The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2003, Volume 14

by Stephen Jones

  Hoegbotton set the cage down in front of Bristlewing and took the ring of keys from him at the same time. “Just put it in the office. Are the inventory books up to date?” Hoegbotton’s hand still stung from where the imprint of the handle had branded itself on his skin.

  “Course they’re current,” Bristlewing said, turning stiffly away as he picked up his new burden.

  By design, the way to Hoegbotton’s office at the back of the store was blocked by a maze of items, from which rose a collective must-metal-rotted-dusty smell that to him formed the most delicate of perfumes. This smell of antiquity validated his selections as surely as any papers of authenticity. That customers tripped and frequently lost their bearings as they navigated the arbitrary footpaths mattered little to Hoegbotton. The received family wisdom said that thus hemmed in the customer had no choice but to buy something from the stacks of chairs, umbrellas, watches, pens, fishing rods, clothes, enameled boxes, deer racks, plaster casts of lizards, elegant mirrors of glass and copper, reading glasses, Truffidian religious icons, boards for playing dice made of oliphaunt ivory, porcelain water jugs, globes of the world, model ships, old medals, sword canes, musical clocks, and other ephemera from past lives or distant places. Hoegbotton loved knowing that a customer might, in seeking out a perfectly ordinary set of dinner plates, come face to face with the flared nostrils and questing tongue of a Skamoo erotic mask. An overwhelming sense of the secret history of these objects could sometimes send him into a trance-like state. Thankfully, Rebecca understood this feeling, having been exposed to it from an early age.

  Emerging from this morass of riches, Hoegbotton’s office lay open to the rest of the store like an oasis of sparseness. Five steps led down to its sunken carpeting – crimson with gold threads, bought from the old Threnody Larkspur Theater before it burned to the ground – and a simple rosewood desk whose only flourishes were legs carved into the shape of writhing squid. A matching chair, two work tables against the far wall, and a couch for visitors rounded out the furniture. To the left of the office space stood two doors. The first led to a private bathroom, recently installed, much to Bristlewing’s delight.

  The desk lay beneath an organized clutter of inventory books, a blotter, a selection of fountain pens, stationery with the H&S logo emblazoned upon it, folders full of invoices, a metal message capsule with a curled-up piece of paper inside, a slice of orange mushroom in a small paper bag, a shell he had found while on vacation in the Southern Isles when he was six, and the new Frankwrithe & Lewden edition of The Mystery of Cinsorium by Blake Clockmore. Daguerreotypes of Rebecca, his brother Stephen (lost to the family now, having signed up for the Kalif’s cavalry on a monstrous but historically common whim) and his mother Gertrude standing on the lawn of someone else’s mansion in Morrow added a personal touch.

  Bristlewing had already made himself scarce – Hoegbotton could hear him pulling some artifact out from behind a row of old bookcases stacked high with cracked flowerpots – and the cage stood on the sideboard of his desk as if it had always been there.

  Hoegbotton hung his raincoat on one of the six coat racks lined up like soldiers in the farthest corner of the office. Then he took the past day’s book of inventory and purchases and walked to the door that led to the room next to the bathroom. The door was very old, wormholed, and studded with odd metal symbols that Hoegbotton had taken from an abandoned Manziist shrine.

  Hoegbotton unlocked the door and went inside. The door shut silently behind him and he was alone. The light that cast its yellowing glare upon the room came from an old-fashioned squid-oil lamp nailed into the room’s far wall.

  Nothing, at first glance, distinguished the room from any other room. It contained a tired-looking dining table around which stood four worn chairs. To one side, plates, cups, bowls, and utensils sat atop a cabinet with a mirror that served as a backboard. The mirror was veined with a purplish fungus that had managed to infiltrate minute fractures in the glass. He had worried that the Cappan’s men might confiscate the mirror on one of their weekly inspections of his store, but they had ignored it, perhaps recognizing the age of the mirror and the way mold had itself begun to grow on the fungus.

  The table held three place settings, the faded napkins unfolded and haphazard. Across the middle of the table lay a parchment of faded words, so old that it looked as if it might disintegrate into dust at the slightest touch. A bottle of port, half full, stood on the table next to a bare space in front of the fourth chair.

  By tradition, recently established, Hoegbotton sat there for his daily readings from the books of inventory. Bound in red leather, the books were imported from Morrow. The off-white pages were thin as tissue paper to accommodate as many sheets as possible. The two books that Hoegbotton had taken with him represented the inventory for the past three months. Sixteen others, as massive and unwieldy, had been wrapped in a blanket and carefully hidden beneath the floorboards in his office. (Two separate notebooks to record unfortunate but necessary dealings with Ungdom and Slattery, suitably yellow and brown, had been tossed into an unlocked drawer of his desk.)

  Yesterday had been slow – only five items sold, two of them phonograph records. He frowned when he read Bristlewing’s description of the buyers as “Short lady with walking stick. Did not give a name,” and “Man looked sick. Took forever to make up his mind. Bought one record after all that time.” Bristlewing did not respect the system. By contrast, a typical Hoegbottonpenned buyer entry read like an investigative report: “Miss Glissandra Beckle, 4232 East Munrale Mews, late 40s. Grey-silver hair. Startling blue eyes. Wore an expensive green dress but cheap black shoes, scuffed. She insisted on calling me ‘Mr Hoegbotton.’ She examined a very expensive Occidental vase and commented favorably on a bone hairpin, a pearl snuffbox, and a watch once worn by a prominent Truffidian priest. However, she only bought the hairpin.”

  If Bristlewing disliked the detail required by Hoegbotton for the ledgers, he disliked the room itself even more. After carefully cataloging its contents upon their arrival three years before, Hoegbotton had asked Bristlewing a question.

  “Do you know what this is?”

  “Old musty room. No air.”

  “No. It’s not an old musty room with no air.”

  “Fooled me,” Bristlewing had said and, scowling, left him there.

  III

  But Bristlewing was wrong. Bristlewing did not understand the first thing about the room. How could he? And how could Hoegbotton explain that the room was perhaps the most important room in the world, that he often found himself inside it even while walking around the city, at home reading to his wife, or buying fruit and eggs from the farmers’ market?

  The history of the room went back to the Silence itself. His great-great-grandfather, Samuel Hoegbotton, had been the first Hoegbotton to move to Ambergris, much against the wishes of the rest of his extended family, including his twenty-year-old son, John, who stayed in Morrow.

  For a man who had uprooted his wife and daughter from all that was familiar to take up residence in an unknown, sometimes cruel, city, Samuel Hoegbotton became remarkably successful, establishing three stores down by the docks. It seemed that it would be only a matter of time before more of the Hoegbotton clan moved down to Ambergris.

  However, this was not to be. One day, Samuel Hoegbotton, his wife and his daughter disappeared, just three of the thousands of souls who vanished from Ambergris during the episode known as the Silence – leaving behind empty buildings, empty courtyards, empty houses, and the assumption among those who grieved that the grey caps had caused the tragedy. Hoegbotton remembered one line in particular from John’s diary: “I cannot believe my father has really disappeared. It is possible he could have come to harm, but to simply disappear? Along with my mother and sister? I keep thinking that they will return one day and explain to me what happened. It is too difficult to live with, otherwise.”

  Sitting in his mother’s bedroom with the diary open in front of him, the young Robe
rt Hoegbotton had felt a chill across the back of his neck. What had happened to Samuel Hoegbotton? He spent many summer afternoons in the attic, surrounded by antiquities, speculating on the subject. He combed through old letters that Samuel had sent home before his disappearance. He visited the family archive. He wrote to relatives in other cities. His mother disapproved of such inquiries; his grandmother just smiled and said sadly, “I’ve often wondered myself.” He could not talk to his father about it; that cold and distant figure was rarely home.

  His sister also found the mystery intriguing. They would act out scenarios with the house as the backdrop. They would ask the maids questions to fill gaps in their knowledge and thus uncover the meaning of words like “grey cap” and “Cappan”. His grandmother had even given them an old sketch that showed the apartment’s living room – Samuel Hoegbotton surrounded by smiling relatives on a visit. But for his sister it was just relief of a temporary boredom, and he was soon so busy learning the family business that the mystery faded from his thoughts.

  When he reached the age of majority, he decided to leave Morrow and travel to Ambergris. No Hoegbotton had set foot in Ambergris for ninety years and it was precisely for this reason that he chose the city, or so he told himself. In Morrow, under the predatory eye of Richard, he had felt as if none of his plans would ever be successful. In Ambergris, he started out poor but independent, operating a sidewalk stall that sold fruit and broadsheets. At odd times – at an auction, looking at jewelry that reminded him of something his mother might wear; sneaking around Ungdom’s store examining all that merchandise, so much richer than what he could acquire at the time – thoughts of the Silence wormed their way into his head.

  The day after he signed the lease on his own store, Hoegbotton visited Samuel’s apartment. He had the address from some of the man’s letters. The building lay in a warren of derelict structures that rose from the side of the valley to the east of the Merchant Quarter. It took Hoegbotton an hour to find it, the carriage ride followed by progress on foot. He knew he was close when he had to climb over a wooden fence with a sign on it that read OFF LIMITS BY ORDER OF THE CAPPAN. The sky was overcast, the sunlight weak yet bright, and he walked through the tenements feeling ethereal, dislocated. Here and there, he found walls where bones had been mixed with the mortar and he knew by these signs that such places had been turned into graveyards.

  When he finally stood in front of the apartment – on the ground level of a three-storey building – he wondered if he should turn around and go home. The exterior was boarded up, fire-scorched and splotched with brown-yellow fungi. Weeds had drowned the grass and other signs of a lawn. A smell like dull vinegar permeated the air. The facing rows of buildings formed a corridor of light, at the end of which a stray dog sniffed at the ground, picking up a scent. He could see its ribs even from so far away. Somewhere, a child began to cry, the sound thin, attenuated, automatic. The noise was so unexpected, almost horrifying, that he thought it must not be a baby at all, but something mimicking a baby, hoping to lure him closer.

  After a few more moments, he reached a decision and took a crowbar from his pack. Half an hour later, he had unpried the boards and the door stood revealed, a pale “X” running across the dark wood. He realized that he was breathing in shallow gasps, anticipation laced with fear. No one could help him if he opened the door and needed help, but he still wanted whatever was inside the apartment. It could be anything, even the end of his life, and yet the adrenalin rushed through him.

  Hoegbotton pulled the door open and stepped inside, crowbar held like a weapon. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. The air was stale. Windows to the right and left of the hallway, although boarded up, let in enough light to make patches of dust on the floor shine like colonies of tiny, subdued fireflies. The hallway was oddly ordinary, nothing out of place. In the even more dimly lit living room, Hoegbotton could make out that some vagrant had long ago set up digs and abandoned them. A sofa had been overturned and a blanket used as a roof for a makeshift tent, broadsheets strewn across the floor for a bed. Dog droppings were more recent, as were the bones of small animals piled in a corner. A rabbit carcass, withered but caked with dried blood, might have been as fresh as the week before. The wallpaper had collapsed into a mumbling senility of fragments and strips. Paintings that had hung on the wall lay in tumbled flight against the floor, their hooks having long since given out. A faint, bitter smell rose from the room – a sourness that revealed hidden negotiations between wood and fungi, the natural results of decay. Hoegbotton relaxed. The grey caps had not been in the apartment for a long time. He let the crowbar dangle in his hand.

  Hoegbotton entered the dining room. Brittle fragments of newsprint lay scattered across the dining-room table, held in place by a bottle of port with a glass beside it. Colonized by cobwebs, by dust, by mottled fragments of wood that had drifted down from the ceiling, the table also held three plates and place settings. The stale air had preserved the contents of the plates in a mummified state. Three plates. Three pieces of ossified chicken, accompanied by a green smear of some vegetable long since dried out. Samuel Hoegbotton. His wife Sarah. His daughter Jane. All three chairs, worm-eaten and rickety, were pulled out slightly from the table. A fourth chair lay off to the side, smashed into fragments by time or violence.

  Hoegbotton stared at the chairs for a long time. Had they been moved at all in the last hundred years? Had freak winds blowing through the gaps in the boarded-up windows caused them to move? How could anyone know? And yet, their current positioning teased his imagination. It did not look as if Samuel Hoegbotton’s family had gotten up in alarm – unfolded napkins lay on the seats of two of the chairs. The third – that of the person who would have been reading the newspaper – had not been used, nor had the silverware for that setting. The silverware of the other two was positioned peculiarly. On the right side, the fork lay at an angle near the plate, as if thrown there. Something dark and withered had been skewered by the fork’s tines. Did it match an irregularity in the dry flesh of the chicken upon the matching plate? The knife was missing entirely. On the left side of the table, the fork was still stuck into its piece of chicken, the knife sawing into the flesh beside it.

  It appeared to Hoegbotton as if the family had been eating and had simply . . . disappeared . . . in mid-meal. A prickly, cold sensation spread across Hoegbotton’s skin. The fork. The knife. The chairs. The broadsheet. The meals uneaten, half-eaten. The bottle of port. The mystery gnawed at him even as it became ever more impenetrable. Nothing in the scenarios his sister and he had drawn up in their youth could account for it.

  Hoegbotton took out his pocket knife and leaned over the table. He carefully pulled aside one leaf of the broadsheet to reveal the date: the very day of the Silence. The date transfixed him. He pulled out the chair where surely Samuel Hoegbotton must have sat, reading his papers, and slowly slid into it. Looked down the table to where Samuel’s daughter and wife would have been sitting. Continued to read the paper with its articles on the turmoil at the docks, preparing for the windfall of squid meat due with the return of the fishing fleet; a brief message on blasphemy from the Truffidian Antechamber; the crossword puzzle. A sudden shift, a dislocation, a puzzled look from his wife, and he had stared up from his paper in that last moment to see . . . what? To see the grey caps or a vision much worse? Had Samuel Hoegbotton known surprise? Terror? Wonder? Or was he taken away so swiftly that he, his daughter, and his wife, had no time for any reaction at all?

  Hoegbotton stared across the table again, focused on the bottle of port. The glass was half full. He leaned forward, examined the glass. The liquid inside had dried into sludge over time. A faint imprint of tiny lips could be seen on the edge of the glass. The cork was tightly wedged into the mouth of the bottle. A further mystery. Had the port been poured long after the Silence?

  Beyond the bottle, the fork with the skewered meat came into focus. It did not, from this angle, look as if it came from the p
iece of chicken on the plate.

  He pulled back, as much from a thought that had suddenly occurred to him as from the fork itself. A dim glint from the floor beside the chair caught his eye. Samuel Hoegbotton’s glasses. Twisted into a shape that resembled a circle attached to a line and two “u” shapes on either end. As he stared at the glasses, Hoegbotton felt the questions multiply, until he was not just sitting in Samuel Hoegbotton’s chair, but in the chairs of thousands of souls, looking out into darkness, trying to see what they had seen, to know what they came to know.

  The baby was still screaming as Hoegbotton stumbled outside, gasping. He ran over bits of brick and rubble. He ran through the long weeds. He ran past the buildings with mortar made from bones. He scrambled over the fence that said he should not have been there. He did not stop running until he had reached the familiar cobblestones of Albumuth Boulevard’s farthest extreme. When he did stop, gasping for breath, the pressure in his temples remained, the stray thought lodged in his head like a disease. What had Samuel Hoegbotton seen? And was it necessary to disappear to have seen it?

  * * *

  That was how it had started – following a cold, one-hundred-year-old trail. At first, Hoegbotton convinced himself that he was just pursuing a good business opportunity: buying up the contents of boarded-up homes, fixing what was in disrepair, and reselling it from his store. He had begun with Samuel Hoegbotton’s apartment, hiring workmen to take the contents of the dining room and transplant it to the room next to his office. They had arranged it exactly as it had been when he first entered it. He would sit in the room for hours, scrutinizing each element – the bottle of port, the plates, the silverware, the napkins haphazard on the chairs – but no further insight came to him. After a few months, he dusted it all and repaired the table, the chairs, restoring everything but the broadsheet to the way it must have been the day of the Silence. In his darker moments, he felt as if he might be ushering in a new Silence with his actions, but still he came no closer to an answer.