The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 20

by Stephen Jones (ed. )

  They took to having conversations, short ones, usually, that ended in unsatisfying confusion, because she didn’t know the right questions to ask, or he didn’t know the right words to tell her what she wanted to know. Sometimes, she swore, he held back his answers, wanting always to get more than he gave. When he asked her about the wider world, outside the borders of the farm, outside the boundaries of the county, she found that she didn’t know very much – only what she saw on TV, really, and he saw as much of that as she did; more, in fact – and he quickly became contemptuous of her. Always, though, their exchanges came back to a single question:

  “Why wouldn’t you go into the water that day?”

  There was something waiting for me in that pond.

  “What was waiting?”

  A spirit. There was a spirit on that water, and it wanted me to come in there with it. The spirit wanted me, the spirit and the water both.

  “You were afraid the water would change you?”

  I was afraid it wouldn’t. I felt the change coming on me that day, and I had the fear that the water might take it off and leave me what I had always been. I wanted to be something else.

  “The change didn’t feel bad to you? It didn’t hurt?”

  It felt – exhilarating. He sounded pleased with himself that he had come up with that word, but his face was impossible to read.

  Hark was still drinking and watching TV, and the liquor was holding out longer than Bridie had thought (had hoped) it might. Vandal had taken to spending long stretches away from the house, out walking the fields or shuffling about in the granary, sitting alone in the loft of the silent barn, watching over the place as it fell fallow without his labour.

  Sometimes he went into the kennel, and she didn’t care to ask him what he did there. He didn’t touch her in their bed at night anymore, wouldn’t undress where she could see him. Under his clothes, he seemed to have shrunk, and his gaze, whenever it fell on her, was cool and distant. At that moment, he was upstairs, asleep in their bed. He slept ten hours a night, sometimes more, and still he seemed always to be exhausted.

  Hark dropped an empty bottle and it rolled across the parlour floor and disappeared under the davenport. It could be, she thought, that Xerxes had him a stash that I never knew about. But how did he find it?

  “Hark?” she said.

  Ain’t my name.

  “What?” she asked.

  Nefas. That’s what you call me now. That’s my name now. Not that word you give me, that nothing. That Hark.

  “I’m not going to call you—”

  Nefas! he shouted. His teeth, still pointed, flashed at her. Baphomet! Marduk, Shahar, Enkidu! Call me by my God-damned name!

  Her hand flashed out, and her open palm cracked against the sharp bones of his face. The sting of the blow travelled up her arm, to the centre of her chest, and her eyes filled with tears, but she swung again, savagely backhanded him so that spittle flew from his gaping mouth. His right eye closed and his head twisted to the side. She thought that she wouldn’t be able to stand the throbbing of her hand. Her fingers; had she broken them?

  He flew at her with a snarl, and the momentum of his small, furious body took them both to the floor. He put his teeth on the swelling of her throat just below her jaw, and his breath was hot against the skin of her neck. He will kill me now, she thought, and the flaming agony of her arm, and Hark’s noisome weight – or Marduk’s, or whatever he cared to call himself, Nefas – on her, and the events of these last days, made that idea not at all an unwelcome one.

  Instead, he began to squeeze her breasts with both his hands, and his breathing quickened as he fumbled to open her blouse. He pushed a knee between her legs and worked to part them. This is how he did it, he said.

  “No,” she said.

  He gave a throaty little chuckle. There was real amusement in the sound. It’s all fine and dandy to tell someone No, he said. But the question has to be: can you make it stick? The stench of whiskey filled her nostrils. His teeth and his lips moved from beneath her chin to the hollow of her throat, and from there to her breastbone. He pressed himself avidly against her.

  She willed her wrecked right hand into motion, her fingers and thumb searching for his eyes, her palm forcing his blunt head up and back. The stubble on his cheeks rasped against her like sandpaper, and she cried out with the pain and horror of it. She didn’t want to hurt him. She had never wanted to hurt anyone in her life.

  She caught sight of the picture of the baptism on the wall, hanging high above her – I am where Xerxes lay, she thought, and this is the angle he saw it from at the last – while her left hand went seeking, almost on its own, along the wall. In the picture, a great crowd of grey figures, cloaked like ghosts, filled the background, lining the far bank of the river. Seen from a distance, it was possible to take them for clouds, or a line of distant cliffs. How is it I never noticed them before? she thought, as Hark (Nefas!) fastened his eager mouth on her nipple, as her left hand found the set of fireplace tools that stood on the hearth and brought them all clattering down. As her left hand got purchase on the pair of iron log tongs and whipped them around in a hard arc.

  The tongs took him up high, on the temple, and his suckling mouth fell away from her, his limbs spasming. She struck him again, on the shoulder this time, and he screeched and tumbled off of her, scrambling to escape, his limbs scrabbling against the floor. He was like an injured insect. She stood and went after him, straddling his body, thumping him on the back of the head, the spine. He squealed, and she wondered if Vandal might hear the sound and come to investigate. “Your name is Hark!” she shouted at him. Her blows rained down on him.

  Nefas, he managed to gasp out.

  “You will come when we call!”

  Enkidu.

  “You will do what we say.”

  Hark scuttled into a corner of the room, behind the easy chair, where Bridie had a hard time getting at him. She stood with the tongs upraised, waiting on a good moment to strike him again. When she saw his eyes on her, she tugged her blouse closed with her injured hand. A couple of the buttons were missing. Crouched in the corner, his spindly arms crossed over his head for protection, Hark indicated the picture with a lift of his snout.

  Okay, he said. His ribs were heaving, and blood stained his shirt and his pants. You got the upper hand of me. You going to make me get down on my knees and worship him the way that you do? he said. Bow down to your water man, your dead man? Your foller-man?

  Vandal lay next to her in the dark, moaning softly, his legs kicking from time to time beneath the bedcovers. He faced the wall, and when she touched him, she could feel the puckered ridge of his backbone. He had always been a thickset man, but now it was as if the flesh was melting off him, leaving his body a skeletal landscape of edges and hollows. She envied him his sleep. She had taken some aspirin, the last in the house, but her right arm continued to pain her terribly.

  “What if we’re imagining all this?” she asked Vandal’s back. She kept her voice low, because she didn’t really want to wake him. She hoped, somehow, that he might awake on his own, and be as he had been before. He shivered and whimpered at the sound of her voice. “What if he never talked or changed at all? What if we’re dreaming it?” she asked.

  Dreaming the same dream, he said. She closed her eyes at the sound of his voice, which was no longer his, little more than a buzzing or gurgling deep in his throat. Eyes open, eyes closed, she found that it was the same darkness all around her.

  “Maybe I’m just dreaming it,” she said. “Alone.”

  Vandal made a small snorting noise that she took to mean assent, and went on, like a being in a fairy story, with his impenetrable slumber.

  Deep in the night, when she could not tell how long she had been asleep, the voice came to her from outside her bedroom door, whispering in like wind through the crack at the threshold: The strong will do what the strong will do. And the weak will bear what they must.

  When he surpri
sed her in the kitchen, she understood that this time there would be no lucky hand on the tongs, no surprise blow to the head. He wasn’t drunk. He was ready. Nefas (she had come to think of him that way – he wasn’t Hark anymore, and it seemed foolish to keep calling him by the vanished dog’s name) had grown at least as large as she was, and nimbler, and far faster and stronger, with a beast’s terrible speed and strength, and a man’s cruelty. If she tried to hurt him, he would hurt her far worse in return, she knew. In some deep part of him, she thought, he hoped that she would fight him, because he very much wanted to hurt her.

  Her right arm was immobilized in a sling that she had rigged up for it out of a couple of dish cloths, her fingers bruised, the joints blackened. She had a fever. Vandal was still upstairs, in the bed that was now far too large for him. He slept around the clock, wasting away. She would not have been surprised, upon going into the bedroom, to find him gone altogether.

  If I had a pot of water boiling, she thought. If I had a skillet full of sizzling grease, I would fling it in his grinning face. There was nothing hot. He had placed himself between her and the great wooden knife block. He wasn’t stupid. He had the shotgun in his hand, pointing clumsily downward, at his feet.

  She found herself hoping that Vandal wouldn’t awake, ever, that he would simply sleep through what was coming, for her, for him, for all of them. She hoped that he could go on forever dreaming for himself a world where the sunshine was bright and golden as in the old days, and untamed birds crisscrossed the sky in their lopsided Vs, and cattle drifted in friendly bunches across the pastures, and game, unending phalanxes of game, deer and clever squirrels and bear and swift wily turkeys that could be hunted and brought down but which did not die, which lent themselves again and again to the eternal chase – she hoped that, in his dreams, all of these filled the emerald mansions of the limitless forest.

  God be with you, she thought, and then Vandal, like Hark, was gone from her thoughts.

  Nefas set the shotgun carefully on the floor behind him and put his hands on her shoulders. His touch was heavy but not painful. His hands were broad and short-fingered. “Please,” she said.

  Call me by my name, he said.

  “Nefas,” she said, choking on the word. “Please.”

  He leaned into her, cradled the back of her head with his hard palm, sniffed deeply at her hair. Call me by my name, he said.

  She struggled to remember what he had said she should call him. Why did he need so many names? She couldn’t recall them all, and she was terrified of what he would do to her if she couldn’t name him properly. Her memory leaped. “Baphomet,” she said. “Marduk, please.”

  He bit the lobe of her ear, hard enough to draw blood, and she cried out. She struggled to free her arm from the sling but it was caught fast. Call me by my name, he said, his mouth against her ear. His breath was moist, his tone simultaneously intimate and insistent. He cupped her right breast as though he were weighing it, as though it were a piece of fruit that he was considering buying. His weight against her drew agony from her wounded hand, trapped between her body and his.

  “Enkidu,” she said. She knew that she could not, must not, resist him, and she steeled herself to surrender. Why, she wondered, was it not possible simply to die? To her astonishment, her uninjured hand, her left, hefted a cumbersome iron trivet from the stovetop. It had belonged to Vandal’s mother, and Bridie had never cared much for it, but she had kept it for the sentiment she imagined it provoked in Vandal.

  She raised the trivet over Nefas’ shaggy head. The fingers of her left hand were bloodless, she was holding it so tightly. He followed its ascent with his eyes, but he did not take his mouth away from her ear. He made a sound that she thought might be laughter. His hand went to the skirt that she was wearing, and he tugged the hem up to her waist.

  Shall we fuck each other, or shall we kill each other? he asked. It didn’t sound like he much cared which. Both were fine with him. With one of his feet he hooked the shotgun and slid it forward, where he could get a hand on it quickly.

  “This doesn’t have to happen,” she said.

  No? he asked. His hands were busy, unbuttoning, unclasping. She was nearly nude, and still her hand stayed poised over his skull. The trivet had a number of pointed projections. It had always seemed a peaceable thing, domestic, sitting patiently atop the stove, but in her hand it had taken on the look of some exotic piece of medieval weaponry. He shucked his baggy Levi’s, and the buckle of his belt clattered against the linoleum. Seems to me it’s happening already.

  Spare me, spare me, she thought, but she didn’t say it because a creature like him wouldn’t spare her anything. He was toying with her. He had come an unspeakable distance and waited an unthinkably long time for the pleasures he was planning to indulge. “You were a good dog,” she said. “Can’t you be a good man?”

  He considered a moment, drew fractionally away from her. Her skin where it had touched his was hot, and the small space between them felt deliciously fresh. The trivet was growing heavy, her hand was trembling with the effort of holding it over him. Nefas jerked a thumb upward, and his hand brushed the metal. He could have taken it from her if he had wanted, but he let it stay. Is he a good man? he asked her.

  She had to struggle to work out who he might mean. Vandal, asleep in the master bedroom overhead. “He was,” she said. “I don’t know what precisely he is now.”

  You think it’s only me that gets to choose, he said. He chooses too. Every minute he chooses.

  Vandal, upstairs, choosing oblivion.

  You choose too, just as much as him. Just as much as me. He tapped the trivet with a dense fingernail, and it rang like a bell. You’re choosing right now. What is it you’re choosing? “Not this,” she said, indicating his nakedness, and hers. His eyes roamed over her body, and she had the impulse to cover herself, but she resisted it. It took her a great deal of will to open her fingers; wearily, she dropped the iron trivet onto the counter, where it thumped and rolled and left a small scar. “Not this either,” she said. Unable to suppress a whimper of pain as she did it, she shucked the sling and flexed the stiffened fingers of her hand.

  Nefas returned his gaze to her face. He ain’t fucked you in a while now, he said. And you don’t want to fuck me. You just planning on doing without it for the rest of your life?

  “That might not be such a very long time,” she said. “With the world the way it is.”

  And yet it might, he said to her. That’s one choice as is not left up to us.

  Stifling her disgust, she reached out and took him by the hand, his broad palm in her swollen fingers. She drew him gently to her, not in the way of a lover, but as a mother might. An expression of shock, unmistakable even on his inscrutable face, crossed his crude features. Slowly he came to her, almost against his will. She gritted her teeth and shut the feel of his hairy hide away from her. He laid his bony head on her bosom, and she embraced him.

  With surprise, she felt how meagre he was, how slight his frame. He’s made out of a dog’s bones, and he’s got a man’s mind, she thought. There was no joy in him anywhere, she could feel that plainly, none of the kind of blind infectious joy that even the least of dogs possesses in abundance. “Why do you think he gave his place up to you?” she asked, meaning Vandal. She could see now that that was precisely what he had done. Slipped away from her, away from the world, and left this twisted creature in his stead. “Being a man isn’t what you think it is.”

  Hark began to cry. His hot tears slipped over her breasts. “I’ve got my teeth in it now,” he said. “I can’t ever go back. I don’t much want to go forward, but I know for sure I can’t go back.” He put his arms around her and she stiffened in his embrace, but the lust had passed through him for the moment and left him innocent. It would come back, and the old struggle would rise up between them again; and how it would end she didn’t care to contemplate. For the present, they could manage to stand together this way, skin to skin and inextricabl
y linked.

  Nefas cocked his head. “I can hear him, you know,” he said. “Always hear him. His voice was quiet. Listen to him as he comes this way. He’s pretty near.”

  “Who?”

  Him. Him as sent me on ahead.

  She recognized the quality of his fear. It wasn’t fear for himself, she realized, and the knowledge clutched at her. “Who can you hear?” she demanded. She struggled to keep her own voice even.

  I figured you knew, Nefas said. I figured you knew all along. He looked up at her with wide eyes. He’s coming along on my heels, but he ain’t your foiler-man. It’s nothing like that. I don’t believe he’s any sort of man at all.

  Terror bloomed in her, and her vision dimmed. “X?”

  He wanted me to tell as soon as I could talk proper, but I found out I wanted you, so I didn’t say it.

  “Didn’t say what?” she asked. “What were you supposed to say?”

  He wanted me to tell you that he don’t care about what you said. He supposes he should hold it against you, but he don’t plan to pay it any mind at all.

  The house felt very small and fragile in that moment, and she felt small and fragile inside it, holding onto this creature, this hairy thing that wasn’t her husband, that wasn’t her dog either. The world was drawing in around her, the broad fields folding up to the size of handkerchiefs, the once-straight fences crowding and jostling themselves crooked, the barn and the granary and the machine shop butting up hard against the house and the dog run and the kennel, the woods and tangled marshes infiltrating the cleared spaces, humans and beasts colliding, the dead and the living spilling over each other; order failing, pandemonium as all the things that had been separate for so very long came rushing together, splintering one another like ships driven before a storm, until there was no way to know what was one and what was another.

  Probably, Bridie thought, this has happened at other times, perhaps countless times before, perhaps every age came to its close in just this way, with no one left alive to tell the tale. Her mind went to the pond, and to the turtles huddled under the shivering surface of the water. Them, she thought. They are the great survivors.