The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

by Stephen Jones (ed. )

  Maddox looked around to check that Jack was still in tow, then moved on.

  He stood silently in cold meats, swaying very gently.

  “Gone,” he said quietly. “All gone. Disappeared.”

  “What, Daddy? What’s gone?”

  “Wait there, Jack. I’ll be back. Don’t move.”

  He walked to the end of the aisle and turned the corner. He walked to the end of the next aisle and then the next, looking at the items on the shelves, familiar brands, labels he’d seen a thousand times. All meaningless. He recognised nothing. What was he looking for? Bread and milk? Where were they? He couldn’t remember. He went back to where he’d left the trolley. It was there, but Jack wasn’t.

  He looked up and down the aisle. The brand names that had meant nothing to him a moment ago now leapt out at him, shouting, screaming for attention. It was as if the two sides of the aisle had suddenly shifted inward. Jack was nowhere to be seen.

  “Jack!”

  Maddox ran to the end of the aisle and looked both ways. He looked up the next aisle, then up the next and the one after. He kept calling Jack’s name. Shoppers stopped and stared, but Maddox moved faster and shouted louder. He looked at the line of tills and wondered if Jack had gone that way. He could already be out of the store, wandering around the car park, about to be run over or abducted. He told himself to calm down, that he would find him, but at the same time another voice suggested that sometimes the worst thing imaginable did happen. It had before, after all. Would this be the next case heard about on the news? A half-page in the paper. London man loses child in supermarket. Brian Maddox, 42, took his eyes off his son for one moment and he was gone. But he hadn’t taken his eyes off him for just one moment. He’d gone to the next aisle, or the one after. He’d gone away. He could have been gone five minutes. Ten, fifteen.

  “Jack!”

  “Sir?”

  A young lad, a shelf stacker, was standing in front of him. Maddox told him his son had disappeared. The shelf stacker asked for a description. Maddox gave him one and the lad said he would start from the far end of the store and advised Maddox to start from the other. They would meet in the middle and most likely one of them would have found Jack. Maddox did as he was told and neither of them found Jack. Maddox was short of breath, dry in the mouth, his chest rising and falling, unbearable pressure being exerted on his temples. He could no longer call out Jack’s name without his voice breaking. More staff were on hand now. They took Maddox’s arms and led him to an office where he was sat down and given a drink of water.

  “Maybe the boy’s with his mother?” someone suggested.

  Maddox shook his head.

  “Do you have a number for her?”

  Maddox produced Christine’s number. He was dimly aware of a phone call being made. The office was full of people. Managers, security, cashiers. They swopped remarks, observations. Some expressions hardened. “What did she say?” a voice asked. “There is no son,” another one answered. “No kids at all, apparently.” A security guard replayed videotape on a monitor. Grainy, vivid. Maddox entering the store on his own with a trolley. Standing in front of the newspapers, on his own. Leaving the trolley in cold meats. No unattached children.

  They gave Maddox another glass of water while waiting for the police to arrive. The store didn’t want to press charges. “What would be the point?” Maddox was free to go. “Has this happened before?” Shake of the head. “If it were to happen again, the store would have to consider taking action . . . Very upsetting for other shoppers . . . You will see someone?”

  Maddox sat in the car park, behind the wheel of the car. He hadn’t got what he’d come for. The milk and the bread. Maybe it didn’t matter any more. He sat in the car for a long time and only turned the key in the ignition when he realised the sky over central London was beginning to get dark.

  He didn’t go to the house. He didn’t imagine Christine would be there, but it was kind of irrelevant either way. Instead, he drove to South Tottenham. He drove through the top of the congestion charge zone. It didn’t matter any more. It was rush hour. It took an hour and a half to get to N15. The street door was open. He walked up, entered the flat. Thump-thump-thump from downstairs. He took out his phone and sent a text message, then stood by the window for a while watching the street. He left the phone on the window ledge and pulled down the ladder and climbed into the loft, retrieving the ladder and closing the trap door behind him. Stooping, he walked over to the suitcase, which smelled strongly of formalin. He knelt in front of it for several minutes, resting his hands on the lid, then touching the clasps.

  He released the clasps and opened the case.

  It was empty.

  He frowned, then sat and stared at the empty case for some time, listening to the creaks of the beams and the muffled basslines from the downstairs flat. He wondered if Karen would come, how long she might be. He wasn’t sure what he would do when she arrived.

  Slowly, he rose, then lowered the upper half of his body into the case, folding his legs in afterwards. Inside the case, the smell of formalin was very strong. He stared at the pine beams, the cobwebs, the shadows clinging to the insulating material. He could still faintly hear his neighbour’s loud music, which Karen had been unable to hear, and then, rising above it, the clear and unmistakeable chime of his phone, down in the flat, announcing the arrival of a text message. He started to uncurl his body and the lid of the case fell forward.

  He had twisted his body far enough that the hump of his shoulder caught the closing lid.

  He climbed out and lay down next to the suitcase.

  A minute later his phone chimed a reminder.

  He thought about Linzi. Linzi had been good for him, until things went bad. He wondered where she was. He looked at the empty suitcase again and plucked a long fine strand of fair hair from the lining. He thought about Karen and her need, unacknowledged, to be looked after. He remembered how vulnerable Linzi had seemed when he saw her for the first time.

  Karen would be along soon. Probably. She hadn’t let him down yet.

  He still had options.

  MICHAEL BISHOP

  Dr Prida’s Dream-Plagued Patient

  MICHAEL BISHOP HAS PUBLISHED seventeen novels in his nearly thirty years as a freelance writer, including the Nebula Award-winning No Enemy But Time; Unicorn Mountain, winner of the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award; and Brittle Innings, an imaginative study of minor-league baseball in the Deep South during World War II and winner of the Locus Award for best fantasy novel.

  His short-fiction collections include Blooded on Arachne, One Winter in Eden, Close Encounters with the Deity, Emphatically Not SF Almost, At the City Limits of Fate, Blue Kansas Sky and Brighten to Incandescence: 17 Stories, featuring an incandescent wraparound cover by his son, Jamie. His recent novelettes “The Door Gunner” and “Bears Discover Smut” have each won Southeastern Science Fiction Association awards for best short fiction.

  He has published numerous essays and reviews, including a collection from PS Publishing, A Reverie for Mister Ray, also with an evocative wraparound cover by his son, and edited such anthologies as Light Years and Dark, winner of the Locus Award for best anthology, three Nebula Award volumes and, most recently, A Cross of Centuries: Twenty-Five Imaginative Tales About the Christ.

  He lives in Pine Mountain, Georgia, with his wife Jeri, an elementary-school counsellor, and he is currently Writer in Residence at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Georgia.

  “I’m not very keen on vampire fiction,” Bishop admits, “although I recognise this bias as a form of bigotry, based on stereotypes, and know that any theme or subject matter admits of excellent work if the writer focuses, rethinks, and eschews cliché. Have I done that here? I hope so.

  “My inspiration for the story was an invitation from the editors of a relatively new magazine, Aberrant Dreams, to submit to them and the fact that I’d come to the end of a semester of full-time teaching, with four writing classes that kept me so busy e
ither preparing for each new session or grading essays that I wrote nothing of my own (beyond blood-red notes in the margins of student papers) for over four months.

  “When January came, then, and I had my first free day in a long time, I wrote ‘Dr Prida’s Dream-Plagued Patient’ at our kitchen table in longhand with a fine felt-tipped pen in four or five hours of concentrated work. Careful readers will note that I afflicted my narrator with a devilish horror of the mundane and conventional, and that aberrant dreams play a significant, moody role in my quasi-Lovecraftian piece because I was writing for a magazine with that provocative name.”

  WELL, OF COURSE, I sleep during the day, Dr Prida – in a storm pit or canning cellar (whichever term you prefer) beneath the pantry of a country Victorian home in an aggressively modernizing county in a Southern state whose denizens display little belief in and even less tolerance for creatures of my ilk. I lie in a rotting wooden johnboat on a slab of plywood atop a pair of stumpy-legged sawhorses, and my diurnal companions – in the clayey darkness beneath the prosaic brightness of day – include spiders of several species, spotted camel crickets, and bewildered moths. (The moths’ wings often fleck my lips and forehead with their chalky powder.) The darkness attracts and soothes, I guess, not only these unlovely insects but also the rarely sated longings of my forfeited soul. Selah.

  I’m here this evening, Dr Prida, at the urging of an early mentor and under protest, but must admit that your gracious couchside manner and delicate bone-china complexion – is that last observation sexist? – have considerably palliated my initial prejudice against this visit. Perhaps it will in fact lessen my anxiety, counteract my depression, and give me the necessary incentive to explore those perilous extremities of night – dawn and dusk – with a bravado heretofore alien to me. By the way, I like your chignon. And the flush at your throat derives, I feel sure, from the lamp beside your wing-back rather than from the somatic manifestations of a quickened pulse. After all, with that Chopin nocturne playing almost inaudibly in the background, your office has a truly calming ambience – indeed, the security of my canning cellar without the attendant dankness.

  Ah, how charmingly you chuckle. All right, then, laugh. By that descriptive verb, Dr Prida, I meant no derogation of your femininity. Willie Shakespeare had a character – was it Edgar in King Lear? – say that ripeness is all, but in another context. I place more value on specificity, whatever the circumstances, and am like to remark a person’s looks and actions, not to mention speech, with more apprehensive detail than does your ordinary machine-stamped client. No offense, of course, to either you or those pitiable lockstep clones. Let me also note that you have decidedly appealing little wren tracks beside your eyes when you frown.

  My dreams? You want to know what sort of aberrant dreams I have lying in my great-grandfather’s johnboat in my great-grandmother’s canning cellar? What would any sane and cogent professional expect? They appal me, my dreams. They make the plush beneath my fingernails engorge and the flesh of my scrotum tighten. My languid heart accelerates, my flaccid lungs assume the groaning liveliness of bellows, my back arches, and my agitated body balances on the sensitive points of my shoulder blades, coccyx, and heels. A low-level galvanic current crisscrosses my chest and abdomen and streams discontinuously, maddeningly, from a shifting locus in my brain to my fingertips and toes. An onlooker would no doubt suppose me electrified: an epileptic suffering a fit at once disruptive and shackling. If only I could awaken.

  Their substance? Relate the substance of these dreams? Specificity? Of course. You want from me only what I pride myself on providing: namely, facts: namely, details; namely, the distillation of the synaptic impulses informing my visions into words that narrate and evoke. Very well. How can I deny you? How can I transgress against the eminence who made me this way – and who sent me to you – by withholding that which, fully aired and processed, could perhaps end my torment? But, Dr Prida, I hesitate – out of conscience as well as shame – to subject you, a respectable professional woman, to the specifics, to the dreadful aberrance of these subterranean sleep-engendered imaginings. I hesitate to alarm, repel, violate, and, ultimately, estrange you. I cringe from disclosing the heinous constructs of my id, whose depravity only a god or a child could visit without life-altering damage.

  You scoff? Well, go ahead. As young as you look, you claim to have practiced a decade and a half? You’ve heard – as confessions – the laments of anorexics, adulterers, pederasts, fools, bigots, self-mutilators, poltroons, traitors, murderers, and blasphemers? Nothing I can say – no shameful act I might reveal – could possibly dent your therapist’s armor, much less pierce it and render you, the queen of unshakable aplomb, a gibbering parody of your degree-bearing self? Very well, then, I’ll speak. Remember that I warned you. Remember that I hold in higher regard that kernel of innocence at your venerable core than you do yourself . . .

  Three days ago, in my johnboat coffin amid the pseudo-foetuses of canned squash and tomatoes in their ill-shelved Mason jars, I had three devastatingly aberrant dreams in a row. That I survived even one of them – that I outlasted all three – even yet astonishes me, Dr Prida. The first alone would have unmanned nine-tenths of the diurnal sleepers of my unhappy persuasion – indeed, shocked them to utter insentience and left them the unresisting prey of brown recluses, camel crickets, and mice. Forgive what must sound like unmitigated boasting, but I know the Achilles’ heels of my colleagues, as well as my own, and that first dream let fly its pernicious arrow at that highly vulnerable portion of my psychic anatomy, and struck it square on.

  The dream: get to the dream. I’ll recount it as starkly as it inflicted itself upon me: I awoke – not in reality, but in the washed-out opalescent landscape of my vision – and struggled out of bed into a chamber of undivided white: white ceiling, white floor, white walls, white bedstead, white clothes-tree, and, upon this clothes-tree, an assortment of white clothes for the ten-year-old boy that, in dreaming, I had become. I had to garb myself, for I had awakened naked and the stinging brightness of the chamber required an immediate adjustment on my part to prevent my going blind. Shuddering at the touch of each item, I donned a pair of schoolboy briefs, a ribbed white wife-beater undershirt, a pair of white-duck trousers, a starched white dress shirt, and a hooded white sweatshirt, whose hood allowed me some small shelter from the overweening brightness. Head down, I groped my way back to the bed, found a pair of white cotton sweat socks on the white feather pillow, and pulled one of these socks onto my pallid toes, over my albino’s instep, and up and over my leprous left ankle. The sock had no end. It covered my calf, knee, thigh, groin, and, by some inexplicable geometric convolution, my midriff, torso, and neck, so that I was finally imprisoned in a snowy full-body strait-stocking that clung to nearly every square inch of me, mercilessly. When I screamed, still sleeping, this first dream unraveled – without, however, releasing me to the dank but comforting reality of my great-grandmother’s canning cellar.

  Ah, my recitation has left you speechless, Dr Prida. I understand. What could more reliably silence a psychiatrist than the indelible image of an ignorant child wrapped in a tenacious white strait-stocking? You smile – no doubt to solace me, to convey by a compassionate look that not even this horror estranges you, that I may speak freely, with no inhibiting fear of your outrage or censure. All right, then, my second dream, which followed the first after an interval of chaotic blankness and erupted into my apprehensive consciousness in the workaday vicinity of noon.

  Not surprisingly, this daymare centered on eating.

  As a young man of twenty-five or -six, I sat in a rustic Victorian kitchen before an immense porcelain tureen of potato soup. Beside this tureen resided a large white platter hosting a grilled sandwich of mozzarella or possibly provolone cheese, a hardboiled egg, and a scoop of macaroni pasta with almond slices, buttons of watercress, and shards of sun-bleached celery. From the table’s white Formica surface a tumbler of skin milk rose up like a small Doric pillar. N
auseated, I spooned soup, nibbled at the sandwich, bit off tatters of egg, sampled the pasta, and sipped the milk in a predictably ceaseless repeating sequence that my dream self had no power to halt. The peristaltic action of my throat continued without hindrance or interruption until white tears began falling into my soup and a muffling lambency-shot fog filled the kitchen, putting a gauzy clamp on both my esophagus and my second dream.

  You smile again? More comfort for a troubled client? More compassion for a deviant dreamer? Of course, of course. What else do we pay you for, Dr Prida? Who else can we turn to? But you see now why shame mantles me and my conscience gnaws. But if I’ve gone this far, how may I refrain from unburdening myself of my final dream, my third and most ruthlessly aberrant horror show?

  Listen, then, Dr Prida. Listen as you have listened to the others, and withhold your condemnation – your outrage and its inevitable articulation – until I have wholly purged myself of this psychic poison. Know, though, that it has a narrative arc absent from the first two dreams and an additional character: a story as opposed to the static imagery of those inchoate earlier visions. Know, too, that had my mentor not found me in the throes of an abreactive post-dream spasm and stepped in to help me, I might have died forever. The word forever, at least in this hypothetical projection, has more finality to it than I, or any of my anonymous half-, quarter-, or no-blood siblings, can fully bear.

  Listen:

  As a man of forty or so (my apparent age this evening, Dr Prida), I stand at an altar in a white tuxedo and exchange vows with a woman twelve years my junior clad in a traditional white bridal gown. She gazes upon me with a nonjudgmental gentleness as rare as midsummer sleet. After the wedding and a grand reception in a country Victorian house appointed ivory and cream – from interior dome to transoms to louvered shutters to wainscoting to balusters – we ride in a bone-hued limousine to a marble villa on the crest of a mountain of quartz and milky chalcedony. Here, in the last light of the afternoon in a high-windowed room overlooking a valley carpeted with white mums and pale gardenias, we consummate with neither bites nor strangle marks the promise of our vows and lie in each other’s arms until we move again in the same tender way and so traverse the entire self-negating night to the doorstep of morning . . . at which point my real body, the one in the pit, began to thrash in dread-stricken protest against the conventional harmoniousness of such a wholesome union. And, as I’ve already said, I might have died forever but for the timely intercession of Gregor, your undying father.