The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror

by Stephen Jones

Allan called again. “You coming? I want to show you something. Hurry!”

  She was on the verge of asking why she had to hurry. It wasn’t as if anything in the park was going anywhere. Instead she took a deep breath, set her shoulders, and marched determinedly down the centre of the platform, looking neither to left nor right, ignoring the whispers which started up outside the station as soon as she turned her back. Only trees, Linda; it’s only the trees.

  Allan was standing on the stretch of track that left the station heading towards the lift hill. She had obviously missed seeing him on her initial walk past. The track curved sharply to the right and she could see, beyond Allan, what looked like a shed built across the track, curving with it. The open entranceway was choked with undergrowth and blocked by a fallen tree, and she could make out blackness beyond, but nothing more.

  “Look at that!” Allan gestured to the shed. “This is really something special. The track is pretty basic – your ordinary out-and-back layout – but you don’t often see this.”

  “What’s ‘this’?” asked Linda. “Why did someone build a shed over the track?”

  “It’s not a shed, it’s a tunnel. Look,” – Allan pointed back towards the station – “the train would have left the station, started into the curve towards the lift hill, and then – wham! into a tunnel.” He peered at the opening. “Hard to tell what sort of doors there would have been. Probably crash doors, like in a dark ride.” He shook his head. “Can’t tell from here. Maybe the other side is better.” And without another word he was off, heading around the inside of the curve, leaving Linda trailing in his wake.

  She caught up to him at the other end of the tunnel. To her right the lift hill ascended, a dead tree suspended across it, and to her left she could see the tunnel exit. A corrugated iron door stood across one side; the other gaped open, and for a moment Linda thought that something darted back into the shadows. This is crazy, she thought, you’re seeing things. Yet when Allan moved towards the opening she heard an edge of panic in her voice as she called out “Where are you going?”

  “I want to look inside the tunnel, see how clear it is.” Linda cast her eyes along the structure, which looked more or less intact at either end but appeared badly damaged in the middle, where a tree had come down on the roof.

  “I don’t think that’s a very good idea, Allan.” She didn’t move, couldn’t, from where she stood. “C’mon,” - this as he approached the entrance, shining his flashlight through the open side – “let’s go. We still have to find your Tumble Bugs, or whatever they’re called.”

  “I don’t care about those.” Allan pushed through the open door, and she saw his figure swallowed up by the tunnel. She wanted to scream, but bit her lip and called out again “Allan! Please!”

  “Oh, Linda, you’ve got to see this,” she heard him say. His voice sounded as if it was coming from far away. “Man, this is better than I could have imagined. There’s an old coaster car in here, in pretty good shape. This is just amaz—”

  His voice stopped suddenly, like a needle jerked off a record. Linda waited for a moment, then called “Allan?” in a voice she barely recognized as her own. When there was no reply she called again, louder, but there was nothing except the sound of branches clattering against each other and, somewhere, a faint snatch of music that was snuffed out almost instantly.

  She knew she had to go look, knew that she had to go up to the tunnel entrance and see what had happened – he’d fallen, something had hit him, he’d collapsed – but the mouth of the tunnel seemed . . . busy, somehow, as if there were too many shadows there. She gave a thin scream, like an animal in a trap. Then, as the shadows seemed to thicken and grow darker she turned, turned and ran, like a frightened child, heedless, uncaring, back the way they had come, her bag banging against her side with each step, her breath coming in ragged gasps, her ears filled with sounds she did not want to identify, shadows running alongside her, thin shapes clutching at her legs, until she was somehow -miraculously – back at the door in the fence, shouldering her way through, careless of how she might look to anyone watching, running up to the house, pounding on the door, and only then, it seemed, pausing for a moment to think about what had happened, what had to be done . . .

  The door swung inward and the woman they had spoken with earlier stood framed inside the opening. She looked at Linda; then her eyes travelled past her, and Linda, even in her confusion, saw a look of pain mixed with sadness settle in her face. She looked back at Linda.

  “My boyfriend,” Linda gasped, trying to form her thoughts into something coherent, something that would make sense. “My boyfriend – he’s in there, in the park, something’s happened to him . . .”

  “I know.” The voice was quiet, but there was sorrow contained within it.

  “What do you mean, you know? How can you know?”

  “I do. We all do.”

  Linda took a deep breath, tried to calm herself. “I need to use your phone, call the police, the ambulance, someone. I think he might be hurt.”

  “No, he’s not hurt.”

  “How do you know?” Linda almost screamed. “You weren’t there. He was inside that tunnel, by the Coaster; some of it had collapsed, he might be lying there injured, I need to get help.”

  “No one can help.” The woman’s eyes flicked over Linda’s shoulder again, towards the park. “There’s nothing anyone can do. Believe me.”

  “But you don’t understand,” begged Linda, her voice harsh. “He’s in there, he could be hurt, I need to do something.”

  “There’s nothing you can do. He’ll come out if he wants to. Some of them do. You can wait here with us, if you like.”

  Linda tried to make sense of what she was hearing. “What do you mean, some of them do? Some of who? And who do you mean by ‘us’?”

  The woman half-turned her head, towards the hallway behind her. “Us,” she said simply.

  Linda looked over the woman’s shoulder, and saw that there were others behind her; women, all, half-a-dozen or so. One or two looked to be the same age as the woman in the doorway, but the others were older, middle-aged at least, or perhaps they only looked so. It was difficult to tell. All were plainly dressed, in clothing that ranged from threadbare to out-of-date. Apart from that, their only commonality was a look that Linda could only think of as resigned sadness. She turned back to the woman in the doorway.

  “Who are you?” she asked, in a voice that sounded as if it came from many miles away. “Why are you here?”

  “We’re waiting,” the woman said simply. “Some of us have been waiting a long time.” She nodded towards the cars parked in the lane beside the house. “Some of us can’t leave. So we wait. What else can we do?”

  Linda shivered. Her mind seemed to be retreating from her body, but she heard herself say, “So they come back – sometimes?”

  “Yes. But it can be a long time, if it happens.” The woman looked at Linda, her gaze steady. “You have to be prepared to wait. Are you prepared?”

  Linda took a deep breath and drew herself upright. As she did so her bag shifted against her hip, and she heard the rattle of the car keys from deep inside it. An image of Allan’s face as she had seen it at the Coaster flashed before her: excited, eager, happy, in a way that she had seldom seen it.

  “I don’t know,” she replied finally. “Can I think about it for a minute?”

  “Yes, of course. We have all the time in the world.”

  There was nothing more to be said. The door closed.

  All the time in the world.

  But it would not take her that long to decide.

  RAMSEY CAMPBELL

  Respects

  RAMSEY CAMPBELL’S MOST RECENT books are the novel Creatures of the Pool and the collection Just Behind You, both from PS Publishing, and from Titan Books, Solomon Kane, “based on the movie and various drafts of the screenplay, it attempts both to capture the film and include deleted elements that director Michael J. Bassett would have
liked to include,’’ explains the author. Forthcoming is another novel, The Seven Days of Cain, and Ghosts Know is in progress.

  “‘Respects’ was suggested by a local incident in which a car thief in his early teens killed himself while fleeing the police,” recalls Campbell. “A lamp standard at the site of his demise is still decorated with flowers years after the incident, and the tributes on the obituaries page of one Wallasey newspaper were at least as grotesque as the ones I’ve invented – the romanticisation of a petty criminal.

  “How much has this to do with the public hunger for a moment in the media? The tendency has produced its own clichés. There almost seems to be a standard script (created by the demand for sound bites) for grieving parents to deliver at press conferences. A lost daughter inevitably becomes ‘my little princess’, and it isn’t uncommon to hear very young children described as ‘my best friend’.

  “Does this cheapen the grief? People may need to express their feelings (although not doing so, at least in public, can be useful too), but how much does banality and inaccuracy express?”

  BY THE TIME DOROTHY finished hobbling downstairs, somebody had rung three times and knocked several more. Charmaine Bullough and some of her children were blocking the short garden path under a nondescript November sky. “What did you see?” Charmaine demanded at once.

  “Why, nothing to bother about.” Dorothy had glimpsed six-year-old Brad kicking the door, but tried to believe he’d simply wanted to help his mother. “Shouldn’t you be at school?” she asked him.

  Brad jerked a thumb at eight-year-old J-Bu. “She’s not,” he shouted.

  Perhaps his absent siblings were, but not barely teenage Angelina, who was brandishing a bunch of flowers. “Are those for me?” Dorothy suggested out of pleasantness rather than because it seemed remotely likely, then saw the extent of her mistake. “Sorry,” she murmured.

  Half a dozen bouquets and as many wreaths were tied to the lamp-standard on the corner of the main road, beyond her gate. Charmaine’s scowl seemed to tug the roots of her black hair paler. “What do you mean, it’s not worth bothering about?”

  “I didn’t realise you meant last week,” Dorothy said with the kind of patience she’d had to use on children and parents too when she was teaching.

  “You saw the police drive our Keanu off the road, didn’t you?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t say I did.”

  At once, despite their assortment of fathers, the children resembled their mother more than ever. Their aggressive defensiveness turned resentful in a moment, accentuating their features, which were already as sharp as smashed glass. “Can’t or won’t?” Charmaine said.

  “I only heard the crash.”

  Dorothy had heard the cause as well – the wild screech of tyres as the fifteen-year-old had attempted to swerve the stolen Punto into her road apparently at eighty miles an hour, only to ram a van parked opposite her house - but she didn’t want to upset the children, although Brad’s attention seemed to have lapsed. “Wanna wee,” he announced and made to push past her, the soles of his trainers lighting up at every step.

  As Dorothy raised a hand to detain him, J-Bu shook a fist that set bracelets clacking on her thin arm. “Don’t you touch my brother. We can get you put in prison.”

  “You shouldn’t just walk into someone else’s house,” Dorothy said and did her best to smile. “You don’t want to end up—”

  “Like who?” Angelina interrupted, her eyes and the studs in her nose glinting. “Like Keanu? You saying he was in your house?”

  Dorothy might have. The day before the crash she’d come home to find him gazing out of her front room. He hadn’t moved until she managed to fumble her key into the lock, at which point he’d let himself out of the back door. Apart from her peace of mind he’d stolen only an old handbag that contained an empty purse, and so she hadn’t hurried to report him to the overworked police. If she had, might they have given him no chance to steal the car? As Dorothy refrained from saying any of this, Charmaine dragged Brad back. “Come out of there. We don’t want anyone else making trouble for us.”

  “I’m sorry not to be more help,” Dorothy felt bound to say. “I do know how you feel.”

  Angelina peered so closely at her that Dorothy smelled some kind of smoke on the girl’s breath. “How?”

  “I lost my husband just about a year ago.”

  “Was he as old as you?” J-Bu said.

  “Even older,” said Dorothy, managing to laugh.

  “Then it’s not the same,” Angelina objected. “It was time he went.”

  “Old people take the money we could have,” said J-Bu.

  “It’s ours for all the things we need,” Brad said.

  “Never mind that now,” said Charmaine and fixed Dorothy with her scowl. “So you’re not going to be a witness.”

  “To what, forgive me?”

  “To how they killed my son. I’ll be taking them to court. The social worker says I’m entitled.”

  “They’ll have to pay for Keanu,” said Brad.

  Dorothy took time over drawing a breath. “I don’t think I’ve anything to offer except sympathy.”

  “That won’t put shoes on their feet. Come on, all of you. Let’s see Keanu has some fresh flowers. He deserves the best,” Charmaine added louder still.

  Brad ran to the streetlamp and snatched off a bouquet. About to throw them over Dorothy’s wall, he saw her watching and flung them in the road. As Angelina substituted her flowers, Dorothy seemed to hear a noise closer to the house. She might have thought a rose was scratching at the window, but the flower was inches distant. In any case, the noise had sounded muffled by the glass. She picked up a beer can and a hamburger’s polystyrene shell from her garden and carried them into the house.

  When she and Harry had moved in she’d been able to run through it without pausing for breath. She could easily outdistance him to the bedroom, which had been part of their fun. Now she tried not to breathe, since the flimsy shell harboured the chewed remains of its contents. She hadn’t reached the kitchen when she had to gasp, but any unwelcome smell was blotted out by the scents of flowers in vases in every downstairs room.

  She dumped the rubbish in the backyard bin and locked the back door. The putty was still soft around the pane Mr Thorpe had replaced. Though he’d assured her it was safe, she was testing the glass with her knuckles when something sprawled into the hall. It was the free weekly newspaper, and Keanu’s death occupied the front page. LOCAL TEENAGER DIES IN POLICE CHASE.

  She still had to decide whether to remember Harry in the paper. She took it into the dining-room, where a vase full of chrysanthemums held up their dense yellow heads towards the false sun of a Chinese paper globe, and spread the obituary pages across the table. Keanu was in them too. Which of the remembrances were meant to be witty or even intended as a joke? “Kee brought excitement into everyone’s life”? “He was a rogue like children are supposed to be”? “There wasn’t a day he didn’t come up with some new trick”? “He raced through life like he knew he had to take it while he could”? “Even us that was his family couldn’t keep up with his speed”? Quite a few of them took it, Dorothy suspected, along with other drugs. “When he was little his feet lit up when he walked, now they do because he’s God’s new angel.” She dabbed at her eyes, which had grown so blurred that the shadows of stalks drooping out of the vase appeared to grope at the newsprint. She could do with a walk herself.

  She buttoned up her winter overcoat, which felt heavier than last year, and collected her library books from the front room. Trying to read herself to sleep only reminded her that she was alone in bed, but even downstairs she hadn’t finished any of them – the deaths in the detective stories seemed insultingly trivial, and the comic novels left her cold now that she couldn’t share the jokes. She lingered for a sniff at the multicoloured polyanthuses in the vase on her mother’s old sideboard before loading her scruffiest handbag with the books. The sadder a bag l
ooked, the less likely it was to be snatched.

  The street was relatively quiet beneath the vague grey sky, with just a few houses pounding like nightclubs. The riots in Keanu’s memory – children smashing shop windows and pelting police cars with bricks – had petered out, and in any case they hadn’t started until nightfall. Most of the children weren’t home from school or wherever else they were. Stringy teenagers were loitering near the house with the reinforced front door, presumably waiting for the owner of the silver Jaguar to deal with them. At the far end of the street from Dorothy’s house the library was a long low blotchy concrete building, easily mistaken for a new church.

  She was greeted by the clacking of computer keyboards. Some of the users had piled books on the tables, but only to hide the screens from the library staff. As she headed for the shelves Dorothy glimpsed instructions for making a bomb and caught sight of a film that might have shown an equestrian busy with the tackle of her horse if it had been wearing any. On an impulse Dorothy selected guides to various Mediterranean holiday resorts. Perhaps one or more of her widowed friends might like to join her next year. She couldn’t imagine travelling by herself.

  She had to slow before she reached her gate. A low glare of sunlight cast the shadow of a rosebush on the front window before being extinguished by clouds, leaving her the impression that a thin silhouette had reared up and then crouched out of sight beyond the glass. She rummaged nervously in her handbag and unlocked the door. It had moved just a few inches when it encountered an obstruction that scraped across the carpet. Someone had strewn Michaelmas daisies along the hall.

  Were they from her garden? So far the vandals had left her flowers alone, no doubt from indifference. As her eyes adjusted to the dimness she saw that the plants were scattered the length of the hall, beyond which she could hear a succession of dull impacts as sluggish as a faltering heart. Water was dripping off the kitchen table from the overturned vase, where the trail of flowers ended. She flustered to the back door, but it was locked and intact, and there was no other sign of intrusion. She had to conclude that she’d knocked the vase over and, still without noticing unless she’d forgotten, tracked the flowers through the house.