The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2003, Volume 14

by Stephen Jones

  As he came closer, he could see that the great oak door, which had seemed so secure, now hung awry on its hinges, no doubt due to the damage evidenced by the gaping hole in the wall beyond. There were dark shadows on the stone treads and he was horrified to see that the jostling shapes were those of dozens of rats, which were emerging from the broken doorway. Grant shrank back but the seething mass darted aside and at the same moment someone came up behind him. Grant turned, expecting to see the Rector, but it was the black-clad figure of the old man he had several times glimpsed hovering about the churchyard.

  The architect was nauseated by the appalling charnel stench that emanated from the creature’s clothing. The old man thrust a withered face into Grant’s own, and at the same time a clawlike hand seized his arm in a crushing grip, incredible in one so ancient. He had a welcoming smile on his face as he said in a high, sweet voice, “Come with me, my son. Welcome to Paradise!”

  As though in a dream Grant was led inexorably toward the steps leading to the shattered doorway of the tomb. They were halfway down, and Grant could not shake off the paralysis that had overcome him, when a huge brass altar cross was suddenly thrust into the old man’s face. He gave a hideous cry of fear and fell downward through the door, which Grant had remembered as being solid but nevertheless disintegrated in a cloud of dust as the architect fell fainting into the Rector’s arms.

  VI

  Brandy was being forced down Grant’s throat. He coughed and the swimming vision finally settled into the reassuring faces of Brough and one of his churchwardens. The architect was back in the church, lying on one of the pew benches with a cushion beneath his head.

  “What was it?” he gasped, when the fit of shuddering had passed. “What was it?”

  The Rector shook his head. “We will leave that for the moment,” he said gently. “You have been unconscious for nearly an hour but the police doctor told us there was nothing to worry about. All is being taken care of.”

  Grant struggled up. “I owe you so much, Rector.”

  The other gave him a wry smile. “Let us say we were fortunate. I had occasion to come back to the church to collect some notes for a lecture. I saw you being dragged across the churchyard by a strange old man in black clothes and I assumed it was the person of whom you had previously spoken. Then I also noticed that you were walking like a drunken man, with a desperate expression on your face. There was something so sinister in the sight that I was momentarily paralysed and you were almost at the vault steps before I recovered myself.”

  Grant took another sip of the brandy, feeling strength returning.

  “That thing . . .”

  The Rector bit his lip. “There was something inexpressibly unholy in that horrifying tableau. So I rushed into the church and seized the altar crucifix and struck it blindly into the creature’s face. I say ‘creature’ advisedly because there was something loathsome and evil about it. The thing let go your arm and fell downward into the vault.”

  “I cannot thank you enough, sir.”

  Brough inclined his head. He was about to speak when they were interrupted by the wailing of police sirens outside. Grant started to his feet, but the Rector laid a hand on his arm.

  “I should not go out if I were you. The police, the press, doctors and the ambulance men are there.” There was a tremor in his voice now. “They have discovered terrible things in that vault. Opened coffins. Many bodies, some of them in advanced stages of putrefaction. Police computer systems have already identified a number as being those of persons reported missing in the county over the past few years.” He shuddered. “Utterly evil. Unspeakable things.”

  “And the old man?” Grant said in a trembling voice.

  The Rector turned away. “Nothing but bones and dust. It is beyond belief.”

  VII

  Grant left the village a week afterward, his work completed. In the interim the vault contents had been removed, the tomb dismantled and the area turfed over. The Bishop then reconsecrated it as sacred ground. The architect took a month’s convalescence and he and Sally were married in the late summer. Understandably he was reluctant to undertake church restoration work after his experiences and now sends one of his junior colleagues instead.

  A strange aftermath of the affair at St Ulric’s is the appearance of a small streak of white in his otherwise black hair. His wife has often asked him to snip it off but he prefers it to remain as a salutary warning and reminder of the evils that walk abroad at noonday. The quotation was garbled, owing to his faint recollection of the piece, but his wife got the message.

  KELLY LINK

  Catskin

  KELLY LINK RECENTLY MOVED to Northampton, Massachusetts, with her husband Gavin J. Grant. Together they produce the small-press magazine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and publish books as Small Beer Press. The duo are also now reading for the fantasy half of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, taking over from editor Terri Windling.

  Individually, Link is the editor of the anthology Trampoline, and her short stories have won a Nebula, the World Fantasy Award, and the James Tiptree, Jr Award.

  “I wrote ‘Catskin’ very quickly,” she recalls. “I was getting ready to drive cross-country on a tour with writer Shelley Jackson, and I wanted something to give away at readings. Shelley had written several songs, and brought along an electric guitar to all the readings. I don’t sing, so I printed up about a hundred and fifty copies of ‘Catskin’ as a mini-zine and gave it away. Shelley produced art for the cover.

  “The real inspiration – besides not being able to sing – for ‘Catskin’ was a conversation that I had with writer Christopher Rowe, after he e-mailed me a jpeg of his cat, about whether or not said cat was a real feline, or a spooky cat-impersonator. Christopher produced a zine Say . . . is this a cat? on the subject.

  “ ‘Catskin’ was subsequently republished in McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, guest-edited by Michael Chabon. It got a second illustration, this time from Howard Chaykin. Oh yeah, and the book tour was a blast.”

  CATS WENT IN AND OUT of the witch’s house all day long. The windows stayed open, and the doors, and there were other doors, cat-sized and private, in the walls and up in the attic. The cats were large and sleek and silent. No one knew their names, or even if they had names, except for the witch.

  Some of the cats were cream-colored and some were brindled. Some were black as beetles. They were about the witch’s business. Some came into the witch’s bedroom with live things in their mouths. When they came out again, their mouths were empty.

  The cats trotted and slunk and leapt and crouched. They were busy. Their movements were catlike, or perhaps clockwork. Their tails twitched like hairy pendulums. They paid no attention to the witch’s children.

  The witch had three living children at this time, although at one time she had had dozens, maybe more. No one, certainly not the witch, had ever bothered to tally them up. But at one time the house had bulged with cats and babies.

  Now, since witches cannot have children in the usual way – their wombs are full of straw or bricks or stones, and when they give birth, they give birth to rabbits, kittens, tadpoles, houses, silk dresses, and yet even witches must have heirs, even witches wish to be mothers – the witch had acquired her children by other means: she had stolen or bought them.

  She’d had a passion for children with a certain color of red hair. Twins she had never been able to abide (they were the wrong kind of magic) although she’d sometimes attempted to match up sets of children, as though she had been putting together a chess set, and not a family. If you were to say a witch’s chess set, instead of a witch’s family, there would be some truth in that. Perhaps this is true of other families as well.

  One girl she had grown like a cyst, upon her thigh. Other children she had made out of things in her garden, or bits of trash that the cats brought her: aluminum foil with strings of chicken fat still crusted to it, broken television sets, cardboard boxes that
the neighbors had thrown out. She had always been a thrifty witch.

  Some of these children had run away and others had died. Some of them she had simply misplaced, or accidentally left behind on buses. It is to be hoped that these children were later adopted into good homes, or reunited with their natural parents. If you are looking for a happy ending in this story, then perhaps you should stop reading here and picture these children, these parents, their reunions.

  Are you still reading? The witch, up in her bedroom, was dying. She had been poisoned by an enemy, a witch, a man named Lack. The child Finn, who had been her food taster, was dead already and so were three cats who’d licked her dish clean. The witch knew who had killed her and she snatched pieces of time, here and there, from the business of dying, to make her revenge. Once the question of this revenge had been settled to her satisfaction, the shape of it like a black ball of twine in her head, she began to divide up her estate between her three remaining children.

  Flecks of vomit stuck to the corners of her mouth, and there was a basin beside the foot of the bed which was full of black liquid. The room smelled like cats’ piss and wet matches. The witch panted as if she were giving birth to her own death.

  “Flora shall have my automobile,” she said, “and also my purse, which will never be empty, so long as you always leave a coin at the bottom, my darling, my spendthrift, my profligate, my drop of poison, my pretty, pretty Flora. And when I am dead, take the road outside the house and go west. There’s one last piece of advice.”

  Flora, who was the oldest of the witch’s living children, was redheaded and stylish. She had been waiting for the witch’s death for a long time now, although she had been patient. She kissed the witch’s cheek and said, “Thank you, mother.”

  The witch looked up at her, panting. She could see Flora’s life, already laid out, flat as a map. Perhaps all mothers can see as far.

  “Jack, my love, my birdsnest, my bite, my scrap of porridge,” the witch said, “you shall have my books. I won’t have any need of books where I am going. And when you leave my house, strike out in an easterly direction and you won’t be any sorrier than you are now.”

  Jack, who had once been a little bundle of feathers and twigs and eggshell all tied up with a tatty piece of string, was a sturdy lad, almost full grown. If he knew how to read, only the cats knew it. But he nodded and kissed his mother’s grey lips.

  “And what shall I leave to my boy Small?” the witch said, convulsing. She threw up again in the basin. Cats came running, leaning on the lip of the basin to inspect her vomitus. The witch’s hand dug into Small’s leg.

  “Oh it is hard, hard, so very hard, for a mother to leave her children (though I have done harder things). Children need a mother, even such a mother as I have been.” She wiped at her eyes, and yet it is a fact that witches cannot cry.

  Small, who still slept in the witch’s bed, was the youngest of the witch’s children. (Perhaps not as young as you think.) He sat upon the bed, and although he didn’t cry, it was only because witchs’ children have no one to teach them the use of crying. His heart was breaking.

  Small was ten years old and he could juggle and sing and every morning he brushed and plaited the witch’s long, silky hair. Surely every mother must wish for a boy like Small, a curly-headed, sweet-breathed, tender-hearted boy like Small, who can cook a fine omelet, and who has a good strong singing voice as well as a gentle hand with a hairbrush.

  “Mother,” he said, “if you must die, then you must die. And if I can’t come along with you, then I’ll do my best to live and make you proud. Give me your hairbrush to remember you by, and I’ll go make my own way in the world.”

  “You shall have my hairbrush, then,” said the witch to Small, looking, and panting, panting. “And I love you best of all. You shall have my tinderbox and my matches, and also my revenge, and you will make me proud, or I don’t know my own children.”

  “What shall we do with the house, mother?” said Jack. He said it as if he didn’t care.

  “When I am dead,” the witch said, “this house will be of no use to anyone. I gave birth to it – that was a very long time ago – and raised it from just a dollhouse. Oh, it was the most dear, most darling dollhouse ever. It had eight rooms and a tin roof, and a staircase that went nowhere at all. But I nursed it and rocked it to sleep in a cradle, and it grew up to be a real house, and see how it has taken care of me, its parent, how it knows a child’s duty to its mother. And perhaps you can see how it is now, how it pines, how it grows sick to see me dying like this. Leave it to the cats. They’ll know what to do with it.”

  * * *

  All this time the cats have been running in and out of the room, bringing things and taking things away. It seems as if they will never slow down, never come to rest, never nap, never have the time to sleep, or to die, or even to mourn. They have a certain proprietary look about them, as if the house is already theirs.

  The witch vomits up mud, fur, glass buttons, tin soldiers, trowels, hat pins, thumbtacks, love letters (mislabeled or sent without the appropriate amount of postage and never read), and a dozen regiments of red ants, each ant as long and wide as a kidney bean. The ants swim across the perilous stinking basin, clamber up the sides of the basin, and go marching across the floor in a shiny ribbon. They are carrying pieces of Time in their mandibles. Time is heavy, even in such small pieces, but the ants have strong jaws, strong legs. Across the floor they go, and up the wall, and out the window. The cats watch, but don’t interfere. The witch gasps and coughs and then lies still. Her hands beat against the bed once and then are still. Still the children wait, to make sure that she is dead, and that she has nothing else to say.

  In the witch’s house, the dead are sometimes quite talkative.

  But the witch has nothing else to say at this time.

  The house groans and all the cats begin to mew piteously, trotting in and out of the room as if they have dropped something and must go and hunt for it – they will never find it – and the children, at last, find that they know how to cry, but the witch is perfectly still and quiet. There is a tiny smile on her face, as if everything has happened exactly to her satisfaction. Or maybe she is looking forward to the next part of the story.

  The children buried the witch in one of her half-grown doll-houses. They crammed her into the downstairs parlor, and knocked out the inner walls so that her head rested on the kitchen table in the breakfast nook, and her ankles threaded through a bedroom door. Small brushed out her hair, and, because he wasn’t sure what she should wear now that she was dead, he put all her dresses on her, one over the other over the other, until he could hardly see her white limbs at all beneath the stack of petticoats and coats and dresses. It didn’t matter: once they’d nailed the dollhouse shut again, all they could see was the red crown of her head in the kitchen window, and the worn-down heels of her dancing shoes knocking against the shutters of the bedroom window.

  Jack, who was handy, rigged a set of wheels for the dollhouse, and a harness so that it could be pulled. They put the harness on Small, and Small pulled and Flora pushed, and Jack talked and coaxed the house along, over the hill, down to the cemetery, and the cats ran along beside them.

  The cats are beginning to look a bit shabby, as if they are molting. Their mouths look very empty. The ants have marched away, through the woods, and down into town, and they have built a nest on your yard, out of the bits of Time. And if you hold a magnifying glass over their nest, to see the ants dance and burn, Time will catch fire and you will be sorry.

  Outside the cemetery gates, the cats had been digging a grave for the witch. The children tipped the dollhouse into the grave, kitchen window first. But then they saw that the grave wasn’t deep enough, and the house sat there on its end, looking uncomfortable. Small began to cry, (now that he’d learned how, it seemed he would spend all his time practicing) thinking how horrible it would be to spend one’s death, all of eternity, upside down and not even properly burie
d, not even able to feel the rain when it beat down on the exposed shingles of the house, and seeped down into the house and filled your mouth and drowned you, so that you had to die all over again, every time it rained.

  The dollhouse chimney had broken off and fallen on the ground. One of the cats picked it up and carried it away, like a souvenir. That cat carried the chimney into the woods and ate it, a mouthful at a time, and passed out of this story and into another one. It’s no concern of ours.

  The other cats began to carry up mouthfuls of dirt, dropping it and mounding it around the house with their paws. The children helped, and when they’d finished, they’d managed to bury the witch properly, so that only the bedroom window was visible, a little pane of glass like an eye at the top of a small dirt hill.

  On the way home, Flora began to flirt with Jack. Perhaps she liked the way he looked in his funeral black. They talked about what they planned to be, now that they were grown up. Flora wanted to find her parents. She was a pretty girl: someone would want to look after her. Jack said he would like to marry someone rich. They began to make plans.

  Small walked a little behind, slippery cats twining around his ankles. He had the witch’s hairbrush in his pocket, and his fingers slipped around the figured horn handle for comfort.