always, I was aware of the audience as individuals. I have found this with all actors and all dancers, except the short-sighted ones for whom the audience is a blur. My eyesight is good, even through the contact lenses.

  “Did you see the man with the moustache in the third row?” we would say. “He is staring at Minou with lustful glances.”

  And Minou would reply, “Ah yes. But the woman on the aisle, who looks like the German Chancellor, she is now fighting to stay awake.” If one person falls asleep, you can lose the whole audience, so we would play the rest of the evening to a middle-aged woman who wished only to succumb to drowsiness.

  The second time you stood near me you were so close I could smell your shampoo. It smelt like flowers and fruit. I imagine America as being a whole continent full of women who smell of flowers and fruit. You were talking to a young man from the university. You were complaining about the difficulties of our language for an American. “I understand what gives a man or a woman gender,” you were saying. “But what makes a chair masculine or a pigeon feminine? Why should a statue have a feminine ending?”

  The young man, he laughed and pointed straight at me, then. But truly, if you are walking through the square, you can tell nothing about me. The robes look
like old marble, water-stained and time-worn and lichened. The skin could be granite. Until I move I am stone and old bronze, and I do not move if I do not want to. I simply stand.

  Some people wait in the square for much too long, even in the rain, to see what I will do. They are uncomfortable not knowing, only happy once they have assured themselves that I am a natural, not an artificial. It is the uncertainty that traps people, like a mouse in a glue-trap.

  I am writing about myself perhaps too much. I know that this is a letter of introduction as much as it is a love letter. I should write about you. Your smile. Your eyes so green. (You do not know the true colour of my eyes. I will tell you. They are brown.) You like classical music, but you have also ABBA and Kid Loco on your iPod Nano. You wear no perfume. Your underwear is, for the most part, faded and comfortable, although you have a single set of red-lace brassière and panties which you wear for special occasions.

  People watch me in the square, but the eye is only attracted by motion. I have perfected the tiny movement, so tiny that the passer can scarcely tell if it is something he saw or not. Yes? Too often people will not see what does not move. The eyes see it but do not see it, they discount it. I am human-shaped, but I am not human. So in order to make them see me, to make them look at me, to stop their eyes from sliding off me and paying me no attention, I am forced to make the tiniest motions, to draw their eyes to me. Then, and only then, do they see me. But they do not always know what they have seen.

  I think of you as a code to be broken, or as a puzzle to be cracked. Or a jigsaw puzzle, to be put together. I walk through your life, and I stand motionless at the edge of my own. My gestures – statuesque, precise – are too often misinterpreted. I want you. I do not doubt this.

  You have a younger sister. She has a MySpace account, and a Facebook account. We talk sometimes on Messenger. All too often people assume that a medieval statue exists only in the fifteenth century. This is not so true: I have a room, I have a laptop. My computer is passworded. I practise safe computing. Your password is your first name. That is not safe. Anyone could read your email, look at your photographs, reconstruct your interests from your web history. Someone who was interested and who cared could spend endless hours building up a complex schematic of your life, matching the people in the photographs to the names in the emails, for example. It would not be hard reconstructing a life from a computer, or from cell phone messages. It would be like filling a crossword puzzle.