The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2003, Volume 14

by Stephen Jones

  “Who the hell are you?” said one bespectacled, sweating man, shirtsleeves rolled. He had a cigarette squashed between his fingers but it had gone out.

  “Messenger Vine,” Cassie said.

  “Right then messenger Vine, get down the fire station – speed of light – and take this list of water hydrants. Off you go.”

  “First I’ve got a message for you.”

  “Let’s have it, then.”

  “The message is: we will win through this.”

  Everyone looked up from his or her task. The man took off his spectacles. He grimaced. His lips twitched and his mouth shaped to speak but no words came out. Then he said, “Who is the message from?”

  “From me. Messenger Vine.”

  The man put his cigarette to his lips, took a drag on it, then remembered that it had gone out. Then he started laughing, and within a moment everyone in the basement was laughing. The man stepped forward and crushed her in a bear hug, and he kissed her cheek. “You beauty!” he shouted at her. “You little beauty!” Then everyone in the basement was applauding her. “Somebody please give her a tin ’at!” the man shouted. One of the women found her an oversized ARP helmet and squashed it over Cassie’s flying cap. Cassie ran back up the stairs, clutching her note, flushed and embarrassed by the applause. People are strange, she thought.

  But when she got into Broadgate she was shocked into paralysis by what she saw. The heart of the town was in flames. Fire crews were fighting uselessly. The fires and the bombs had stripped department stores. Steam rose from the water directed by the hoses; Bible-black smoke belching where it wasn’t. It was too hot to pass through Broadgate. She stood back and watched the flames and the vile beat of leathery wings at her ears returned. She swatted wildly at the small tormenting demons in the air around her. Then she saw her first corpse.

  It was propped against a shop doorway. The glass from the shopfront had blown out and crystalled the street before her, and every winking shard of glass reflected the red flames. The sparkling rubies crunched under her boots as she approached the figure, its face and clothes white with plaster dust, eyes wide open, worms of blood glistening at ears, nostrils and mouth. It was a man, middle-aged, in uniform, though she couldn’t tell which uniform because it was caked in dust. He looked like one who, exhausted, had squatted down in the doorway for a moment’s rest. Cassie thought she should try to close the staring eyes, not out of respect or religious practice but because she thought that was what you should do. But the eyelids wouldn’t stay closed. She tried again and said, “You can go now.” The eyelids sprung open again. Cassie shivered and walked backwards from the staring corpse, and turned to run, prepared to take her chances amidst the flames of Broadgate.

  The flames were climbing. Not one building in Broadgate seemed untouched, and still the bombs and incendiaries were raining down, and for a moment Cassie lost the centre of herself and the unassailable confidence that had so far been guiding her. She retreated to the white stone steps under the portico of the National Provincial Bank and looked down at Broadgate aflame. The drone of the bombers, the snigger and the howl of bombs, the leather wings, the roar and crackle of the flames were not going to go away. The planes in the night sky became demons, exulting, stretching their wings in effortless displays of aerial prowess, gloating, exulting, making merry. They fanned winds with their wings to make the flames dance higher. Was this hell, then? Cassie thought. Is this what they meant? If it was, she knew she must walk through it. Wasn’t that the only way to move about in hell, to be defiant?

  Snigger. Another stick of incendiaries falling.

  Cassie turned to see the beautiful globe of a parachute, its silk reflecting pearl and pink, moon and fire, waltzing low in the air currents, tugged down by its land-mine basket. It dropped in Broadgate and the blast punched Cassie’s ears and the black wind that followed flung her on her back. Then came a shuffling sound, almost like water, like the sound of someone taking a loose shit in a backyard outhouse, and Cassie lifted her head to see a four-storey building shredding itself into the street.

  She got to her feet and moved away from the swirling hot dust. She clapped her ears. She hadn’t been deafened, but all sound had become muted. The roar of fire had become a low surf sound. The blast of further bombs had become the crackle of sticks on a fire. The air was warm and bitter. It scorched her lungs. She retreated to the white stone steps, the pillared portico of the National Provincial Bank.

  Hunkered in the corner of the portico was another corpse. It was a young boy of her own age, about sixteen. He was also a messenger: she saw the insignia on his epaulettes. This time the eyes were closed in death and his face was pancaked with white masonry dust. Red worms of blood soaked into the dust from his ears and his nostrils. Cassie reached out, very, very slowly, her forefinger and second finger extended in a probing V, and touched the boy’s closed eyes. His eyelids shot open, and his blank, bloodshot eyes stared back at her.

  Snigger in the air. Another stick falling. Flutter of leather wings.

  She leaned forward and put her lips very close to his. “You can’t go,” she said. She exhaled a kiss into him. Still a virgin, like me. She took dust and ash onto the moistness of her own lips. The boy shivered.

  His eyes were now wide with terror and he cowered from her touch. She peered hard at him. His teeth chattered. Cassie moved very slowly, squatting next to him, and put her hand on his head.

  He moved his mouth, saying something, but with the recent blast muffling her ears Cassie couldn’t make out what he said. She remembered the fire-hydrant list, still clutched in her hand. “Come with me,” she said. “We’ll help each other.”

  He twitched slightly, grimacing, making an effort to stir. He spoke again but Cassie couldn’t hear it. She guessed from his lip movement that he said, “I can’t move.”

  “Are you injured?”

  Perhaps he said something like, “No. I just can’t move.”

  There was a sound in her head when he tried to speak. But it was out of sync with his lip movement.

  “If you stay there you will die of shame. You must get over your fear and come with me now. What’s your name?”

  Something. Again he moved his lips, but no clear sound came.

  “I can’t hear. My ears are damaged.”

  “Michael.” Maybe he said his name was Michael.

  Cassie placed her hands either side of his face, and she leaned into him, kissing him full on the mouth once more, sucking more dust and ash from his lips. He trembled and his teeth continued to chatter, so she kissed him harder. “Coventry boy,” she said at last. “Coventry boy. Are you coming with me?”

  The boy wept and tried to hide his eyes from her. She stood up, as if to go, and he scrambled to his feet.

  “Which way to the fire station?” Cassie asked.

  He pointed that they would have to go along Broadgate.

  “Cut through Pepper Lane?” Cassie said, putting the tin hat back on the boy’s head. “No, we won’t get. Hold my hand and we’ll find a way through.”

  Together they moved into the inferno of Broadgate. Though St Michael’s Cathedral was lost, Holy Trinity church was untouched. They ran down Broadgate between the blazing shops and into Trinity Street. When they got to the fire station it had been abandoned. The roof had completely collapsed.

  They passed the twisted skeletons of double-decker buses and clambered over the brick and broken plaster and melted girders. The bodies of two female ARP workers spilled from an ambulance. They stepped over the corpses. The tyres of the ambulances had liquefied in black puddles. The women had blast-blood leaking from eyes, noses and ears.

  They managed to find the relocated Fire Service headquarters and deliver the message. An air of numb resolution gripped the emergency services now. They worked fiercely but blindly. The need for messages was giving way. No one stopped working but there was a sense that planning, strategy, coordination in the face of these odds was useless. There was just the
need to fight the fires and ferry the wounded. So they went back to the Command Centre to see if they could be useful.

  On the way Cassie heard the fluttering of leather wings again, and one of her aerial tormentors clanged on her tin helmet. “They give me the creeps,” she said.

  “What does?” At first she thought her hearing was coming back, but it just seemed that she was better able to intuit Michael. He spoke and she heard his words in her brain, and the words came before his lips moved.

  “These bat-things. These creatures fluttering around. Listen.” Michael strained his ears. The thirty-foot flames lit up the perspiration on his face. “There! Did you hear it?”

  Michael pointed at a piece of smoking metal on the ground. “Shrapnel. Spinning to the ground. From our own ack-ack guns. What do you think happens to the shells after they burst?”

  Cassie felt stupid.

  A man ran past them, very fast, with his hair on fire and the soles of his boots smoking. They watched him run into a side street.

  Together they spent the night running messages for the Command Centre. They were given tea and cigarettes, and told to rest for ten minutes. One of the workers there pulled Cassie aside. “Are you all right?” he said. Cassie could hear him more clearly than she could hear Michael.

  “Yes. We’re all right.”

  “We?”

  “We’re okay.”

  “I think you’re in shock.”

  “Well, we’re all in shock.”

  “Blown if that’s not true. But get someone to look at you if you get a chance.”

  The news of the city’s losses couldn’t be kept from them. Hundreds dead. Wounded incalculable. The library destroyed, churches burned out, shops obliterated, monuments smashed. History had been pulled from the town like a set of back molars. Seven hours after the raid had started it was still going on. The German planes, it was calculated, had had time to go back to their bases, reload and return.

  When they went outside again, it was obvious that there was nothing to be done. Roads were blocked and ambulances couldn’t get through. Fire engines had no water. Buses and cars lay tossed around in the streets like toys. There were the bodies of policemen in Cross Cheaping and a dead messenger boy in Pepper Lane. They had to leave them. Fires on either side of the streets were joining up in the middle, like theatre curtains closing on some hideous show. The heat sucked oxygen from the air and made the mouth taste of ashes and plaster dust and charcoal. And there was the smell of sewage and corruption. Rats ran squeaking amongst the rubble. Still the buildings burned. Coventry was going to be punched into powder. Even the ack-ack guns were giving up.

  “Why aren’t the guns firing?” Cassie asked Michael.

  “Out of ammunition,” she thought he said.

  “Shall we bring one down, Michael? A Nazi plane, I mean? You and me? We could do it.”

  “You’re mad, Cassie.”

  “Do you trust me?”

  “Somehow.”

  “Then hold my hand and follow me.” She led him down Cuckoo Lane and into Priory Row, perilously close to the burning cathedral. All attempts to put it out had ended and the roof had collapsed entirely. Only the smoking Gothic shell remained, a pulsating ruby of vile heat. Every prayer to hope in half a millennium spitting and roasting and smoking. But the tower and the spire were untouched. The door to the tower had burned off. She beckoned him in.

  Michael laughed bitterly. “Not up there.”

  “It’s the safest place in the city,” she said. “That’s why it’s still standing. Trust me, Michael. More than anything I need you to trust me.” She took his hand and pulled him towards the base of the spire. Though it stood apart from the dense smouldering and smoking at the other end of the cathedral it was like walking into an oven. The spire acted like a chimney, sucking up heat, but after the first few twists of spiral steps the updraught blew out of the open mullioned lightwells and it became cooler. Together they climbed the one hundred and eighty spiralling, echoing stone steps.

  When they stepped out onto the parapet of the tower the wind whipped at Cassie’s hair, and she realized what a cold evening it was and how the fires raging below had made an oven of the city. The sky overhead glowed cherry red. She poked her head between the crenellations of the Gothic spire and looked down.

  From below she could hear nothing, and up here only the wind, and that muted, like a sad murmuring at her ears, like the whispering of an inconsolable, defeated angel. The city was a broken bowl, spilling fire. It was like looking into the heart of Satan. Rivers of flame, grinding sparks, belching black puffs of smoke. Miles of red glowing earth at all compass points. She ran to the other side. A filthy strand of smoke, twisting up like a giant worm. Silvery tongues of flame. Crimson jaws working away. Sudden flares. Puddles of combustion. A writhing, as if the flames were a maggoty infestation on the underbelly of the city. For a moment it seemed to Cassie that the tower too dropped away beneath her; she felt her stomach flip, but she was borne up by hot currents of air and she went flying over the inferno, over a city of three hundred thousand burning souls. Then she was back again, her feet planted firmly on the stone parapet of the medieval tower, with the wind in her ears. She heard a new drone.

  More German aircraft coming in from the south-east – ten, no, twenty, no, twenty-five or so, flying in perfect formation. She put her hand out behind her and found Michael’s hand, drawing her to him. He was shivering uncontrollably.

  “My God, you’re freezing,” Cassie said.

  Michael’s teeth chattered wildly. Cassie unbuttoned her coat and wrapped him inside. “Come here,” Cassie said. “Take some of my warmth.”

  Michael tried to say something, shaped his lips, but he was unable to speak. He was unbearably cold, his fingers like frost. She took his hand and put it inside her blouse, onto her breast. He stared at her in anguish.

  “Look at them, Michael.” Cassie said, indicating the incoming bombers. “They think they are beautiful. They think their engines are keeping them in the sky. We know different, don’t we? Don’t we? Smell that? It’s aviation fuel. Close enough to smell, aren’t they? Look! It’s almost possible to see the pilots in the cockpits, isn’t it? If you imagined him a little closer you could talk with him, Michael. Which one? Pick one for yourself. Which one will you choose? Which one must pay? Which one shall we say will not be going home?”

  Michael didn’t answer. Cassie drew his other hand under her skirt and placed it between her thighs, rubbing his icy fingers against herself. “No one should die a virgin, should they Michael?”

  Michael shivered as she unbuttoned his trousers and massaged his erection, stroking her thumb over the head of his cock, whispering to him, encouraging him, as if she were expert. “We’ll have to fly to him, Michael. Scare him. Fly at him like a demon from out of the night.” She hoisted her leg over the crook of his elbow, just as the airman had taught her. Michael was wide-eyed, shocked but yielding. As she guided him inside her they both gasped, grabbing each other to steady themselves against the surpassing pleasure of the penetration. All words had gone. They were paralysed and the sky was ripping open in a fire-breathing ejaculation. Cassie tipped back her head and tried to look up into the moon-flooded fuel-drenched sky. And they fell, upwards, soaring, locked together, the wind streaming in their hair, Cassie’s jet-black curls lashing behind her, making a banshee of her, swooping on the incoming aircraft

  Oh Michael. Let’s choose one. Let’s choose one for you. For you and for the city. Don’t be afraid and you mustn’t feel guilty. After all, they have chosen us. This one? This one coming in a little lower than the others? Shall we punish his beautiful daring? Shall we? He won’t know how it’s done. He’ll have no idea.

  And they swooped on one of the German aeroplanes, arcing through the night, burning silver moonglow in their wake, coming upon the cockpit canopy, and they fastened upon the glass of the canopy with their sucking fingers and mouths, seeing the pilot look up from his controls, seeing hi
s hideous smile of bowel-loosening, uncomprehending fear.

  That’s it. That’s it, Michael. Fly to him. See his face. Look at his eye. Fix your eye on his. It will be like glue. Our eyes. Will be glued. Iris to his iris. We’ll be angels. In his cockpit. Or demons. Look at his terror. Look at the terror in his eye. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. It’s done, Michael, oh it’s done. He won’t get home. That one. No way home for him. It’s done. You can let go.

  Back on the parapet of the spire Cassie watched the targeted plane, saw it bank and turn and climb, and head north-east of the city. A single puff of ack-ack fire burst in the air nearby, but not close enough to damage the plane. The defensive Bofors and ack-ack guns were depleted and exhausted now, offering only token fire. The plane disappeared safely into the darkness.

  But she knew that it made no difference. The plane was doomed. She knew in the same way that she knew what song was playing on the radio even before she switched it on. The plane was locked into its course. It would come down seven miles from the city. Only Cassie knew that it wouldn’t return home safely. Only Cassie and Michael.

  “Michael,” Cassie whispered. “Michael? Where are you?” She walked around the parapet, twice, calling softly to him.

  He was gone. Cassie felt the wind at her ears. She buttoned her coat around her and descended the tower, feeling the heat return to her as she spiralled down the steps of the tower. Back on the ground the hot air was like a reeking and bitter pepper.

  She knew where to find Michael. She retraced her steps, through the dripping fire and the acrid fog of smoke, dodging the fluttering airborne cinders and the maggoty cascading sparks, to the white stone steps under the portico of the National Provincial Bank. She found him hunkered in the corner of the portico, his face white with dust, dried blood in his nose and ears and eyesockets. She put a hand to his neck. His body was cold. This time she didn’t touch his eyelids, and they stayed shut. “You can go now,” she whispered.