The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2003, Volume 14

by Stephen Jones

  A cold touch on his forehead wakened him. A tongue, he thought – a tongue too cold to be alive. He’d thrown off the bedclothes before he realised he’d felt merely a draught from the kitchen window. He bruised an elbow on the hardened mattress as he raised himself to blink. The sash was several inches wider open than he’d left it, and a pale ungainly object was advancing across the kitchen floor towards him. When he found his eyes with the knuckles of his prop of an arm and rubbed his vision clear he saw that the intruder was a naked boy about a year old, trailing wisps of cobweb.

  Leonard filled his lungs to yell at the floor overhead, but let the breath whisper out of him. Surely even Mr Flanagan wasn’t capable of this latest trick – couldn’t have dropped the baby into the kitchen without making it scream. It looked healthy enough. Leonard staggered to his feet and backed away from it to search the rooms. Except for the baby he appeared to be on his own. He had to get rid of it before anyone realised it had been there, but he was about to be late for work. He wrapped the baby in a towel and buttoned a raincoat around it and himself on the way to venturing unwashed and unshaven out of the house.

  Every step bumped the baby against his chest. When he tried to put on speed his burden squirmed and wailed, and he had to rub it through the coat until it subsided. Though the parents and children in the streets weren’t close enough to notice, they gave him no chance to leave the baby anywhere. He had to pass an empty pushchair outside an open door, because mothers were in conversation not a hundred yards away. There would be plenty of prams outside the school, he almost reassured himself aloud.

  There were, but all the parents seemed unusually aware of him. Why couldn’t they be lost in chat as usual? “I’ll be out as soon I’m dressed,” he told them, waving at the school to prove he had a free arm as well as the one that was clutching his chest. He was making his dainty way across the schoolyard when the front of his trousers grew warm and wet. He thought age and panic had ambushed him until he realised that the moisture was trickling from higher up. He waddled splay-legged into the school, desperate to be unobserved for just the few minutes that leaving the baby somewhere would take, but Miss Devine caught sight of him through her doorway at once. “Feeling the cold, Mr Bailey?”

  “Got a bit of one. A bit of a temperature,” he babbled, unable to remember how hot the day was, incapable of glancing down at his coat for fear a stain was visible on him. He stared hot-eyed around the office and was suddenly inspired. “Someone’s looking for you in the yard,” he said.

  “Didn’t you tell them to come in?”

  “They can’t,” he assured her, and rubbed his bulging chest as he tried to think why. The only reason he could manufacture was “They said they can’t.”

  After a pause that turned Leonard’s chest and trousers wetter, the secretary sighed and stood up not too straight with a groan and trudged stooping out of the room. Leonard darted to the filing cabinet behind the desk and began to pull the drawers forth, only to slam them back in. He was close to despairing when the bottom drawer proved to be empty except for several erotic magazines, presumably confiscated. He snatched his coat open, snapping off a button, and laid the baby on top of a glossy woman with gigantic breasts, then tucked the sodden towel around the wriggling limbs and slid the drawer shut. He dragged his orange uniform over the raincoat to hide his stained chest and crotch, and almost buttoned himself up wrong in his haste to be clear of the office before Miss Devine returned.

  He’d barely stepped out of the building when she came at him, head low. “Who’s supposed to be wanting me?”

  “They must have gone.” He surveyed the playground in an attempt to seem convincing, but she recoiled from him, wagging a hand in front of her face. “I know. Smelly old man,” he said. “It’s because I’m ill.”

  He raised his pole and strode across the playground, not sure whether to ignore or joke with the children who held their noses and giggled at him. He hadn’t time to play with them, he was needed on the road. He dipped his pole almost as low as the oncoming windscreens until a car halted with a grudging screech. “Come along,” he called to the mothers and children at the opposite kerb, “you’re all safe while I’m here,” and heard Tiger yapping close by and, further off, a baby’s wail. Surely it wasn’t the child he had stored in the office; how could it be so audible? He lingered in the middle of the road even though nobody was waiting to cross. Before long he was rewarded not just by the impatient blare of a car’s horn but, better, by the arrival at the kerb of Mrs Marsh and Polly, who was leading the dog. “That’s it, hurry along,” he called. “Bring him too. Show a leg, Polly Wolly Doodle.”

  “I’m not a wally.”

  “Of course you aren’t,” Leonard shouted in the hope that would drown the wailing somewhere behind him. “You’re more of a delight every time I see you. Give me a closer look.”

  She and her mother stayed where they were, staring past him at the schoolyard. He mustn’t let himself be distracted from his job. He had to strike the road with his staff before Mrs Marsh said “Cross over quickly, Polly.” Was it Tiger’s tugging that made Polly dash past him to the school gates? He tried not to see Miss Devine advancing, stooped over a loud bundle, but she raised her voice above the clamour. “Did you leave this in my office, Mr Bailey?”

  He almost succeeded in laughing. “What would I be doing with a baby?”

  A car honked and lurched forward an inch, urging him off the road. He didn’t want to be seen to retreat from Miss Devine. He almost tripped as he stumbled onto the pavement alongside the schoolyard. “Go in, Polly. Leave Tiger here,” Mrs Marsh said far more briskly than usual, and bent to give the little girl a swift kiss before joining other parents and the secretary in staring hard at Leonard. “He took some children in to see a dirty film the other day,” a mother said.

  “And he got thrown out of the library for letting kids see porn on the Internet.”

  “I’ve had my doubts about the way he talks to Polly. He says he moved because of some children. I’m starting to wonder how he found them disturbing, if you know what I mean.”

  Their fights and their thumping stereo had kept him awake; they’d shoved rubbish through his letterbox and then denied that they had. Before he could explain any of this the secretary turned towards the school, shooing away children and declaring over the wail of her burden “I’m phoning the police.”

  Leonard knew at once that he had no chance. If the mothers couldn’t see him as he was, nobody would. He leaned his pole against the railings and removed his orange coat to hang it on a spike. He saw the mothers back away from him, and wasn’t sure if he was smelling only the stain the baby had bestowed on him. “Nasty old man,” he said, and called through the railings “I never had a dog really. I wished I had. I just used to pretend.” He didn’t know if Polly heard him – didn’t know if the further muttered accusations he thought he heard were issuing from the mothers or from the pal he’d nearly had, lurking somewhere close to see him off, behind a wall or a car. It was too late to matter. He pushed himself away from his abandoned uniform. “You can’t see me,” he said, and stepped into the traffic.

  BASIL COPPER

  Ill Met by Daylight

  FOR THIRTY YEARS BASIL COPPER worked as a journalist and editor of a local newspaper before becoming a full-time fiction writer in 1970.

  His first story in the horror field, “The Spider”, was published in 1964 in The Fifth Pan Book of Horror Stories, since when his short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies, been extensively adapted for radio, and collected in Not After Nightfall, Here Be Daemons, From Evil’s Pillow, And Afterward the Dark, Voices of Doom, When Footsteps Echo, Whispers in the Night and, most recently, Cold Hand on My Shoulder.

  One of the author’s most reprinted stories, “Camera Obscura”, was adapted for a 1971 episode of the anthology television series Rod Serling’s Night Gallery.

  Besides publishing two non-fiction studies of the vampire and werewolf legends, his
other books include the novels The Great White Space, The Curse of the Fleers, Necropolis and The Black Death. He has also written more than fifty hard-boiled thrillers about Los Angeles private detective Mike Faraday, and has continued the adventures of August Derleth’s Holmes-like consulting detective in several volumes, including the collections The Exploits of Solar Pons and The Recollections of Solar Pons. Copper’s 1983 Arkham House novel The House of the Wolf was recently reprinted in a special Twentieth Anniversary edition by Sarob Press.

  “I must admit that my work in certain genres has been greatly influenced by the wonderful tales of M.R. James,” explains the author. “His own subtle and oblique way of constructing narrative has been my dictum: less is more. I also admire the work of the distinguished film director Lawrence Gordon Clark, who has translated some of James’s finest stories to the television screen in a restrained and wonderfully evocative fashion. Clark has been trying to get my film treatment of James’s ‘Count Magnus’ made for TV, for which I shall always be grateful.

  “I hope that those who come to this tale for the first time will find some measure of enjoyment and, dare one say it, a frisson of the terror that takes hold of the protagonist. For, as Edward van Sloan so memorably observed in an epilogue to one of the classic Universal horror films, ‘There are such things!’ ”

  I

  IT WAS LATE MORNING when Grant left St Ulric’s Church. He had come down there on an architectural project two months earlier and now, on this bright spring day he had dropped into a bar almost opposite for a pre-lunch drink. As he sipped his goblet of chilled house white he had a clear view through one of the front windows across the road and to the church beyond. That was when he first saw the old man. He wore dark clothes and the architect thought for a moment that it was the sexton, a somewhat lugubrious character he had spoken to earlier in the morning, but then he realized he was mistaken.

  The man’s dark clothes had nothing about them appertaining to the church. In fact, now that Grant saw him more clearly, he looked like a tramp, for the watcher could have sworn the old man’s overcoat was tied together with string. He was acting in a most peculiar manner, which had first attracted Grant’s attention.

  He swayed slightly, as if drunk, and though Grant, oblivious of the animated chatter of the occupants of the bar, shifted slightly to catch a glimpse of the man’s face, he kept it averted. Then he suddenly darted into the church entrance, so perhaps he was connected with St Ulric’s after all, Grant thought.

  “Something else, sir?” The white-coated barman was at his elbow.

  “Yes, same again, please. By the way, do you know that old chap hovering about opposite?”

  The barman looked puzzled. “I don’t see anyone, sir.”

  Grant turned his attention back to the church entrance but the man had gone, no doubt around the main body of the building. There was a public footpath there.

  He gave a short laugh. “It’s nothing important. An old chap was there just now.”

  The barman nodded, glancing at the former’s leather case, which he had propped against the table leg. “Ah, you’ll be Mr Grant, sir. Doing the survey of the church for Mr Brough. Staying at The Bull, I believe.”

  Grant nodded. Brough was the Rector. “You seem to know a lot about me.”

  The barman smiled. “It’s a small place. And Mr Brough enjoys a drink here from time to time. He spoke about you when you first came.”

  After Grant had returned to The Bull, where he had taken a room for the duration of his work on the church – it would be a long commission, for the building was in a very poor state, particularly so far as the foundations went – he had lunch and then found a corner of the coffee lounge and checked his latest notes and drawings. This occupied him for over an hour and afterward he decided to take a walk round the village in order to stretch his legs. He passed the old timbered post office on his way round and on impulse, seeing a phone booth outside, went in and dialled his fiancée, Sally, in London, to let her know how things were going. Then he returned to The Bull and continued working on his notes in the now deserted lounge.

  Presently there was a pleasant interruption to his labours when a shadow fell across his drawings and the bulky form of the Rector, the Rev. Charles Brough, materialized. A good-looking man in his early fifties, his black hair flecked with grey, he had established a good rapport with Grant and the latter had enjoyed the hospitality of Brough and his much younger wife at the Rectory, a mellow eighteenth-century building the other side of the churchyard.

  Grant, using his privilege as a guest at the hotel, quickly ordered the visitor a glass of sherry and the two men were soon engrossed in facts and figures regarding the renovation work on the church.

  “Of course, you do realize it will be a very expensive job,” the architect pointed out. “A good deal of underpinning of the buttresses on the north side of the building, where water has been penetrating for years and some of the panelling and other interior fitments are showing signs of dry rot, to say nothing of woodworm.”

  The Rector smiled briefly, raising his glass in salute. “I don’t think that will be too big a problem, Mr Grant. The Diocese has promised us half a million pounds and we have a large-scale restoration fund underway.”

  Grant nodded. “Oh, but you haven’t taken my fees into account.”

  The Rector gave a dry chuckle before continuing. “Now that you have been on the spot and gone into all the details, how long do you think the work will take? We have an excellent firm of church restorers, and though they have only undertaken what you might call running repairs in the past, they will be glad of this major commission in these difficult times.”

  Grant pursed his lips, putting down his sherry glass and tidying up his papers. “According to the requirements you’ve laid down and the preliminary figures I’ve arrived at, around two years for the complete restoration. Perhaps a little longer. My associates will, of course, check the work thoroughly as it proceeds. And naturally I shall still have overall control.”

  Brough gave him an approving glance. “That’s about what the church council thought. I’ll let them know your provisional findings at the council meeting next Monday evening. You’ll be present, of course, and perhaps you’d like to have dinner at the Rectory afterwards.”

  Grant thanked Brough for his invitation and the two men rose.

  “I must get back to the church,” the Rector said.

  “I’ll come with you,” Grant replied. “I have to take some more measurements and make further inspection before writing my notes this evening.”

  The two men fell into step as they crossed the road toward St Ulric’s, engaging in small talk, when Grant caught sight from the corner of his eye a black-clad figure walking among the gravestones in the churchyard. He was too late to see clearly and the man – for he was certain of the gender – had disappeared along the footpath by the time they reached the worn lych-gate.

  “Did you see who that was?” Grant asked.

  The Rector glanced around. “I didn’t notice anybody. This is a public footpath, as you know. Something to do with the Lord of the Manor in medieval times, who gave the land for the building of the church while retaining a public right of way. A great eccentric, according to old records.”

  “That reminds me,” Grant continued. “I saw an old chap in shabby black clothes acting rather queerly near the church this morning. I wondered if you knew anything about him.”

  The Rector shook his head. “Doesn’t ring a bell.” He gave a short laugh. “We have all sorts of funny people around here. Eccentrics, harmless village-idiot types. There are gypsies in the woods too, though they have no right to be there. Many of them use the footpath that runs down to a sort of small suburb to the north of the church. Several streets bisected by a stream. Most picturesque. You ought to take a look some time.”

  “I will,” Grant promised him.

  The two men were at the church porch now and Brough extended his hand. “You’re
going into the church and I’m going to do some work in my study at the Rectory. Shall I see you over the weekend?”

  Grant gave the other an expression of mock regret. “I’m going up to London to see my fiancée in the morning and shan’t be back until Sunday evening.”

  The Rector broke into a smile, revealing strong, square teeth. “Ah, journeys end in lovers’ meetings,” he said jocularly.

  Grant smiled too. “Something like that.”

  He watched the powerful figure striding away down the brick path, but as he turned to go into the church something arrested his attention. Instead, he went across the sloping turf between the gravestones to where he had previously seen the dark form. He walked aimlessly, desultorily reading the worn inscriptions. They were mostly old tombstones here, with an occasional vault for some more prestigious local, he supposed. One in particular caught his eye. Principally because there was a fresh posy of spring flowers tied with string, lying on the damp grass. He glanced from it to the black-letter inscription on the worn stone, half obscured by the inroads of ivy.

  He read: JEDEDIAH BRIGGS. CALLED TO GLORY APRIL 30TH 1770. Underneath was a rather puzzling inscription in much smaller letters: GREAT THOUGH IT IS TO LIE IN DARKNESS, EVEN MORE GLORIOUS IS IT TO WALK ABROAD AT THE NOONTIDE HOUR.

  A curious sentiment, the architect thought, and during various church commissions carried out in his career Grant had never seen one more strange. Even more bizarre, to his mind, was that the inscription carried no date of birth. He would ask the Rector about it when they met on Monday. He supposed now that the figure he had seen might have left the rustic bouquet at the graveside; possibly some descendant of the deceased person, though over two hundred years was a long time to continue leaving such tokens. However, as he turned back to the church and his immediate concerns, the matter was swiftly erased from his mind.

  II