The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 20

by Stephen Jones (ed. )

  I didn’t understand, not entirely. “She was your wife? But you said—”

  “—I said she gave me back my ring – the engagement ring I bought for her. She broke her promissse!”

  “She found someone she loved better or more than you.”

  “What?” He turned to me in a rage. “No, she was a slut and would have had anyone before me! She betrayed me – deserted me – gave him what she could never give me. She sent me my ring in a letter, said that she was sssorry! Well, I made them sssorry! Or so I thought. But now, in their place of waiting, still they have each other while I have nothing. And if they must wait for ever what does it matter to them? They don’t wait in misery and solitude like meeeee! Even now they make love, and I am the one who sufferssss!”

  “Blind hatred! Insane jealousy!” Now, I can’t be sure that I said those words; it could be that I merely thought them. But in any case he “heard” my accusation. And:

  “Be very careful, Mr Stanaaard!” Carlisle snarled. “What, do you think to test me? In a place such as this? In this dangerous place?” His red lamp eyes drew me from the stone shoulder until I leaned out over a gulf of air. For a moment I was sure I would fall, until he said, “But no. Though I would doubtless take great pleasure in it, that would be a dreadful waste. For this is not my waiting place, and there’s that which you still must see. So come.” As easily as that, he drew me back . . .

  We descended from Tumble Tor, but so terribly quickly that it was almost as if we slid or slithered down from the heights. As before I was guided by Carlisle’s evil voice, until at last I stood on what should have been solid ground – except it felt as if I was still afloat, towed along in the wake of my dreadful host to the far side of the outcrop. But I made no inquiry with regard to our destination. This time I knew where we were going.

  And off across the moor he strode or floated, myself close behind, moving in tandem, as if invisibly attached to him. Part of my mind acknowledged and accepted the ancient, mist-wreathed landscape: a real yet unreal place, as in a dream; that was the part in the grip of Simon Carlisle’s influence. But the rest of me knew I should be fighting this thing, struggling against the mental miasma. Also, for the first time, I felt I knew for sure the evil I’d come up against, even though I couldn’t yet fathom its interest in me.

  “Ghosts,” I heard myself say. “You’re not real. Or you are – or you were – when you lived!”

  Half-turning, he looked back at me. “So finally you know,” he said. “And I ask myself: how is it possible that such a mind – as dull and unimaginative as yours – lives on corporeal and quick when one as sharp and as clear as mine is trapped in this place?”

  “This place? Your place of waiting?”

  “No, Mr Stanaaard.” He pointed ahead. “Theirs! Mine lies on the other side of the tor, halfway to the bald knoll where first I saw you and you saw me. You’ll know it when you see it: the mossesss, reedsss, and rushesss. But this place here: it’s theirsss! It’s where I killed them – where I’ve killed them a hundred times; ah, if only they could feel it! But no, they’re satisfied with their lot and no longer fear me. We are on different levels, you see. Me riding my loathing, and them lost in their lust.”

  “Their love.” I contradicted him.

  He turned on me and a knife was in his hand; its blade was long and glittering sharp. “That word is poison to meeee! Maybe I should have let you fall. How I wish I could have!”

  Logic, so long absent from my mind, my being, returned however briefly. “You can’t hurt me. Not with a ghost knife.”

  “Fool!” He answered. “The knife is not for you. And as for your invulnerability: we shall see. But look, we are there.”

  Before us the place I had seen from Tumble Tor, the secret love nest surrounded by gorse and tall ferns; the lovers joined on their bed of layered clothing; Carlisle leaping ahead of me, his coat flapping, knife raised on high. The young man’s broad back was his target; the young woman’s half-shuttered eyes saw the madman as he fell upon them; the young man turned his head to look at his attacker – and amazingly, he only smiled!

  The knife struck home, again and again. No blood, nothing. And Carlisle’s crazed howling like a distant storm in my ears. Done with his rival, he turned his knife on the girl. Deep into her right eye went the blade, into her left eye, her throat and bare breasts. But she only shook her head and sadly smiled. And her eyes and throat and breasts were mist; likewise her lover’s naked unmarked body: a drift of mist on the coarse empty grass.

  “Ghosts!” I said again. “And this is their waiting place.”

  Carlisle’s howling faded away, and panting like a mad dog he drifted to his feet and turned to me. “Did you see? And am I to be pitied? They pity me – for what they have and I haven’t! And I can’t stand to be here any longer. And you, Mr Stanaaard – you are my elevation, and perhaps my salvation. For whatever place it is that lies beyond, it must be better than this place. Now come, and I shall show you my place of waiting.”

  Danger! That part of me which knew how wrong this was also recognized the danger. Oh, I had known the precariousness of my position all along, but now the terror was tangible: this awful sensation of my soul shrinking inside me. I felt that I was now beyond hope. But before my fear could completely unman me, make me incapable of speech, there was something I must know. And so I asked the ghost, ghoul, creature who was leading me on, “What is . . . what is a place of waiting?”

  “Ah, but that’s a secret!” he answered, as we drew closer to Tumble Tor. “Secret from the living, that is, but something that is known to all the dead. They wouldn’t tell you, not one of them, but since you will soon be one of them . . .”

  “You intend to kill me?”

  “Mr Stanaaard, you are as good as dead! And then I shall move on.”

  It began to make sense. “You . . . you’re stuck in your so-called waiting place until someone else dies there.”

  “Ah, and so you’re awake at last! The waiting places are the places where we died. And there we must wait until someone else dies in the same place, in the same way! To that treacherous dog and his bitch back there, it makes no difference. They have all they want. But to me . . . I was only able to do what I do, to watch as I did in life, to hate with a hatred that will never die, and to wait, of course. Then you came along, trying to look beyond life, searching for someone who had moved on – and finding me.”

  “I called you up,” I said, faintly.

  “And I was waiting, and I was ready. Yessss!”

  “But how shall you kill me? I won’t die of fright, not now that I know.”

  “Oh, you won’t die by my insubstantial hand. But you will die of my doing, most definitely. Do you know that old saying, that you can lead a horse to water—”

  “But you can’t make him drink?”

  “That’s the one. Ah, but water is water and mire is mire.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, though I was beginning to.

  “You will understand,” he promised me. “Ah, you will . . .”

  Passing Tumble Tor, we started out across the low-lying ground toward the knoll. And in that region of my conscious mind which knew what was happening (while yet lacking even a small measure of control) I remembered something that Carlisle had said about his place of waiting:

  “You’ll know it when you see it: the mossesss, reedsss and rushesss.”

  “We’re very nearly there, aren’t we?” I said, more a statement of fact than a question. “The sphagnums and the rushes—”

  “—And the mire, yessss!” he answered.

  “The quagmire where you killed yourself, putting an end to your miserable life: that’s your place of waiting.”

  “Killed myself?” He paused for a moment, stared at me with his blazing eyes. “Suicide? No, no – not I! Never! But after I killed them I was seen on the moor; a chance encounter, damn it to hell! And so I fled. I admit it: I fled the scene in a blind panic. But a mist came up �
� the selfsame mist you see now – and as surely as Satan had guided me to my deed, my revenge, so God or Fate led me astray, brought me shivering and stumbling here. Here where I sank in the mire and died, and here where I’ve had to wait . . . but no longer.”

  We were halfway to the knoll and the mist was waist deep. But still I knew the place. Andrew Quarry had pointed it out on the occasion of our first meeting: the sphagnums and the reeds, pointers to mud that would suck my shoes off. But it now seemed he’d been wrong about that last. Right to avoid it but wrong in his estimation, for it was much deeper than that and would do a lot more than just suck my shoes off.

  And it was there, lured on in the ghostly wake of Carlisle – as I stumbled and flailed my arms in a futile attempt to keep my balance, managing one more floundering step forward and wondering why I was in trouble while he drifted upright and secure – it was there that what little remained of my logical, sensible self took flight, leaving me wholly mazed and mired in the misted, sucking quag.

  Carlisle, this powerful ghost of a man, as solid to me now as any man of flesh and blood, stood and watched as it began to happen. His gaunt jaws agape, and his eyes burning red as coals in the heart of a fire, he laughed like a hound of hell. And as I threw myself flat on the mud to slow my sinking: “Murder!” he said, his voice as glutinous as the muck that quaked and sucked beneath me. “But what is that to me? You are my third, yes, but they can only hang a man once – and they can’t hang me at all! So down you go, Paul Stanaaard, into the damp and the dark. And with your passing I, too, shall pass into whatever waits beyond . . . while you lie here.”

  It appeared I had retained at least a semblance of commonsense. Drawing my legs up and together against the downward tug of viscous filth, I threw my arms wide and my head back, making a crucifix of my body and limbs in order to further increase my buoyancy. Even so, the quag was already lapping the lobes of my ears, surging cold and slimy against my Adam’s apple, and smelling in my nostrils of drowned creatures and rotting foliage; in which position desperation loaned voice to what little of logic remained:

  “But where are you bound?” I asked him, aware of the creeping mud. “Do you know? Do any of you know? What if your waiting places are a test? What if someone – God, if you like – what if He is also waiting, to see what you’ll do, or won’t do? What if this was your last chance to redeem yourself, and you’re throwing it away?”

  “Do you think I haven’t – we haven’t – asked ourselves the very same questionsss?” he answered. “I have, a thousand times. But think on thisss: if the next place doesn’t suit me, I shall move on again by whatever means available. And again, and again . . . alwaysss.”

  “Not if the next place is Hell!” I told him. “Which I very much hope it is!”

  “Wrong!” he said, and burst out laughing. “For my Hell was here. And now it’s yoursss!”

  I strained against the suction of the mud. I tried to will myself to stay afloat, but the filthy stuff was lapping my chin and surging in my ears, and I could feel my feet sinking, going down slowly but surely into the mire. Weeds tangled my hair and slime crept at the corners of my mouth; immobilized by mud, all I could do was gaze petrified at Carlisle where he stood like a demon god on the surface of the quag, howling his crazed laughter from jaws that gaped in a red-glowing Hallowe’en skull, his lank limbs wreathed in mist and rotten cloth.

  Muddy water was in my nostrils, trickling into my mouth. I felt the hideous suction and was unable to fight it. I was done for and I knew it. But I also knew of another world, more real than Simon Carlisle’s place of waiting. The world of the quick, of the living, of hope that springs eternal. And at the last – even as I gagged at the ooze that was slopping into my mouth – I called for help, cried out until all I could do was choke and splutter.

  And my cries were answered!

  “Paul!” came a shout, a familiar voice, which in my terror I barely recognized. “Paul Stanard, is that ye down there? Man, what in the name of all that’s—?”

  “Help! Help!” I coughed and gurgled.

  And Carlisle cried, “No! No! I won’t be cheated! It can’t end like this. Drink, drown, die, you bloody obstinate man! You are my one, my last chance. So die, die!”

  He drifted toward me, got down beside me, tried to push at my face and drive my head down into the mud. But his hands were mist, his furious, burning face, too, and his cries were fading as he himself melted away, his fury turning to terror. “No, no, noooo!” And he was gone.

  Gone, too, the mist, and where Carlisle’s claw-like hands had sloughed into nothingness, stronger hands were reaching to fasten on my jacket, to lift my face from the slop, to draw my head and shoulders to safety out of—

  —Out of just six inches of muddy water!

  And Andrew Quarry was standing ankle deep in it, standing there with his Jennie, her raven hair shining in the corona of the sun that silhouetted her head. And nothing of that phantom mist to be seen, no sign of Carlisle, and no bog but this shallow pond of muddied rain-water lying on mainly solid ground

  “Did you did you see him, or it?” I gasped, putting a shaking hand down into the water to push myself up and take the strain off Quarry’s arms. But the bottom just there was soft as muck; my hand skidded, and again I floundered.

  “Him? It?” Quarry shook his head, his eyes like saucers in his weathered face. “We saw nothin’. But what the hell happened to ye, man?” And again he tugged at me, holding me steady.

  Still trembling, cold and soaking wet – scarcely daring to believe I had lived through it – I said. “It was him, Carlisle. He tried to kill me.” As I spoke, so my fumbling hand found and grasped something solid in the muddy shallows: a rounded stone, it could only be.

  But my thumb sank into a hole, and as I got to my knees I brought the “stone” with me. Stone? No, a grinning skull, and I knew it was him! All that it lacked was his maniac laughter and a red-burning glare in its empty black socket eyes . . .

  At Quarry’s place, while Jennie telephoned the police – to tell them of my “discovery” on Dartmoor – her father sat outside the bathroom door while I showered. By then the fog had lifted from my mind and I was as nearly normal as I had felt in what seemed like several ages. Normal in my mind, but tired, indeed exhausted in my body.

  Andrew Quarry knew that, also knew why and what my problem had been. But he’d already cautioned me against saying too much in front of Jennie. “She would’nae understand, and I cannae say I’m that sure myself. But when ye told me ye’d been warned off, and by Old Joe . . .”

  “Yes, I know.” Nodding to myself, I turned off the shower, stepped out and began to towel myself dry. “But he’s not real – I mean, no longer real – is he?”

  “But he was until four years ago.” Quarry’s voice was full of awe. “He used tae call in here on his rounds – just the once a year – for a drink and a bite. And he would tell me where he had been, up and down the country. I liked him. But just there, where ye parked ye’re car, that was where Old Joe’s number came up. He must hae been like a wee rabbit, trapped in the beam of the headlights, in the frozen moments before that other car hit him. A tragic accident, aye.” Then his voice darkened. “Ah, but as for that other . . .”

  “Simon Carlisle?” Warm and almost dry, still I shivered.

  “That one, aye,” Quarry growled, from behind the bathroom door where it stood ajar. “I recognized his name as soon as ye mentioned it. It was eighteen years ago and all the newspapers were full of it. It was thought Carlisle had fled the country, for he was the chief suspect in a double moors murder. And—”

  “I know all about it,” I cut him off. “Carlisle, he . . . he told me, even showed me! And if you hadn’t come along – if you hadn’t been curious about my . . . my condition, my state of mind after what I’d said to you on the ‘phone – he would have killed me, too. The only thing I don’t, can’t understand: how could he have drowned in just six inches of water?”

  “Oh,
I can tell ye that!” Quarry answered at once. “Eighteen years ago was a verra bad winter, followed by a bad spring. Folks had seen nothin’ like it. Dartmoor was a swamp in parts, and that part was one of them. The rain, it was like a monsoon, erodin’ many of the small hillocks intae landslides. Did ye no notice the steepness of that wee knoll, where all the soil had been washed down intae the depression? Six inches, ye say? Why, that low-lyin’ ground was a veritable lake of mud . . . a marsh, a quag!”

  Dressed in some of Quarry’s old clothes, nodding my understanding, I went out and faced him. “So that’s how it was.”

  “That’s right. But what I dinnae understand: why would the damned creature – that dreadful man, ghost, thing – why would it want tae kill ye? What, even now? Still murderous, even as a revenant? But how could he hope tae benefit frae such a thing?”

  At that, I very nearly told him a secret known only to the dead and now to me. But, since we weren’t supposed to know, I simply shook my head and said nothing . . .

  As for those pictures I’d snapped, of Simon Carlisle on Tumble Tor: when the film was developed there was only the bare rock, out of focus and all lopsided. None of which came as any great surprise to me.

  And as for my lovely Jennie: well, I’ve never told her the whole thing. Andrew asked me not to, said there was a danger in people knowing such things. He’s probably right. We should remember our departed loved ones, of course we should, but however painful the parting we should also let them go. That is, if and when they can go, and if they’re in the right place of waiting.

  Myself: well, I don’t go out on the moor any more, because for one thing I know Old Joe is out there patiently waiting for an accident to set him free. That old tramp, yes, and lord only knows how many others, waiting in the hedgerows at misted crossroads on dark nights, and in remote, derelict houses where they died in their beds before there were telephones, ambulances and hospitals . . .