The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2003, Volume 14

by Stephen Jones

  They came in like muggers dogging a lone Girl Scout on a train platform.

  “Saaayyy,” Tiny said, swaggering. “I always wanted to kick Frankenstein in the balls to see what he’d do.”

  The Monster looked up, infinite weariness in its face.

  The blades came out. “Give us those bolts and we won’t have to Veg-O-Matic your ass,” said Chispa.

  The Monster stood up, casting all three of them into its shadow. The sight of the knives caused it to wave its huge hands, to ward away the danger, and that was all Tiny needed to interpret as an attack. They swarmed the Monster, right, left and center.

  The Monster grabbed Tiny’s throat as Tiny drove his lock-back knife hilt-deep into its sternum. It grunted but followed through, crushing all the bones in Tiny’s neck. Tiny’s eyes went snowy and he died instantly, hitting the ground like a side of buffalo steak falling off the back of a butcher’s truck. Flaco feinted while Chispa dug in. The Monster backhanded Chispa so hard that his eyes popped out. Worse, his pompadour was mussed for life.

  In another part of the Stairway to Hell, guests witnessing the action had begun to applaud.

  Flaco saw them, felt caught in the act, and his fight-or-flight knob cranked full over to flight. He ran away, grateful that his dead friends could not see him chicken out in real time.

  The Monster growled, once, put-upon and angry. No one else dared to come near it. It pulled the knife from its chest and flung it. Then it resumed its seat in partial shadow, hands rising to obscure its view of the world. It just wanted to be left alone.

  “Hey, mijo,” Chiqui said when she’d spotted Flaco, crouched low near the Haunted Bayou, eyes dulled. “You laying down on the job or you just trying to lure me back into the bushes?” She was game, and dropped a strap, trying to look sexy-cute.

  “Chiquita,” Flaco said, gasping, his voice clogged. “Don’t—”

  “What?”

  Flaco could say no more because he was busy trying to hold his intestines together in his lap. He failed. Chiqui uttered a strangled little cry and nearly backed into the guy standing behind her, the guy in the long cloak and top hat.

  “What the fuck are you?!” she said, whirling, startled out of seeing Flaco, just for a moment. “Fucking Dracula; get the fuck outta here.”

  “I suppose not,” said the man in the cloak.

  “Oh, well, you Mister Hyde or some sorta fucker, then? Fuck, you ain’t no monster.”

  “I suppose not,” said Jack the Ripper, who had lived for a hundred years and would live for a hundred more, as a killer with no face.

  He slid Flaco’s six-inch blade into Chiqui’s esophagus, cutting off further comment and popping a knuckle of vertebra through the back of her neck. He had cut Flaco quickly. With the women, he always tried to take more time.

  “Oh, wow, he cut her, man – cut her like a surgeon!”

  Archie’s insane giggle had grated Mace’s nerves for three kills now, and Mace was starting to think that maybe his partner was beginning to lose his mind.

  “If you don’t shut up and keep down, I’m going to cut you,” Mace said gutturally. “Like a weed-eater. Hand me the other battery.”

  Archie rummaged inside his rucksack of nightfighting-black canvas. “He stuck the knife in them and they died, faster than clicking off a light switch. That was so smooth. Please tell me you got that!”

  “I got it, I got it. Jesus.” Typical, for Archie to think Mace might have missed the shot. Mace wanted to be a cameraman, and would never let a low battery pack louse up a choice composition. “I got it, okay?”

  Then the Mummy got them.

  Archie pitched forward onto Mace, his skull corrugated by inch-deep finger-tracks full of dust and trailing mold. Everything inside his head gushed out under pressure, and as Mace was trying to swing his lens around to capture the moment, he realized the last face he would see was more than three thousand years old, and completely devoid of expression.

  Hymie and Gloria worked clean-up together, one of several details throughout the park. Appropriate to the season, they were in costume too, from their dark blue washable jumpsuits to the paper filters partially masking their faces. Like many of the ambient monsters in the park, they too wore latex gloves, though theirs were surgical. Their shoulder patches read SECURITY and were emblazoned with little handcuffs and lightning bolts.

  “It just gets worse,” Gloria said, her gaze defocused. Her eyes, above the aluminum nose-guard for the mask, were metallic blue-grey in the vague light. “Nobody can just have a nice time anymore. Children don’t have any business with adult drugs, adult weapons, yet here they are, more every year.” She was staring toward the exit to the Haunted Bayou sector. Tourists in, tourists out. No action just now.

  “It wouldn’t be so bad if these gang idiots just killed each other,” said Hymie, who was of the opinion that the world needed fewer stupid people anyway, but was conflicted by his need to sound sympathetic to Gloria’s views. Her jumpsuit revealed her figure as pert and trim and he really wanted to ask her out, after work, for coffee or something.

  Gloria said, “Well, who are we to deny them a little help-along?” Her expression was caught halfway between rueful and bittersweet as her headset radio crackled. She had this habit of pressing the earpiece when she responded, as though she was auditioning in a recording booth. “Copy that, Front-Man, clean-up on Aisle Eight.” Aisle Eight would be the restricted area behind the Bizarre Bazaar.

  Usually they just zipped the body into a bag and slung it into the back of their van. When they had twenty-five stacked up, they traded for a clean van. But the Aisle Eight job was a bonafide mess, and Hymie’s first thought was Wolf Man.

  “What, again?” Gloria shook her head at the mess. “I’m thinking Jack the Ripper got himself into a party mood.” It was funny in a way: the Wolf Man did the real ripping; Jack used tools. The corpse was a casserole from chin to crotch. Together they managed to spatula-roll it into the sterile bag, and once zipped shut, it was just another load.

  “Is this a guy or a girl?” Hymie said.

  “Female. Look at the make-up. Unless it’s a guy in drag. Hell, Hymie, everybody’s wearing make-up tonight; nobody’s who they’re supposed to be. Isn’t that what Hallowe’en’s all about? Disguising yourself?”

  “Damned monsters,” Hymie said, wiping down his suit with an aerosol bottle of disinfectant.

  “The last time I ever trick-or-treated, I was twelve,” she said. “Before poison in the candy and pedophiles behind every door. This neighbor lady named Mrs Burke used to hand out full-sized candy bars. My sister Jeanie and I had to go home and empty our bags. We made two full rounds of the whole neighborhood, walked on streets we couldn’t even name, till almost midnight, and we were okay. We were safe. God, I feel old.”

  “What did you go as?” said Hymie.

  “I went as the sorority vampire chick from Blood of Dracula – scarf, vampire fangs, contrail eyebrows, the whole bit. I thought it was an empowering image. I never went as a princess, or Snow White. I was the Bride of Frankenstein one time, and the Leech Woman.”

  “If more kids were watching those old movies and dressing up, we might not have to do this.”

  “That was then, this is now,” she said. “Besides, we’d be out of a job, so I’m not complaining.” In a lax economy, their particular branch of SECURITY was booming. They had more clean-ups every year.

  Hymie said, “I heard next year they might actually tell the fake monsters about the . . . you know – the ringers.”

  Gloria snorted. “Why? The actors aren’t going to get hurt. We haven’t lost a single one.”

  “What about Dracula, last year?”

  “That was an accident, and it was probably his own fault, or some drunk moron shoved him. It wasn’t – you know, the other thing.”

  Neither of them could summon the words to speak of real monsters.

  “Not only that,” said Gloria, “but if we told the actors too, then nobody wou
ld show up for the auditions. Bad for biz.”

  Together they slung the fresh bag into their van. Hymie’s heart did a little skip-and-jump. He knew about Blood of Dracula; he knew that the movie had been filmed as I Was A Teenage Vampire in the 1950s, and he and Gloria could talk about stuff like that later, after they punched their clock cards for the night.

  He wondered what she was up to for Christmas.

  Somehow, Oscar had made it clear of SpookyNight with no further damage. Somehow, he had put the monster fest behind him, huffing and puffing, on hands and knees, over the grassy hillock on the other side of the security fences. He did not even remember finding his car in the part-time employee lot, or not losing his keys, or two dozen other variables that might have hampered his escape.

  Lot Security waved him through the gate with a grin. Look at that, a monster driving a car, pretty damned funny. I didn’t know lycanthropes could drive a stick.

  Making it back to his apartment without killing himself in a collision was another minor miracle. His attempts to hide his face made him lope, and he was spotted by costumed kids on the sidewalk, being shepherded through treats, with few tricks, by their put-upon parents and handlers. Look, Daddy, it’s the Wolf Man! They all saw him, and not one of them was frightened.

  When he caught sight of himself in his bureau mirror, he startled. His make-up base was smeared, kohling his eyes so they appeared huge and wet. He thought of prostitutes, beaten up and left with shredded hose in some alley. The blend edges of his Wolf Man appliances had peeled. He looked like he was rotting, dying. Sweat had popped in gravid, oily droplets. Hallowe’en had surprised him this year. His skull sloshed with sickly thoughts about classic monsters and make-believe; about the dangers of making the fantasmagoric creatures of the night too cuddly.

  He tried to meter his breathing, and failed. He fought to stabilize his composure, and couldn’t. His emotions were redlining because this year, this season, he had felt something he had never felt before, when playing dress-up and going boo! for minimum wage . . . and in the flash of an instant, the world had changed around him.

  Oscar was scared. To the thudding core of his heart, he was scared to death on Hallowe’en, for the very first time.

  NICHOLAS ROYLE

  Standard Gauge

  NICHOLAS ROYLE WAS BORN IN MANCHESTER in 1963, and has lived in London for the past twenty years. He is the author of four novels: Counterparts, Saxophone Dreams, The Matter of the Heart and The Director’s Cut.

  He has published more than one hundred short stories and has edited eleven anthologies, from Darklands (1991) to The Time Out Book of London Short Stories: Volume 2 (2000).

  As Royle explains: “ ‘Standard Gauge’ was written for a book of photographs of female nudes by photographer Marc Atkins. The idea behind the book, Thirteen, was that thirteen writers would each be sent a randomly selected nude and asked to write a piece to ‘illustrate’ the photograph. Readers may like to try to imagine the nude in this case. Or, better still, track down a copy of Thirteen.”

  THERE ARE TWO THINGS you can be sure of with West London estate agents. One is that the prices will always be higher than the last time you looked. The other is that among the properties for sale or rent there will always be at least one in Sinclair Road.

  Sinclair Road runs from behind Olympia to the top of Addison Gardens in Shepherd’s Bush. It’s a long straight road lined with big Victorian terraced houses divided up into flats. Nothing unusual in that, you might think. But Sinclair Road is actually very unusual indeed.

  Late one blowy afternoon towards the end of last year, I was looking in the window of an estate agent close to Shepherd’s Bush Green when I noticed a couple of places in Sinclair Road. I went into the office intending to score a flat list and get back out on the street as quickly as possible – I’ve nothing against estate agents, I just wish they didn’t always demand your soul in return for a flat list – but both the agents, a man and a woman, were busy and there was no other visible source of information. The man, a well-built dark-skinned guy in his early thirties, was on the phone, twirling a set of keys around his index finger as he exaggerated the charms of a studio flat in Hammersmith Grove to someone on the other end of the line.

  The woman, pipe-cleaner thin, cigarette-lined, looking ten years older than her thirty-odd years, was fielding some bizarre questions from the only other person apart from me in the place. Having dismissed the woman’s invitation to sit down, the questioner used his hands to press against the edge of her desk. Essentially he wanted to know if the properties they sold were divided up vertically or horizontally. It didn’t matter how many different ways he phrased it, the woman seemed unable to give him an answer.

  “We sell flats and houses,” she kept saying. “Some of the houses are divided up into flats.”

  “Horizontally or vertically?” he wanted to know, chopping his hands through the air. “This way or that?”

  Deep gridlines of stress had appeared on the woman’s forehead as if etched there by the man’s hand movements. “I’m sorry,” she said finally. “I don’t think I can help you.”

  Her colleague continued to spiel and twirl, appearing to drag out the conversation. I had no doubt, however, that the caller had hung up.

  What interested me in particular was that as I had entered the office the first words I had heard the crazy guy say were “Sinclair Road”.

  Abruptly, the madman scowled and spun away from the woman’s desk. I saw his face for the first time; his eyes blazed with an unsettling intensity. He pulled open the door and left. I noted the direction he took, then turned to raise my eyebrows at the woman, but she was still wound up, so I quickly requested a flat list. She pulled one out of a drawer and handed it to me without a word. I left the shop and headed down Goldhawk Road. The sky above the Hammersmith & City line bridge was turning a deep pink. Within half an hour it would be that uniform orangey-purple that passes for night in London. The crazy guy turned and went into Vesbar. I stopped outside and watched through the window as the young, the fashionable and the beautiful parted to allow the interloper to approach the bar, where I saw him growl at the staff until they relented, presenting him with what I assumed was a glass of tap water.

  I went in and asked for two beers, pointing to a row of bottles in the chiller.

  “Want a beer?” I asked him.

  He glared at me.

  “I was in the estate agent’s,” I explained. “I’m interested in this vertical/horizontal thing. Have a beer and tell me about it.”

  He turned away.

  “I think I know what you’re talking about,” I lied.

  He turned back.

  “What’s it to you?” he asked, taking the beer.

  “I’m interested.”

  And so he told me. The normal way in which a street is divided up – one house, consisting of a ground floor, first floor and perhaps second floor, next to another – did not reflect the actual reality of these spaces. There was more homogeneity between one first-floor space and the next than between any first-floor space and the ground floor beneath it or the second floor above.

  “I see,” I said, wishing that I’d saved my beer money.

  “Anyway,” he muttered, turning away again. “She wasn’t tall enough.”

  “What?”

  “The estate-agent woman. She wasn’t tall enough.”

  “How could you tell? She was sitting down.”

  “I can tell.”

  He kept looking away, watching people around him, as if an attack could come from any quarter.

  “What’s your name?” I asked him.

  “Marco.”

  “Tall enough for what, Marco?” I asked.

  “It ran just south of here, you know.”

  “What did?”

  “Two minutes’ walk.”

  I thought about buying him another beer, out of pity, and making myself scarce. But I didn’t like to leave him there. He was in the wrong place. Very soo
n after it had opened, Vesbar had started to fill up from early evening onwards with the sort of people you didn’t normally see in Shepherd’s Bush. Young, trendy, furiously smoking; tote bags, tight jackets, Hoxton fins. Where did they come from? They didn’t live in the Bush; you never saw them carrying shopping or entering houses. From which branch of Central Casting did they get bused in? They weren’t of the same stripe as the good-time girls and boys who shivered in shirtsleeves outside the Walkabout on the west side of the Green, or even drawn from the same subset as the exhibition drinkers who had packed out the Slug & Lettuce on the north side the moment it opened. Nor would they be likely to wander down to the Bush Bar & Grill for expensive eats after a couple of swift ones. They were there for the duration. (Earlier in the day it was a different story. The place was almost empty at lunchtime. It was good for meetings with BBC producers who wanted to get out of the office. I’d take my iBook down there and show them my stuff over a mineral water, and they’d say “Mmm, yes. Very nice”, and then never call.)

  “D’you wanna see it?” Marco asked, looking up at me through dirty wisps of hair.

  “See what?” I asked, running a hand over my shaved skull.

  “The old line, the disused line. What I’ve been talking about all this time, for fuck’s sake.”

  I had to admit that I had almost no idea what he’d been talking about, even less now, but I left with him because I rather liked the unnecessary cursing and I didn’t have him pegged as dangerous. We turned off Goldhawk Road into Richford Street.

  Richford Street is mixed. Dentists, psychologists, foreign editors and private finance types rub shoulders with hookers, crack-heads, murderers and various victims of violent crime. I knew a bunch of people down there, primarily drawn from the former group. I wondered where Marco was taking me. I wasn’t carrying my camera, my standard piece of armour in awkward situations.

  At the bottom of Richford Street we kept going. At Trussley Road, Marco stopped.

  “Over there,” he said. To our left was a viaduct carrying the Hammersmith & City line south to Hammersmith. The railway arches had been colonized by car workshops, separate businesses specializing in different makes of vehicle. Marco was pointing across the street to the remains of another railway viaduct. “There.”