My father puts a hand to his ear as the sound of the engine fades. “So every bugger’s left me now, have they?” he says in a kind of shout at himself. “Well, good riddance.”
He’s waving his fists as if he wants to punch something, and he sounds as if he’s suddenly got drunk. He must have been holding it back while Kate was there. I’ve never seen him like this. It frightens me, so I stay where I am.
It isn’t only my father that frightens me. There’s only a little bump of the sun left above the water now, and I’m afraid how dark the island may be once that goes. Bits of sunlight shiver on the water all the way to the island, and I think I see some heads above the wall of the yard full of slabs, against the light. Which side of the wall are they on? The light’s too dazzling, it seems to pinch the sides of the heads so they look thinner than any heads I’ve ever seen. Then I notice a boat setting out from Elounda, and I squint at it until I’m sure it’s Iannis’s boat.
He’s coming early to fetch us. Even that frightens me, because I wonder why he is. Doesn’t he want us to be on the island now he realises how dark it’s getting? I look at the wall, and the heads have gone. Then the sea puts the sun out, and it feels as if the island is buried in darkness.
I can still see my way down – the steps are paler than the dark – and I don’t like being alone now I’ve started shivering. I back off from the mound, because I don’t like to touch it, and almost back into a shape with bits of its head poking out and arms that look as if they’ve dropped off at the elbows. It’s a cactus. I’m just standing up when my father says “There you are, Hugh.”
He can’t see me yet. He must have heard me gasp. I go to the top of the steps, but I can’t see him for the dark. Then his voice moves away. “Don’t start hiding again. Looks like we’ve seen the last of Kate, but we’ve got each other, haven’t we?”
He’s still drunk. He sounds as if he’s talking to somebody nearer to him than I am. “All right, we’ll wait on the beach,” he says, and his voice echoes. He’s gone into the tunnel, and he thinks he’s following me. “I’m here, dad,” I shout so loud that I squeak.
“I heard you, Hugh. Wait there. I’m coming.” He’s walking deeper into the tunnel. While he’s in there my voice must seem to be coming from beyond the far end. I’m sucking in a breath that tastes dusty, so I can tell him where I am, when he says “Who’s that?” with a laugh that almost shakes his words to pieces.
He’s met whoever he thought was me when he was heading for the tunnel. I’m holding my breath – I can’t breathe or swallow, and I don’t know if I feel hot or frozen. “Let me past,” he says as if he’s trying to make his voice as big as the tunnel. “My son’s waiting for me on the beach.”
There are so many echoes in the tunnel I’m not sure what I’m hearing besides him. I think there’s a lot of shuffling, and the other noise must be voices, because my father says “What kind of language do you call that? You sound drunker than I am. I said my son’s waiting.”
He’s talking even louder as if that’ll make him understood. I’m embarrassed, but I’m more afraid for him. “Dad,” I nearly scream, and run down the steps as fast as I can without falling.
“See, I told you. That’s my son,” he says as if he’s talking to a crowd of idiots. The shuffling starts moving like a slow march, and he says “All right, we’ll all go to the beach together. What’s the matter with your friends, too drunk to walk?”
I reach the bottom of the steps, hurting my ankles, and run along the ruined street because I can’t stop myself. The shuffling sounds as though it’s growing thinner, as if the people with my father are leaving bits of themselves behind, and the voices are changing too – they’re looser. Maybe the mouths are getting bigger somehow. But my father’s laughing, so loud that he might be trying to think of a joke. “That’s what I call a hug. No harder, love, or I won’t have any puff left,” he says to someone. “Come on then, give us a kiss. They’re the same in any language.”
All the voices stop, but the shuffling doesn’t. I hear it go out of the tunnel and onto the pebbles, and then my father tries to scream as if he’s swallowed something that won’t let him. I scream for him and dash into the tunnel, slipping on things that weren’t on the floor when we first came through, and fall out onto the beach.
My father’s in the sea. He’s already so far out that the water is up to his neck. About six people who look stuck together and to him are walking him away as if they don’t need to breathe when their heads start to sink. Bits of them float away on the waves my father makes as he throws his arms about and gurgles. I try to run after him, but I’ve got nowhere when his head goes underwater. The sea pushes me back on the beach, and I run crying up and down it until Iannis comes.
It doesn’t take him long to find my father once he understands what I’m saying. Iannis wraps me in a blanket and hugs me all the way to Elounda and the police take me back to the hotel. Kate gets my mother’s number and calls her, saying she’s someone at the hotel who’s looking after me because my father’s drowned, and I don’t care what she says, I just feel numb. I don’t start screaming until I’m on the plane back to England, because then I dream that my father has come back to tell a joke. “That’s what I call getting some tongue,” he says, leaning his face close to mine and showing me what’s in his mouth.
1992
Norman Wisdom and the Angel of Death
Christopher Fowler
FOR THE FOURTH EDITION, Robinson Publishing foiled the now-familiar logo for the UK trade paperback. Thankfully, Carroll & Graf adapted the uncredited cover art for another classy-looking hardcover in the US.
Oddly, this time there was no American softcover edition (at least that I am aware of), but Best New Horror 4 did become the first book in the series to get a foreign reprinting, although translation rights in other individual volumes have been sold to Japan and Russia over the years. Horror: Il Meglio (a phrase I’ve always wanted reproduced on a T-shirt) was published in Italy the following year in trade paperback with a dust-jacket painting by my old friend Les Edwards.
At seventeen pages, the Introduction expanded for the first time beyond the eleven pages of the Necrology. Having had a go at a Locus reviewer the previous year, Ramsey and I strongly disputed comments made by Paul Brazier in the British SF magazine Nexus, in which he claimed that “the abattoir aspect of horror fiction has come to dominate the genre, until it seems we can expect blood to drip from every page . . .”
Roberta Lannes belatedly made it into the series with her tale “Dancing on a Blade of Dreams”, and the twenty-four stories included Hellraiser alumni Clive Barker and Peter Atkins’ first appearances in Best New Horror. M. John Harrison was represented with two stories, including a collaboration with Simon Ings.
Ramsey and I have always agreed that humour can be a very important element in horror fiction and, when used well, has the ability to heighten the impact of the most gruesome tale. As an editor, I have also always felt that an anthology should comprise various different types of storytelling – not only to keep the reader off-balance, but also to offer differing moods and styles that hopefully complement each other over the length of the book.
Norman Wisdom may not be all that familiar a name to American readers (he was something of an acquired taste in the UK as well), but for his debut in Best New Horror, Christopher Fowler used the British comedian as the inspiration for his tale of maniacal obsession.
Not only did the author watch every single Norman Wisdom movie before writing the story but – perhaps even more disturbingly – Chris admitted that he happened to find the comic really funny. It is unlikely that you will ever hear many people willing to admit to that . . .!
Diary Entry #1 Dated 2 July
THE PAST is safe.
The future is unknown.
The present is a bit of a bastard.
Let me explain. I always think of the past as a haven of pleasant recollections. Long ago I perfected the method of sipho
ning off bad memories to leave only those images I still feel comfortable with. What survives in my mind is a seamless mosaic of faces and places that fill me with warmth when I choose to consider them. Of course, it’s as inaccurate as those retouched Stalinist photographs in which comrades who have become an embarrassment have been imperfectly erased so that the corner of a picture still shows a boot or a hand. But it allows me to recall times spent with dear friends in the happy England that existed in the 1950s; the last era of innocence and dignity, when women offered no opinion on sexual matters and men still knew the value of a decent winter overcoat. It was a time that ended with the arrival of the Beatles, when youth replaced experience as a desirable national quality.
I am no fantasist. Quite the reverse; this process has a practical value. Remembering the things that once made me happy helps to keep me sane.
I mean that in every sense.
The future, however, is another kettle of fish. What can possibly be in store for us but something worse than the present? An acceleration of the ugly, tasteless, arrogant times in which we live. The Americans have already developed a lifestyle and a moral philosophy entirely modelled on the concept of shopping. What is left but to manufacture more things we don’t need, more detritus to be thrown away, more vicarious thrills to be selfishly experienced? For a brief moment the national conscience flickered awake when it seemed that green politics was the only way to stop the planet from becoming a huge concrete turd. And what happened? Conversation was hijacked by the advertising industry and turned into a highly suspect sales concept.
No, it’s the past that heals, not the future.
So what about the present? I mean right now.
At this moment, I’m standing in front of a full-length mirror reducing the knot of my tie and contemplating my frail, rather tired appearance. My name is Stanley Morrison, born March 1950, in East Finchley, North London. I’m a senior sales clerk for a large shoe firm, as they say on the quiz programmes. I live alone and have always done so, having never met the right girl. I have a fat cat called Hattie, named after Hattie Jacques, for whom I have a particular fondness in the role of Griselda Pugh in Series Five, Programmes One to Seven of Hancock’s Half Hour, and a spacious but somewhat cluttered flat situated approximately 150 yards from the house in which I was born. My hobbies include collecting old radio shows and British films, of which I have an extensive collection, as well as a nigh-inexhaustible supply of amusing, detailed anecdotes about the forgotten British stars of the past. There’s nothing I enjoy more than to recount these lengthy tales to one of my ailing, lonely patients and slowly destroy his will to live.
I call them my patients, but of course they aren’t. I merely bring these poor unfortunates good cheer in my capacity as an official council HVF, that’s a Hospital Visiting Friend. I am fully sanctioned by Haringey Council, an organisation filled with people of such astounding narrow-minded stupidity that they cannot see beyond their lesbian support groups to keeping the streets free of dogshit.
But back to the present.
I am rather tired at the moment because I was up half the night removing the remaining precious moments of life from a seventeen-year-old boy named David Banbury who had been in a severe motorcycle accident. Apparently he jumped the lights at the top of Shepherd’s Hill and vanished under a truck conveying half-price personal stereos to the Asian shops in Tottenham Court Road. His legs were completely crushed, so much so that the doctor told me they couldn’t separate his cycle leathers from his bones, and his spine was broken, but facial damage had been minimal, and the helmet he was wearing at the time of the collision had protected his skull from injury.
He hasn’t had much of a life, by all accounts, having spent the last eight years in care, and has no family to visit him.
Nurse Clarke informed me that he might well recover to lead a partially normal life, but would only be able to perform those activities involving a minimal amount of agonisingly slow movement, which would at least qualify him for a job in the Post Office.
Right now he could not talk, of course, but he could see and hear and feel, and I am reliably informed that he could understand every word I said, which was of great advantage as I was able to describe to him in enormous detail the entire plot of Norman Wisdom’s 1965 masterpiece The Early Bird, his first colour film for the Rank Organisation, and I must say one of the finest examples of post-war British slapstick to be found on the face of this spinning planet we fondly call home.
On my second visit to the boy, my richly delineated account of the backstage problems involved in the production of an early Wisdom vehicle, Trouble in Store, in which the Little Comedian Who Won the Hearts of the Nation co-starred for the first time with his erstwhile partner and straight-man Jerry Desmonde, was rudely interrupted by a staff nurse who chose a crucial moment in my narration to empty a urine bag that seemed to be filling with blood. Luckily I was able to exact my revenge by punctuating my description of the film’s highlights featuring Moira Lister and Margaret Rutherford with little twists of the boy’s drip-feed to make sure that he was paying the fullest attention.
At half-past-seven yesterday evening I received a visit from the mentally disorientated liaison officer in charge of appointing visitors. Miss Chisholm is the kind of woman who has pencils in her hair and NUCLEAR WAR – NO THANKS stickers on her briefcase. She approaches her council tasks with the dispiriting grimness of a sailor attempting to plug leaks in a fast-sinking ship.
“Mr Morrison,” she said, trying to peer around the door of my flat, presumably in the vain hope that she might be invited in for a cup of tea, “you are one of our most experienced Hospital Helpers” – this part she had to check in her brimming folder to verify – “so I wonder if we could call upon you for an extracurricular visit at rather short notice.” She searched through her notes with the folder wedged under her chin and her case balanced on a raised knee. I did not offer any assistance. “The motorcycle boy . . .” She attempted to locate his name and failed.
“David Banbury,” I said, helpfully supplying the information for her.
“He’s apparently been telling the doctor that he no longer wishes to live. It’s a common problem, but they think his case is particularly serious. He has no relatives.” Miss Chisholm – if she has a Christian name I am certainly not privy to it – shifted her weight from one foot to the other as several loose sheets slid from her folder to the floor.
“I understand exactly what is needed,” I said, watching as she struggled to reclaim her notes. “An immediate visit is in order.”
As I made my way over to the hospital to comfort the poor lad, I thought of the ways in which I could free the boy from his morbid thoughts. First, I would recount all of the plot minutiae, technicalities and trivia I could muster surrounding the big-screen career and off-screen heartache of that Little Man Who Won All Our Hearts, Charlie Drake, climaxing with a detailed description of his 1966 magnum opus The Cracksman, in which he starred opposite a superbly erudite George Sanders, a man who had the good sense to kill himself when he grew bored with the world, and then I would encourage the boy to give up the fight, do the decent thing and die in his sleep.
As it happens, the evening turned out quite nicely.
By eleven-thirty I had concluded my description of the film, and detected a distinct lack of concentration on behalf of the boy, whose only response to my description of the frankly hysterical sewer-pipe scene was to blow bubbles of saliva from the corner of his mouth. In my frustration to command his attention, I applied rather more pressure to the sutures on his legs than I intended, causing the crimson blossom of a haemorrhage to appear through the blankets covering his pitifully mangled limbs.
I embarked upon a general plot outline of the classic 1962 Norman Wisdom vehicle On the Beat, never shifting my attention from the boy’s eyes, which were now swivelling frantically in his waxen grey face, until the ruptured vessels of his leg could no longer be reasonably ignored. Then I summoned the ni
ght nurse. David Banbury died a few moments after she arrived at the bedside.
That makes eleven in four years
Some didn’t require any tampering with on my part, but simply gave up the ghost, losing the will to go on. I went home and made myself a cup of Horlicks, quietly rejoicing that another young man had gone to meet his maker with a full working knowledge of the later films of Norman Wisdom (not counting What’s Good For the Goose, a prurient “adult” comedy directed by Menahem Golan which I regard as an offensive, embarrassing travesty unworthy of such a superb family performer).
Now, standing before the mirror attempting to comb the last straggling wisps of hair across my prematurely balding pate, I prepare to leave the house and catch the bus to work, and I do something I imagine most people have done from time to time when faced with their own reflection. I calm myself for the day ahead by remembering the Royal Variety Performance stars of 1952. The familiar faces of Naughton & Gold, Vic Oliver, Jewel & Warriss, Ted Ray, Winifred Atwell, Reg Dixon and the Tiller Girls crowd my mind as I steel myself to confront the self-centred young scum with whom I am forced to work.
It is no secret that I have been passed over for promotion in my job on a number of occasions, but the most terrible slap-in-the-face yet performed by our new (foreign) management was administered last week, when a boy of just twenty-four was appointed as my superior! He likes people to call him Mick, walks around smiling like an idiot, travels to work wearing a Walkman, on which he plays percussive rubbish consisting of black men shouting at each other, and wears tight black jeans which seem specifically designed to reveal the contours of his genitalia. He shows precious little flair for the job, and has virtually no knowledge whatsoever of the pre-1960 British radio comedy scene. Amazingly, everyone seems to like him.
Of course, he will have to go.
Diary Entry #2 Dated 23 August
Mick is a threat no more
The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Horror Page 11