The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 20

by Stephen Jones (ed. )

  I remember when I actually admitted to myself that you had taken to watching me, and only me, on your way across the square. You paused. You admired me. You saw me move once, for a child, and you told a woman with you, loud enough to be heard, that I might be a real statue. I take it as the highest compliment. I have many different styles of movement, of course – I can move like clockwork, in a set of tiny jerks and stutters, I can move like a robot or an automaton. I can move like a statue coming to life after hundreds of years of being stone.

  Within my hearing you have spoken many times of the beauty of this small city. How, for you, to be standing inside the stained-glass confection of the old church was like being imprisoned inside a kaleidoscope of jewels. It was like being in the heart of the sun. Also, you are concerned about your mother’s illness.

  When you were an undergraduate you worked as a cook, and your fingertips are covered with the scar marks of a thousand tiny knife-cuts.

  I love you, and it is my love for you that drives me to know all about you. The more I know, the closer I am to you. You were to come to my country with a young man, but he broke your heart, and still you came here to spite him, and still you smiled. I close my eyes and I can see you smiling. I close my eyes and I see you striding across the town-square in a clatter of pigeons. The women of this country do not stride. They move diffidently, unless they are dancers. And when you sleep your eyelashes flutter. The way your cheek touches the pillow. The way you dream.

  I dream of dragons. When I was a small child, at the home, they told me that there was a dragon beneath the old city. I pictured the dragon wreathing like black smoke beneath the buildings, inhabiting the cracks between the cellars, insubstantial and yet always present. That is how I think of the dragon, and how I think of the past, now. A black dragon made of smoke. When I perform I have been eaten by the dragon and have become part of the past. I am, truly, 700 years old. Kings come and kings go. Armies arrive and are absorbed or return home again, leaving only damaged buildings, widows and bastard children behind them, but the statues remain, and the dragon of smoke, and the past.

  I say this, although the statue that I emulate is not from this town at all. It stands in front of a church in southern Italy, where it is believed either to represent the sister of John the Baptist, or a local lord who endowed the church to celebrate that he had not died of the plague, or the angel of death.

  I had imagined you perfectly pure, my love, pure as I am, yet one time I found that the red lace panties were pushed to the bottom of your laundry hamper, and upon close examination I was able to assure myself that you had, unquestionably, been unchaste the previous evening. Only you know who with, for you did not talk of the incident in your letters home, or allude to it in your online journal.

  A small girl looked up at me once, and turned to her mother, and said, “Why is she so unhappy?” (I translate into English for you, obviously. The girl was referring to me as a statue and thus she used the feminine ending.)

  “Why do you believe her to be unhappy?”

  “Why else would people make themselves into statues?”

  Her mother smiled. “Perhaps she is unhappy in love,” she said.

  I was not unhappy in love. I was prepared to wait until everything was right, something very different.

  There is time. There is always time. It is the gift I took from being a statue – one of the gifts, I should say.

  You have walked past me and looked at me and smiled, and you have walked past me and other times you barely noticed me as anything other than an object. Truly, it is remarkable how little regard you, or any human, give to something that remains completely motionless. You have woken in the night, got up, walked to the little toilet, micturated, walked back to your bed, slept once more, peacefully. You would not notice something perfectly still, would you? Something in the shadows?

  If I could, I would have made the paper for this letter for you out of my body. I thought about mixing in with the ink my blood or spittle, but no. There is such a thing as overstatement, yet great loves demand grand gestures, yes? I am unused to grand gestures. I am more practised in the tiny gestures. I made a small boy scream once, simply by smiling at him when he had convinced himself that I was made of marble. It is the smallest of gestures that will never be forgotten.

  I love you, I want you, I need you. I am yours just as you are mine. There. I have declared my love for you.

  Soon, I hope, you will know this for yourself. And then we will never part. It will be time, in a moment, to turn around, put down the letter. I am with you, even now, in these old apartments with the Iranian carpets on the walls.

  You have walked past me too many times.

  No more.

  I am here with you. I am here now.

  When you put down this letter. When you turn and look across this old room, your eyes sweeping it with relief or with joy or even with terror . . .

  Then I will move. Move, just a fraction. And, finally, you will see me.

  GARY McMAHON

  * * *

  Through the Cracks

  GARY McMAHON’S FICTION has appeared in various magazines and anthologies in the UK and USA, and has been reprinted in both The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror.

  He is the British Fantasy Award-nominated author of the collections Rough Cut, All Your Gods Are Dead, Dirty Prayers, How to Make Monsters and Different Skins, plus the novel Rain Dogs. McMahon has also edited an anthology of original novelettes titled We Fade to Grey. Forthcoming is another collection, To Usher, the Dead, and his first mass-market novel, Hungry Hearts, is published by Abaddon Books in 2009.

  “I saw a picture online that was meant to be a Mid-Eastern Djinn crawling through a narrow crevice in a subterranean cave,” explains the author. “The picture was a fake of course, but the ideas behind it were not.

  “Through the Cracks’ examines the fascination we all have with what might lurk between the cracks in reality; and what monsters we might have summoned with our unquenchable desire to see beyond the mundane.

  “As you can see, the basic idea for this one came relatively easily, but it was very difficult to write – the tone of the piece evaded me for a long time, until the last paragraph (which is a kind of homage to the work of the great Joel Lane) popped into my mind fully formed.

  “After that, I was flying – and I began to see the cracks everywhere.”

  THERE WAS A CRACK in the train window. Emma stared at the fine imperfection, imagining that in a sudden wind the crack would open and everyone inside the speeding vehicle would be sucked out and killed on the tracks.

  Or perhaps when the train thundered through an underground tunnel, something older than the railways would crawl inside through the crack – summoned by the flickering electric lights, the smell of human sweat and the low sound of murmured conversations, it would feast upon the commuters.

  When her mobile phone began to vibrate, signalling an incoming call, Emma suddenly forgot where and when she was. Her mind had drifted to a time many years ago, when such cracks had threatened to appear in the substance of reality all because of the insanity of one man – a man whose name and face she could never forget.

  She had not spoken to Prentiss in three years, so when his name appeared on the screen on the front of the phone, accompanied by a shrill version of some forgettable chart hit, Emma’s initial instinct was to hang up without speaking. But she didn’t. Instead she calmly watched the blocky text flashing on the small rectangular screen, wondering what he could want, and why she’d left his details in the gadget’s memory anyway.

  “Hello,” she finally answered, holding the handset tight against her ear to minimize the noise of the train as it hurtled over uneven tracks towards Newcastle. “Hello. Prent, is that you?”

  Nothing. Not even the familiar whispery hiss of static. Just a long, almost baleful silence on the other end of the line. Then she heard a sound like glass or crockery breaking – a l
oud crunching crackle that made her pull her hand away from the side of her head and screw up her face in an expression of distaste. Was he toying with her, testing what reaction he might receive after all this time?

  “Hello,” she said, loudly, one more time, finger hovering over the green hang-up button.

  “Em? Emma, it’s me. It’s Prentiss.” His voice was faint, as if coming to her across a vast distance. Then there was a surge in volume and she could hear him more clearly. “How are you?”

  “Hi, Prent. I’m good. Long time no hear.” It was typical of him to call her up out of the blue, as if nothing had happened between them. That complete disregard for the social rituals had been part of why they’d split up in the first place. That and about a million other things: half-hidden cracks in his personality that had become ail-too apparent during their time together.

  “I’ve been thinking about you.” The statement sent a faint chill of anticipation along her nerve endings, culminating between her legs. No matter how weird Prentiss had become, how strange his behaviour had been, Emma had long ago resigned herself to the fact that she would always be attracted to him.

  “Oh.” The train went under a tunnel; the connection broke for a few seconds so she could not be completely sure of what he said next.

  “—so I’ve been a bit low lately. Things have been strange.” What had she missed? It seemed important, but she didn’t want to ask him to repeat whatever he’d said; her feelings were always so damn messy when it came to dealing with Prentiss that she was unable to act in anything approaching a normal, rational manner.

  “Can I see you?”

  “I live in London now, Prent. I left the north-east eighteen months ago.”

  “Really? Well that one took me by surprise.”

  “I’m visiting my sister this weekend.” She regretted telling him this as soon as the words passed her lips. “I guess I could meet you somewhere.”

  “It’s like fate, isn’t it?”

  Emma did not reply.

  “I’m having . . . difficulty leaving the house. Could you come round? I’m still living in the same place.”

  “Yes. Okay. Tomorrow evening.” She hung up before she could even question her response. The train carried her towards home, and towards yet another ill-thought out meeting with her ex. As bright winter sunlight battered her with harsh lightning strokes through the long carriage windows, Emma wondered why, wherever Prentiss was concerned, she could never bring herself to say no.

  She arrived in Central Station just after mid-day, and dodged the bustling December crowds to catch a Metro to her sister’s place out near the airport. Yet another capsule rocketing through underground caverns. Somehow this seemed like a metaphor for a part of her life she’d tried so very hard to leave behind. The stations flew by in a blur: MONUMENT. HAYMARKET. JESMOND (rendered dark with memories of Prentiss). ILFORD ROAD. Place names now meaningless because of her relocation to the Smoke. A group of youths in regulation white tracksuits got on at South Gosforth, the only feature distinguishing one from the next being the colour and brand of their baseball caps. The boys – aged between fourteen and sixteen – lounged with their feet up on the seats and drank cheap cider from dented cans. Emma felt relieved to be getting off the train at the next stop.

  Nicci’s house was a five minute walk from the station, past tired-looking shop fronts with dusty window displays consisting of canned and boxed goods Emma hadn’t seen advertised in over ten years. Steel bars and vandal-proof glass marked the way; the sacred landscape of her youth was deteriorating a little more each day she stayed away. Certain parts of the footpaths seemed cracked beyond repair, big gaping fissures opening up in the grubby concrete paving slabs to reveal the dark grasping earth beneath.

  Emma hurried towards Nicci’s house, and when she approached the door it was opened without her having to announce her arrival.

  “Em! Welcome home!” Her sister’s chunky arms went around her, and she was bustled inside and into the warm environment. Food smells accosted her nostrils, the sound of a radio greeted her from another room. This was better. This was more like home.

  They chatted over coffee and biscuits, Emma trying not to comment on Nicci’s recent weight gain. It seemed that her sister’s husband had started a new job, long-distance lorry driving between the UK and Germany. Ed was away for long stints, but according to Nicci this made the time he spent at home with her and the kids all the more worthwhile.

  Emma’s nephews, Olly and Jared, were over at a friend’s house for some pre-teenage birthday party, and would return much later, stuffed to idleness with the unhealthy delights of chocolate and cake. Emma was glad of the time alone with her sister. Quiet moments like these happened all too rarely these days, and their intimacy helped remind her that she hadn’t just the left bad things behind.

  “Mum and dad send their love,” Nicci said, smiling broadly. “I got an e-mail last night.”

  “I’ve been a bit lazy in contacting them. My computer crashed a few weeks ago, and I seem to have forgotten how to use the phone . . .”

  Nicci grinned, appreciating that Emma had never been a strong communicator, and that she’d never approved of their parents’ emigration, designed so that they could spend their retirement in the sun. “It’s expensive to call Australia,” she said, reaching out across the table to brush Emma’s hand in a rare show of solidarity. “I’m sure they understand.”

  The rest of the afternoon passed quickly, and all too soon the kids arrived back from the party. Olly was unable to hide his affection for his aunt, and smothered her with rich candy-flavoured kisses; Jared was more insular, and merely pecked at her offered cheek before slouching off to the bathroom to get ready for bed.

  The travelling had tired Emma more than she cared to admit, and when she started to doze in front of the television Nicci ordered her up to bed. “You’re in the spare room, the one next to the boys’ room. I’ve put fresh sheets on the bed, and there’s a stereo set up in there in case you want to listen to some music before turning in.”

  Emma hugged her sister hard, afraid that if she let go this moment might shatter like glass. When Nicci broke free, a look of amused concern on her face, Emma shook her head and trotted silently upstairs.

  Sleep teased her mercilessly, staying just out of reach, jerking away from her mind whenever she got close enough to grab its tenuous, mist-like essence. She thought of Prentiss, and of his obsessions. The way he’d become convinced that reality was shredding like old wallpaper in a derelict house and something nasty was peering through from the other side.

  It was these frightening notions that had finally led to the breakdown of affection between them. Emma had loved him right up until the end, but had eventually been forced to admit that sometimes love isn’t enough. He refused to seek professional help, remaining convinced that he was sane and stable, despite the protestations of the few friends he had left. When Emma had walked away for the last time, Prentiss was too afraid of his own phantoms to even follow her out the door.

  And now, three years later, did the same madness still drive him? Was he still seeing demons, or had he rid himself of the fantasy life that had driven a wedge between them?

  Finally, she slept, but dark smudges stained her dreams, shapeless fractures that gaped in the corners of her imagination, put there by Prentiss too long ago to trouble her waking mind.

  “For God’s sake, Em, don’t tell me you’re going to see him?” Nicci’s face was contorted into a snarl – she couldn’t mention Prentiss’ name without it scarring her features. “The bloke’s a psycho. Didn’t he run off chasing monsters, or something?”

  “No,” Emma replied, placing her teacup on a floral-patterned coaster. “He locked himself away so that they couldn’t get him.”

  “Oh, well excuse my mistake. That makes a big difference.” Nicci stood and walked to the window, looking out at her boys playing football in the huge back garden. A smile played across her face at the sight, but
then she remembered that she was supposed to be angry. Emma loved her unquestionably in that moment, gaining a glimpse into the heart of motherhood, a peek at a state of mind that she someday dearly wished to experience for herself.

  “He sounded rational, Nic. Like he’s got himself together.”

  Her sister turned away from the window, an apple tree framing her, giving the illusion of devil horns sticking out of the sides of her head. “You always went back to him,” she said, the anger having fled in the face of genuine concern. “And he always exploited that.”

  “Things are different now. I have my own life, a new start. I’m strong now; I don’t need him to lean on.”

  “No,” said her sister. “You have that all wrong. It was always him who leaned on you.”

  The taxi arrived at 6:30 pm, and Nicci walked her to the door. “Be careful,” she said, tenderly. “Don’t let him use you again.”

  Emma kissed Nicci’s cheek and climbed into the cab, watching the suburban view unfurl as they neared the outskirts of the city. Prentiss lived in a shared house in Jesmond, a huge Victorian terraced property with rooms so big each one could have contained her entire flat in Bermondsey with enough space left over to squeeze in a single bed.

  All too soon the ride was over, and Emma paid the driver and watched him pull away from the kerb. Trees lined the verges, their branches bare. Some of them bore splits in their wide flaking trunks, possibly the result of some kind of elm disease. The footpaths here were in better condition than the ones in Nicci’s neighbourhood, but still the area seemed to be falling slowly into ruin. Gardens were overgrown; the brickwork of some of the houses was badly in need of repair. Even the sky looked broken, shattered into giant slivers, like a damaged picture window.