The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

by Stephen Jones (ed. )

  The voice again: “Dr Glover . . . can you hear me? We’ve been looking for you. You weren’t in your office and we found you here . . .”

  He lay on a hard floor. He moved an arm. He was not shackled. A flashlight blinded him, and he shielded his eyes.

  “We thought you must’ve gone onto the roof for a breath of air, but there was no sign of you.”

  Suddenly he was sitting up. There were two men. “Who are you!”

  “Night staff. We’ve just found you.”

  He looked around wildly. He was in the picture gallery. The light was dim except for the beam stabbing into his eyes. No gallows. He slid his hand over the polished floor. No sign of a trapdoor.

  “Where is he?” he said

  The men were crouched beside him. Who did he mean, they asked.

  “Jack,” he said. He scrambled to his feet. “Where’s the one they call Jack?”

  The men were silent for a moment. Then one of them said, “There’s only us two, Dr Glover – Maurice and Fred, we do the night watch together.”

  Silence. He looked from one to the other. Maurice and Fred. He opened his mouth but no words came.

  “You must have fainted, Doctor. Did you hurt yourself?”

  “No . . . no, there’s nothing wrong with me.” He looked around the gallery. He got to his feet without help, and after a moment turned cautiously to face them. “Long ago,” he said, knowing that he spoke slyly, “I believe this room had another purpose. Is that so?”

  Both men smiled. “You mean when it was a prison?” said Maurice, the leader. “Someone’s been telling you the old story.” He nodded towards the corner. “It’s true enough. The gallows used to be over there, in the execution chamber.”

  Martin’s mouth was too dry to speak. He was unsteady, and Maurice noticed. “Let’s go down to your room, Dr Glover, and we’ll get you a drink.”

  Sitting at his desk with the companionship of two others he began to recover. “I didn’t know anything about the gallows but I certainly felt strange in that room,” he said.

  They both nodded. “Fred and I can tell you that something lingers in places like that, and if you weren’t feeling too good, well . . .” Maurice shrugged.

  Martin had only hinted at his nightmare, but he had to test what had happened. “I was told . . .” he began and then corrected himself. “People say there have been a lot of suicides here . . . people leaping from the Castle walls.”

  “I’ve never heard of any,” said Maurice, and Fred agreed.

  “But there’s a list,” Martin insisted.

  Both men looked blank and shook their heads and in his exasperation Martin suddenly burst out, “Jack told me the Castle kept a record!” Jack again, and there was no Jack. He looked away. “I’m sorry.”

  It was Fred, the quieter of the two, who shuffled for a moment before he stood up and went to a filing cabinet in the corner of the tiny room that had at one time been a dungeon. He had to rummage before he took out what looked like an old account book and laid it on Martin’s desk. “I don’t know about suicides,” he said, “but I reckon this is a sort of register.”

  Martin opened it. In fact it was an account book with columns marked in red ink. There was a list of dates and against each was a person’s name, and beneath that another name and then a sum of money. In each case the amount was one guinea.

  Martin looked up. “They can’t be suicides.”

  “No, Doctor. Not suicides, but they all died here in the Castle. They were executed here. Murderers mostly.”

  He looked again at the columns. The names of hanged men, their age, and against each one the name of his trade. On the line beneath every one was written: Paid J. Ketch, one guinea.

  “That was for a job well done, Doctor Glover.” Both watchmen were smiling. “Jack Ketch was the name this city used to give to the public hangman – so as no one knew who he really was.”

  “And they do say that Jack made all his clients suffer,” said Maurice. “Kind of played with them before he turned them off. And he never got the drop right so they suffered a lot more than they had to – more strangled than hanged.”

  Martin nodded. His eyes dipped again to the page, the column of names and, at the bottom of the list, one in particular: Martin Jones, aged twelve, thief, and then the trade he was apprenticed to glover.

  CHRISTOPHER FOWLER

  The Luxury of Harm

  CHRISTOPHER FOWLER HAS WRITTEN many award-winning novels and collections of short stories. His 2003 book Full Dark House won the British Fantasy “August Derleth” Award for Best Novel and was also a finalist for the Crime Writer Association’s Dagger Award. The Water Room was short-listed for the CWA’s People’s Choice Award in 2004, and he won British Fantasy Awards for his short story “American Waitress” the same year and for his novella “Breathe” in 2005.

  When he’s not writing horror or dark comedy, he’s creating new adventures for Bryant & May, his elderly detectives of the sinister. He lives in King’s Cross, London, with a very nice view of St Paul’s Cathedral. His latest novel is White Corridor, and his upcoming collection of twenty-one new short stories is titled Old Devil Moon.

  As Fowler admits: “ ‘The Luxury of Harm’ is a mean-spirited blend of real-life events that included being Best Man at an old friend’s wedding and going to a horror festival in an English coastal town. I don’t think I’ll be invited back after they read this.”

  WHEN I WAS ELEVEN, I was warned to stay away from a new classmate with freckles and an insolent tie, so naturally we became inseparable partners in disruption, reducing our educators to tears of frustration.

  For the next eight years our friendship proved mystifying to all. Simon horrified our teachers by illegally racing his Easy Rider motorbike across the football field. We took the deputy headmaster’s car to pieces, laying it out in the school car park as neatly as a stemmed Airfix kit. We produced a libellous school magazine with jokes filched from TV programmes, and created radio shows mocking everyone we knew. When you find yourself bullied, it’s best to team up with someone frightening. Simon perverted me from learning, and I made his soul appear salvageable whenever he super-glued the school cat or made prank phone-calls. I fretted that we would get into trouble, and he worked out how we could burn down the school without being caught.

  Boys never tire of bad behaviour. Through the principals of economics and the theory of gravity, the Wars of the Roses and Shakespeare’s symbolism, we cut open golf balls and tied pupils up in the elastic, carved rocket-ships into desks and forged each others’ parental signatures on sick notes.

  During puberty, Simon bought a mean leather jacket. I opted for an orange nylon polo-neck shirt with Velcro fastenings. He looked like James Dean. I looked like Simon Dee. In order to meet girls, we signed up for the school opera. Simon met a blue-eyed blonde backstage while I appeared as a dancing villager in a shrill, off-key production of The Bartered Bride. We double-dated. I got the blonde’s best friend, who had legs like a bentwood chair and a complexion like woodchip wallpaper, but her father owned a sweet shop so we got free chocolate. I rang Simon’s girlfriends for him because he was inarticulate, and hung around his house so much that his mother thought I’d been orphaned. Our friendship survived because he gave me visibility, confidence and a filtered charisma that reached me like secondary smoking. He stopped me from believing there was no one else in the world who understood me. And there he remained in my mind and heart, comfortable and constant, throughout the years, like Peter Pan’s shadow, ready to be reattached if ever I needed it, long after his wasteful, tragic death.

  But before that end came, we shared a special moment. By the time this happened, we had gone our separate ways; he became the conformist, with a country home and family, and I turned into the strange one, living alone in town. Recontacting Simon, I persuaded him to come to a horror convention with me, in a tiny Somerset town called Silburton, where the narrow streets were steeped in mist that settled across the river es
tuary, and fishing boats lay on their sides in the mud like discarded toys. The place reeked of dead fish, tar and rotting shells, and the locals were so taciturn it seemed that conversation had been bred out of them.

  The hotel, a modern brick block that looked like a caravan site outhouse, had no record of our booking, and was full because of the convention. In search of a guesthouse, we found a Bed & Breakfast place down beside the river ramps and lugged bags up three flights through narrow corridors, watching by the landlady in case we scratched her Indian-restaurant wallpaper. The beds felt wet and smelled of seaweed.

  By the time we returned to the convention hotel, the opening night party was in full swing. A yellow-furred alien was hovering uncertainly in the reception area, struggling to hold a pint mug in his rubber claws, and a pair of local Goth girls clung to the counter, continually looking around as though they were afraid that their parents might wander in and spot them, raising their arms to point and scream like characters from Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

  Every year the convention had a theme, and this year it was “Murderers on Page and Screen”, so there were a few Hannibal Lecters standing around, including a grinning lad with the top of his head sawn off. The bar staff took turns to stare at him through the serving hatch.

  “Is this really what you do for fun?” Simon asked me, amazed that I could take pleasure from hanging out with guys dressed as Jason and Freddy, films no one even watched any more. “Who comes to these things?”

  “Book people, lonely people,” I said simply, gesturing at the filling room. “Give it a chance,” I told him. “There’s no attitude here, and it gets to be fun around midnight, when everyone’s drunk. Come on, you said your life was very straight. This is something new.”

  Simon looked unsure; he hardly ever read, so the dealers’ rooms, the panels and the literary conversation held no interest for him. He talked about his kids a lot, which was boring. I wanted him to be the kid I’d admired at school. He could relate to drinking, though, and relaxed after a couple of powerful local beers that swirled like dark sandstorms in their glasses. Simon could drink for England. “So,” he asked, “are they all writers looking for tips?”

  “In a way. Take this year’s theme. We’re intrigued by motivation, method, character development. How do you create a realistic murderer? Who would make a good victim?” I tried to think of a way of involving Simon in my world. “Take the pair of us, for example. I’m on my home turf here. People know me. If I went missing, there would be questions asked. For once, you’re the outsider. You were once the tough guy, the bike-riding loner nobody knew, and you’re unknown here. That would make you the perfect victim.”

  “Why?” Simon wasn’t the sort to let something beat him. His interest was piqued, and he wanted to understand.

  “Because taking you out would require an act of bravery, and would be a show of strength. Killers seek notoriety to cover their inadequacies. But they also enjoy the remorse of loss.”

  Simon snorted. “How the hell does that work?”

  “There’s a strange pleasure to be taken in melancholy matters, don’t you think? A kind of tainted sweetness. Look at the Goths and their fascination with death and decay.”

  “Okay, that’s the victim sorted, so who’s the killer?”

  “Look around. Who would you choose?”

  Simon scoped out the bar area. “Not the Jason or Freddy look-alikes. They’re geeks who would pass out at the sight of a paper cut. They’d be happy to watch, but they wouldn’t act.”

  “Good, keep going.”

  “And the Goths couldn’t kill, even though they’re professional mourners. They look tough but play gentle.”

  “Excellent.”

  “But him, over there.” He tapped his forefinger against the palm of his hand, indicating behind him. “He looks like he’s here to buy books about guys who murder their mothers. It wouldn’t be such a big step to committing a murder.”

  “Yeah, we get a few of those at conventions. They sit in the front row at the Q&As, and are always the first to raise their hands with a question. There’s one guy, a retired doctor, who even gives me the creeps. Over there.” I pointed out the cadaverous Mr Henry, with his greasy comb-over and skin like the pages of a book left in the sun. He never missed a convention, even though he wasn’t a writer or publisher, or even a reader. “He once told me he owns one of the country’s largest collections of car crash photographs, and collects pictures of skin diseases.”

  “That’s gross. I knew there would be freaks here.”

  “Relax, he’s too obvious. If there’s one trick to serial killer stories, it’s making sure that the murderer is never someone you suspect. Have you noticed there are some very cute girls hanging around the bar?”

  “You’re right about that,” Simon grudgingly admitted, watching two of them over the top of his glass.

  “You should go and make their acquaintance,” I suggested. “I’ll just be here talking weird books with old friends, or the other way around.”

  I got into a long discussion/argument about the merits of Psycho II and III, about Thomas M. Disch and William Hope Hodgson and what makes a good story, and lost all track of the time. I only checked my watch when the waiter started pulling shutters over the bar. Bidding farewell to my fellow conventioneers, I staggered off through the damp river air toward the guest-house.

  Somehow I managed to overshoot the path, and ended up on the seaweed-slick ramp to the harbour. The only sounds were the lapping of the water and the tinging of masts. The tide was coming in, and the boats were being raised from their graves like reanimating corpses. Drunk and happy and suddenly tired, I sat down on the wet brown sand and allowed the sea-mist to slowly reveal its secrets. It formed a visible circle around me, like the kind of fog in a video game that always stays the same distance no matter how hard you run. A discarded shovel someone had used to dig for lugworms stood propped against the harbour wall. Orange nylon fishing nets, covered with stinking algae, were strung out like sirens’ shawls.

  And through the mist I gradually discerned a slender figure, his head lolling slightly to one side, one arm lower than the other, like the skeleton in Aurora’s “Forgotten Prisoner” model kit, or the one that features on my cover of The Seventh Pan Book of Horror Stories. It was standing so still that it seemed to be more like the unearthed figurehead of a boat than a man.

  There was a strong smell of ozone and rotting fish. The figure raised a ragged, dripping sleeve to its skull, rubbing skin to bone. It seemed as though it had ascended from the black bed of the sea.

  “I fell off the fucking dock and tore my jacket. I am so incredibly slaughtered,” said Simon, before tipping over and landing on his back in the sand with a thump.

  The next morning, screaming seagulls hovered so close to my bedroom window that I could see inside their mouths. Shafts of ocean sunlight bounced through the window, punching holes in my brain. My tongue tasted of old duvet. I needed air.

  I knocked on Simon’s door, but there was no answer. Breakfast had finished, and the landlady had gone. The Easy Rider motorbike still stood in the car park behind the guest house.

  The tide was out and the mist had blown away, leaving the foreshore covered in silvery razor-clams and arabesques of green weed. On the stone walkway above the harbour, an elderly lady in a tea-cosy hat marched past with a shopping bag. There was no one else about. The gulls shrieked and wheeled.

  Carefully, I walked across the beach to the spot where Simon had fallen, and knelt down. It took a moment to locate the exact place. Rubbing gently at a patch of soft sand, I revealed his sand-filled mouth, his blocked nostrils, one open shell-scratched eye that stared bloodily up into the sky. I rose and stood hard on his face, rocking back and forth until I had forced his head deeper into the beach. I carefully covered him over with more sand, smoothing it flat and adding some curlicues of seaweed and a couple of cockleshells for effect. Finally I threw the shovel I had used on his neck as far
as I could into the stagnant water of the harbour.

  As I headed back to the convention hotel, ready to deliver my lecture on “Random Death: The Luxury of Harm”, a heartbreaking happiness descended upon me. I knew that there would be plenty of time to savour the full delicious loss of my old friend in the days, the months, the years to come.

  MARK SAMUELS

  Sentinels

  MARK SAMUELS WAS BORN in Clapham, London. He is the author of two collections, The White Hands and Other Weird Tales and Black Altars, as well as the novella The Face of Twilight. His third collection of short stories is provisionally titled Glyphotech and Other Macabre Processes and is scheduled to be published by Midnight House.

  His stories have appeared in both The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series, along with such recent anthologies as Summer Chills, Inferno and Alone on the Darkside. He has been nominated twice for the British Fantasy Award.

  “When my friend Adam Clayton brought out his non-fiction book Subterranean City in 2000,” Samuels recalls, “its publication reawakened in me an interest in the abandoned ‘ghost’ stations of the London Underground tube network, which I then began to research in more detail.

  “This research somehow got mixed up in my imagination with a 1970s film called Deathline starring one of my favourite actors, Donald Pleasance. His portrayal of a seedy police inspector, in turn, got mixed up with ‘Death and the Compass’ by Jorge Luis Borges. This story is the final result.”

  INSPECTOR GRAY’S INVOLVEMENT in the affair was due to a combination of ill fortune and the photographic cover of a London “urban legends” paperback called The Secret Underground. He should not really have been in that part of London at the time, but had been forced to stay late in the office and complete a batch of gruelling paperwork required by his superior the following morning. Had he driven past a matter of seconds before, he would have seen nothing. After all, he was off-duty and his main concern was to get back to his dingy flat in Tufnell Park, sink a few glasses of whiskey and forget about that day.