The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Horror

by Stephen Jones

  The inside of the small building was not as plain as it had appeared from the outside. There was decoration of a sort, but it was delicate and subtle. A black strip was painted along the base of the walls, stretching about three inches up from the floor. The top of the back strip was irregular, dipping and rising as it went around the room. When Babbas closed the door behind her, Charlotte saw that it had been painted across the bottom of the door as well. Above the black strip, the walls were painted a light yellow. There were small streaks of orange in the yellow, along with tiny flecks of blue and green. The church was lit by the candles on its altar and by the sunlight coming in through the two windows. The mirrors on the walls (and there was one on each wall, she saw) caught the light and reflected it all around, catching the streaks of colour on the walls and making them dance in the corner of her eyes. It was like being at the centre of a vast, calm flame and it was magical in a way she had not expected. The air had a warmth that held her softly and she laughed in delight at it. The old man, hearing this, smiled for the first time and did not seem so sad.

  “It is wonderful, is it not?” asked Babbas.

  “It’s beautiful,” Charlotte answered, although this did not do justice to how beautiful or wonderful it was.

  “The Order of St John of Patmos, here and elsewhere, is charged with the maintenance of the light of God, and we try to love the light wherever possible. It is not an easy life here on the island; there is only one delivery of food and equipment a week, and between these times, it can be lonely. These altar candles must always be aflame, as must other torches that we will come to soon. There must always be enough fuel, enough candles, enough torches, and this takes planning, so that the necessary items can be ordered at least a week in advance, to come in with the following week’s delivery. But when it is hard and when the life I have had given to me seems tiring, I need simply stand in here and feel the beauty and power of God and His love, and I know that I am valued, that I am playing my part in the worship of the light over the darkness.” He stopped talking and his face fell into sadness and tiredness once more. Charlotte wondered why Babbas was telling her these things, but dared not ask. Wasn’t this what she had come here for, after all? And besides, it was interesting, listening to this old man. Such single-mindedness, she thought briefly . I’m not sure I could do what he does, day in, day out.

  As if reading her thoughts again, Babbas said, “It is not always so. Sometimes, there are more here than just me. In past years, this place has housed four or five of the called at a time and we would split the daily tasks between us.”

  “Jesus, you mean there’s just you by yourself?” exclaimed Charlotte, startled, and fast on the heels of this startlement, embarrassed at having sworn in church. Babbas seemed not to notice, however, but simply sighed again and turned away. He walked to the rear of the church, going behind the altar. He went to the doorway and stopped, calling back over his shoulder, “Come.”

  This time, Charlotte did not move. It was not just the peremptory way in which he had called her, although that was irritating to be sure. No, it was also that the idea of going behind the altar, of entering the place where only those who served God as priests or higher could go that made her uncomfortable. Whilst her own faith was, at best, questionable, she had been raised in a family that respected even if it did not believe. She found it hard to disagree with members of the clergy and even thinking critical or dismissive thoughts about the church’s ceremonies or regulations made her feel guilty. She sometimes felt it was this inability as much as anything that stopped her from taking the final step and dismissing the teaching of the church as simple superstition, and that this was a weakness in her that she should try to overcome, but she did not. Hard though it was to admit it even to herself, she liked that the church had mysteries, and revealing them would be akin to stripping away layers of her upbringing and replacing them with something smaller and infinitely more miserable. Seeing behind the altar would solve one of those mysteries, and the thought of it made her sad. She could not articulate this, knowing it made little sense. Rather, she remained still and hoped that the old man would return, would show her something else instead of what lay in the private inner sanctum.

  “Come, now!” said Babbas from the darkness, and he no longer sounded old or tired, but implacable. He loomed into the light briefly, waving her towards him and saying in the same tone of voice, “There is much to show you.” Miserably, feeling far worse than when she thought of losing Roger, she followed him.

  She had expected to find a small chamber beyond the doorway, but was surprised to find a long passage cut into rock, lit by candles set into carved recesses. These recesses were at head height and occurred every five or six feet along the passage. The smell of smoke and old flames was strong but under it, the same sickly, corrupt odour from before caught in Charlotte’s nose. Babbas was already some distance down the passage, walking in that stooped half-shuffle that she had begun to recognize. Wondering what other surprises were in store, she hurried after him.

  The slap of her sandals echoed around her as she walked, the sound coming at her from all angles. She saw as she passed that behind each candle, painted on the back of the recesses, were portraits of people. There were both men and women, all unsmiling and serious-looking. All were wearing a white cloth over their heads, and all had dates across the base of the portraits. In the flickering light of the candles, their eyes seemed to follow her and their lips pursed in disapproval. As much to break the silence and to draw her attention from their gaze as anything, Charlotte called ahead to the old man, “Who are the people in portraits?”

  “The previous leaders of the Order here.”

  “But there are women,” she said before she could stop herself. Babbas turned back to her. There was light from somewhere ahead and for a moment, he was simply a silhouette in the passage. He stretched his arms out, placing his palms against the walls. Leaning forward, he let his arms take his weight. His face came into the light and Charlotte saw his teeth, gleaming a terrible ivory. He stared at her and smiled, although there was no humour in it.

  “This is not a branch of the Orthodox Church,” he said, “and we have always known that God gave women the same role to play in the struggle between good and evil as men. He cares not whether it is a man or a woman who lights the candles and lamps and torches, as long as they are lit. Try to understand, this place has a function, a purpose, beyond simply mouthing words and performing ceremonies, the reason for whose existence most have forgotten. To these walls, men and women are called equally to play their role as God intended.” He glared fiercely at Charlotte and then whirled about, his belt ends and the hem of his robe flailing around him. Charlotte, against her better, more rational, judgment, followed.

  The passage opened out into a cave that took Charlotte’s breath away. It looked as if the whole of the huge outcrop of rock in the island’s centre had been hollowed out. Looking up, she saw a roof far above her that was ragged with gullies and peaks, like a sonar map of deep ocean floors. Here and there, chisel marks were visible and she realized that this must have been a natural opening in the rock, and that man had expanded what nature (God? She wondered fleetingly) had begun. The floor was inlaid with white marble and the walls painted the same yellow and orange as in the church, although there was no black stripe around the base of the walls. At either side of her, doorways were set into the wall, carved rectangles of darker air. The nearest one, she saw, opened into a small carved room that appeared to contain nothing but a bed. He lives here as well! she thought in surprise, and then her eyes were drawn to what lay in the centre of the cavern.

  There was a large opening in the floor.

  Charlotte walked to the opening, beckoned on by Babbas who had gone to stand at its edge. It was roughly square and at each corner was a burning torch set on top of a metal stand. Lamps burned around the walls, she noticed, and then she was looking into the hole.

  It was pitch black. Charlotte s
tared down and immediately felt dizzy, as though she were having an attack of vertigo and, in truth, it was like looking down from a great height. The darkness in the hole seemed to start just feet below its rim, as if it was filled with inky water. Why doesn’t the light go into it? she had time to think and then Babbas’ hand was on her shoulder and he drew her gently away. He guided her back to where she had been standing, to where the floor was all around her, gleaming and white.

  “There is the function of the Order of St John of Patmos,” he said in a soft voice. “We keep the light burning that holds the darkness at bay, and it is what you have come here to do.”

  Charlotte stood, breathing deeply to overcome her dizziness. The old man stood looking at her kindly. His eyes glimmered with . . . what? Expectation? Hope? She could not tell and then the thing that he had said last of all lurched in her memory and the individual words connected, made a sentence, gained meaning.

  “I’m not here to do anything!” she said loudly. “I just wanted to look around!”

  “Of course you did not,” said Babbas, and the sadness was there again in his voice, the sound of a teacher coaxing a particularly slow child. “You were called here, as I was before you and the others were before me. No one comes here to look; we come because God needs us.”

  “No,” Charlotte said as emphatically as she could, “I wanted to see the church. Now I’ve seen it, I’ll go. Thank you for showing it to me.” She took a step back, moving towards the passageway. Babbas did not move, but simply said, “You may leave, if you wish, of course. I shall not stop you, but you will find that the world has already forgotten you.”

  Charlotte opened her mouth to say something, to say anything to counter the oddly threatening madness that was coming from the old man’s mouth, but nothing came. She wanted to tell him that he was insane, that the place she had made for herself in the world was as secure as it had ever been, but instead, the thought of Roger popped unbidden into her mind. Or rather, the memory that Roger had been gone when she looked for him a second time. Could he have forgotten her? Gone back to their hotel room because she no longer existed for him? No, it was madness, she was real, she had a home, a job, a boyfriend.

  “He has forgotten you,” said Babbas, once more guessing at what she thinking, seeing her thoughts and fears reflected in her expression. “Already, the skin of the world is healing over the space you have left in it. In a few days, no trace of you will be left. Now, your place is here.”

  Charlotte stared at the old man and took another step back towards the passage. He was looking at her with that calm, lecturer’s assurance again, confident in the absolute truth of what he was saying. She wanted to say, That’s impossible, but she dared not speak. Saying anything would be an admittance of the fact that, just for a moment, she had wondered, and in her wondering, Babbas’ words attained a sort of reality. But he couldn’t be right, could he? It was an absurdity spouted by an old man driven mad by solitude and religious extremism. Wasn’t it? How could he believe it? she asked herself, and in that moment, she realized that she did not want to leave yet. She had to persuade him of his folly, make him see that he was wrong. Frantically, she went through the things she could say that might puncture his reality and let hers in. Finally, she came across what she felt was the perfect argument.

  “But I can’t,” she said, “I don’t believe, and how can I have been called if I don’t believe?”

  Babbas did not reply and Charlotte thought, for the shortest time, that she’s done it, had made him see his error. But then, the sad little smile never leaving his face, he said, “Believe in what? This church, this place? It is all around you, more solid than you own flesh can ever hope to be. God, perhaps? Well, he does not care, he exists outside of your beliefs or mine and He does not need your faith or mine to continue. Ah, but I see that it is not Him that you do not believe in, but the function of this place. You think, maybe, that all here is ceremony without purpose, or that the purpose itself has become obsolete, like the act of watering a dead plant?”

  Babbas’ smile widened into a grin that showed his teeth. Under his eyebrows, his eyes were lost in pools of flickering shadow. “This is no place of idle ceremony,” he said. “Watch.”

  Babbas took hold of Charlotte’s arm in a grip that was gentle but unyielding and pulled her to one corner of the pit in the floor. Nodding at her, he took hold of the torch and removed it from the bracket in the floor. Holding it high over his head like a lantern, he retreated to the far side of the cavern and stood in the entrance to the passage. With the torch above him, the light danced more frenziedly around him. The walls, their colours melting and merging, were flames about Charlotte’s skin and felt herself try to retreat from them, wrapping her arms tightly around her stomach. She made to step away, but with his free hand, Babbas gestured to the pit by her feet. She looked down.

  The surface of the darkness was writhing and bucking. Even as she gasped in surprise and fear, Charlotte imagined some great creature roiling and thrashing just below the surface of inky water. There were no reflections within the pit or the boiling darkness.

  Charlotte never knew how long she watched the moving darkness for; it may have been one minute or one hour. She only knew that she was mesmerized by the rippling thing that moved before her. There was no light in it, but there were colours, things she could neither name nor even recognize, flashes and sparks and flows that moved and swirled and came and went. She felt herself become trapped in it, like a fly in amber, and it was only with an effort that she pulled herself away, brought her mind back in to herself.

  The darkness in the corner of the pit nearest her had risen.

  The black, moving thing had crept up and was lapping at the edge of the pit and tiny strands of it had slithered out onto the marble floor. It no longer looked like a liquid to Charlotte, but like some shadowed thing slowly reaching out tentacles, sending them questing across the marble floor. They reminded her of tree roots groping blindly through the earth for sustenance. Even as she watched, the first tendril had found a patch of shadow, cast by the holder that Babbas had removed the torch from. The tendril (or root? or feeler? she did not know how to explain what she was seeing) writhed furiously as it reached the shadow, thickening and pulsing. The shadow itself seemed to bulge and sway and then it was solid, more solid than it ought to be. She could not see the floor through it. More tendrils found other shadows, moving with a greedy hunger, and with them came a sound.

  It was the noise of insects in the night-time, of unidentifiable slitherings and raspings, of rustling feet and creaking, ominous walls. Claws tickled across hard floors and breathing came, low and deep. There was the whisper of saliva slipping down teeth as yellow and huge as the bones of long-dead monsters, of hate given voice and pain that hummed in the blood.

  Charlotte tried to scream as the noise slipped about her but the air became locked in her throat as she looked at her feet and saw that the questing tendrils had reached her. They caressed her gently and then the shadows between her toes thickened, became as impenetrable as velvet. When she tried to lift her foot to kick them away, she felt them cling with a warm tenacity that nuzzled gently at her instep and the back of her ankle. It was soft, like the touch of a lover, and it pulsed with a rhythm all of its own, and then she screamed.

  Charlotte stumbled back as she screamed, and it seemed to her as she stumbled that her own shadow felt different, had a weight and a solidity that it had never had before. She felt it hold on to her knees and ankles, slipping across her skin like rough silk. She kicked out, knowing the irrationality of being frightened of your own shadow but kicking nonetheless, and then her back hit something else, something warm and she screamed even louder. The warm thing wrapped itself around her and she caught a flash of light at her side. She recognized the same sweet, sickly smell as she had caught before and then Babbas was saying in her ear, “It is alright. Do not panic.”

  The old man had the torch in front of Charlotte, its flami
ng head close to the floor. He swept it around in great arcs, forcing it into the shadows and using it as though he were driving an animal away. He was breathing hard, the air coming from his mouth in heavy puffs across her cheek. It was warm and moist and made her want to cringe. The heat of the torch flashed near her foot and she yelped in surprise and pain. She started to cry, helpless in his arms, tears of frustration and fear and anger rolling down her face. She closed her eyes and waited, useless, until the old man let her go.

  “It is gone,” he said simply. Charlotte heard the rattle of the torch being placed back onto its stand. Trembling, she opened her eyes.

  The cavern was normal again or at least, as normal as it had been when she first saw it. The walls still seemed to move with a fluid, balletic grace around her, the light from the torches giving the colours life. Now, the vibrancy she felt was a blessing, something that pinned the contents of the pit down with its warmth and vitality.