The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2003, Volume 14

by Stephen Jones

  He dropped the note, flung on his raincoat, and, not bothering to lock the store behind him, ran out onto the street – into the blinding rain. He headed up Albumuth Boulevard, through the Bureaucratic Quarter, toward home. He felt as if he were running in place. Every pedestrian hindered him. Every horse and cart blocked his path. As the rain came down harder, it beat a rhythmic message into Hoegbotton’s shoulders. The raindrops sounded like tapping fingers. Through the haze, the dull shapes of buildings became landmarks to anchor his staggering progress. Passers-by stared at him as if he were crazy.

  By the time he reached the apartment-building lobby, his sides ached and he was drenched in sweat. He had fallen repeatedly on the slick pavement and bloodied his hands. He took the stairs three at a time, ran down the hallway to the apartment, shouting “Rebecca!”

  The apartment door was ajar. He tried to catch his breath, bending over as he slowly pushed the door open. A line of white mushrooms ran through the hallway, low to the ground, their gills stained red. Where his hand held the door, fungus touched his fingers. He recoiled, straightened up.

  “Rebecca?” he said, staring into the kitchen. No one. The inside of the kitchen window was covered in purple fungi. A cane lay next to the coat rack, a gift from his father. He took it and walked into the apartment, picking his way between the white mushrooms as he pulled the edge of his raincoat up over his mouth. The doorway to the living room was directly to his left. He could hear nothing, as if his head were stuffed with cloth. Slowly, he peered around the doorway.

  The living room was aglow with fungi, white and purple, green and yellow. Shelves of fungi jutted from the walls. Bottle-shaped mushrooms, a deep burgundy, wavering like balloons, were anchored to the floor. Hoegbotton’s palm burned fiercely. Now he was in the dream, not before.

  Looking like the exoskeleton shed by some tropical beetle, the cage stood on the coffee table, the cover drawn aside, the door open. Beside the cage lay another alabaster hand. This did not surprise him. It did not even register. For, beyond the table, the doors to the balcony had been thrown wide open. Rebecca stood on the balcony, in the rain, her hair slick and bright, her eyes dim. Strewn around her, as if in tribute, the strange growths that had long ago claimed the balcony: orange strands whipping in the winds, transparent bulbs that stood rigid, mosaic patterns of gold-green mold imprinted on the balcony’s corroded railing. Beyond: the dark grey shadows of the city, dotted with smudges of light.

  Rebecca was looking down at . . . nothing . . . her hands held out before her as if in supplication.

  “Rebecca!” he shouted. Or thought he shouted. His mouth was tight and dry. He began to walk across the living room, the mushrooms pulling against his shoes, his pants, the air alive with spores. He blinked, sneezed, stopped just short of the balcony. Rebecca had still not looked up. Rain splattered against his boots.

  “Rebecca,” he said, afraid that she would not hear him, that the distance between them was somehow too great. “Come away from there. It isn’t safe.” She was shivering. He could see her shivering.

  Rebecca turned toward him and smiled. “Isn’t safe? You did this yourself, didn’t you? Opened the balcony for me before you left this morning?” She frowned. “But then I was puzzled. You had the cage sent back even though Mrs Willis said we couldn’t keep pets.”

  “I didn’t open the balcony. I didn’t send back the cage.” His boots were tinged green. His shoulders ached.

  “Well, someone brought it here – and I opened it. I was bored. The flower vendor was supposed to come and take me to the market, but he didn’t.”

  “Rebecca – it isn’t safe. Come away from the balcony.” Hoegbotton’s words were dull, unconvincing. A lethargy had begun to envelop his body.

  “I wish I knew what it was,” she said. “Can you see it? It’s right here – in front of me.”

  He started to say no, he couldn’t see it, but then he realized that he could see it. He was gasping from the sight of it. He was choking from the sight of it. Blood trickled down his chin where he had bitten into his lip. All the courage he had built up for Rebecca’s sake melted away.

  “Come here, Rebecca,” he managed to say.

  “Yes. Okay,” she said in a small, broken voice.

  Tripping over fungi, she walked into the apartment. Hoegbotton met her at the coffee table, drew her against him, whispered into her ear, “You need to get out of here, Rebecca. I need you to go downstairs. Find Mrs Willis. Have her send for the Cappan’s men.” Her hair was wet against his face. He stroked it gently.

  “I’m scared,” she whispered back, arms thrown around him. “Come with me.”

  “I will, Rebecca. Rebecca, I will. In just a minute. But now, I need you to leave.” He was trembling from mixed horror at the thought that he might never say her name again and relief, because now he knew why he loved her.

  Then her weight was gone as she moved past him to the door and, perversely, his burden returned to him.

  The thing had not moved from the balcony. It was not truly invisible but camouflaged itself by perfectly matching its background. The bars of a cage. The spaces between the bars. A perch. He could only glimpse it now because it could not mimic the rain that fell upon it fast enough.

  Hoegbotton walked out onto the balcony. The rain felt good on his face. His legs were numb so he lowered himself into an old rotting chair that they had never bothered to take off the balcony. While the thing watched, he sat there, staring between the bars of the balcony railing, out into the city. The rain trickled through his hair. He tried not to look at his hands, which were tinged green. He tried to laugh, but it came out as a rasping gurgle. The thought came to him that he must still be back in the mansion with the woman and the boy – that he had never really left – because, honestly, how could you escape such horror? How could anyone escape something like that?

  The thing padded up to him on its quiet feet and sang to him. Because it no longer mattered, Hoegbotton turned to look at it. He choked back a sob. He had not expected this. It was beautiful. Its single eye, so like Rebecca’s eyes, shone with an unearthly light, phosphorescent flashes darting across it. Its mirror skin shimmered with the rain. Its mouth, full of knives, smiled in a way that did not mean the same thing as a human smile. This was as close as he could get, he knew now, staring into that single, beautiful eye. This was as close. Maybe there was something else, something beyond. Maybe there was a knowledge still more secret than this knowledge, but he would never experience it.

  The thing held out a clawed hand and, after a time, Hoegbotton took it in his own.

  PAUL McAULEY

  Dr Pretorius and

  the Lost Temple

  PAUL McAULEY HAS WON the Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, John W. Campbell, Sidewise and British Fantasy awards for his novels and short stories. A former university researcher and lecturer in biology, his books include White Devils, Whole Wide World, Four Hundred Billion Stars, Pasquale’s Angel, Fairyland, The Secret of Life and his acclaimed “The Book of Confluence” trilogy, comprising Child of the River, Ancients of Days and Shrine of Stars. Forthcoming are The Eye of the Tyger, a Dr Who novella from Telos, and Little Machines, a short story collection from PS Publishing.

  “ ‘Dr Pretorius and the Lost Temple’ is the third in an irregular series about Mr Carlyle,” reveals McAuley, “who wouldn’t be at all pleased if you called him a ghost-hunter. The others, ‘Naming the Dead’ and ‘Bone Orchards’, were set in the fag-end of the twentieth century; this adventure is at the beginning of Mr Carlyle’s long career in London, just before Victoria gained the throne.

  “The Rotherhithe tunnel that Isambard Kingdom Brunel helped his father build is still in use, although you’ll have to ride a Tube train to enjoy it, and the stories Brunel tells about the troubled construction of what was then a cutting-edge project are all true. You can see the London Stone just where Mr Carlyle inspected it, and the reconstructed stones of the Temple of Mithras sit aslant Queen Victoria Str
eet. The Great Eastern, which was at last launched from its Millwall slipway, is, alas, no more, but the house where Mr Carlyle had his lodgings still exists; I live there.”

  August 1832

  I FIRST MET THE YOUNG ENGINEER, and became entangled in the machinations of Dr Pretorius and the affair of the lost temple, at a seance. For three weeks, fantastic stories of the psychic powers of a young Romanian gypsy woman had been circulating throughout London. It was said that she could relay messages from the dead and speak directly to the hearts and minds of the living, that her revelations and admonitions made women faint and strong men weep. Rank and fashion flocked to witness this latest curiosity; there had been numerous articles and sketches about her in newspapers and magazines, and skits parodying her seances put on in music halls and theatres.

  I was newly arrived from Edinburgh, and still wore a black band for my mother and father, but I was also young and full of misplaced confidence. I believed that I knew more about the matter of the dead than anyone living, and was both jealous of and intrigued by this young gypsy’s fame; I knew that I must find out if she was a fraud, a rival, or a potential ally and friend.

  Her family had rented out the ground floor of a house on the northern edge of the Holborn Rookery, and a large crowd had gathered outside to watch the arrival of visitors to the new phenomenon. The unending procession of wonders that passes through the great metropolis never seems to exhaust the curiosity of its inhabitants; if the city were a theatre, it would never want for an audience, and its angels would see their investments multiply without any of the usual risk. Young women carrying babies or with small children clutching their skirts were begging for alms; unshaven ruffians in battered caps and canvas waistcoats were swigging from bottles; an old woman with greasy unbound hair and a shrewd gaze stood in a doorway, smoking a short clay pipe. There were pamphlet and ballad-sheet sellers, orange sellers (the road was littered with the bits of tissue paper in which the fruit was wrapped), and sellers of ginger beer and fried fish and pies. A crew of beggars lacking an assortment of limbs were got up as sailors in front of a sheet crudely painted with a ship foundering in a tempest. A street preacher stood on a box under a banner held up by his supporters, sweating into the serge of his black coat, his face shining and his fists shaking above his head as he tried in vain to make himself heard above the din. In short, every beastly aspect of humanity was on display, and most of them were in some way haunted, mostly by imps of delirium or the ghosts of dead children with faces like shrivelled apples; one old woman, bent double over a stick, carried a dozen half-formed ghost babies on her back, squirming over each other like blind newborn kittens trying to get their turn at their mother’s teats.

  It was terribly hot, the close, heavy air laden with the miasma of every taper, candle, whale-oil lantern and gas mantle burning in London’s teeming night. Carriages were lined up along one side of the road, their horses waiting patiently in their traces, grazing from the nosebags strapped over their muzzles; the oaty reek of horse piss was the cleanest smell in the crowded thoroughfare. A pair of constables in black top hats and blue swallow-tail coats stood near a coffee stall, watching the burlesque with a kind of baffled approval, as if it had been unexpectedly staged for their benefit. I joined the knot of well-dressed men and women waiting to gain admittance, paid my florin to a whiskery old rogue who reeked of cheap gin (the grey hair tangled around his face swarmed with flea-sized imps), and followed the others through a dark corridor, hung with cobwebby threads and damp rags that brushed unpleasantly against my face, into a hot airless room not much illuminated by the half-dozen candles spiked to the walls. There was a filthy piece of red velvet stretched across the rear wall, a sagging armchair set in front of it, nothing else.

  The audience was much as I had expected: a party of young swells in bright waistcoats given to laughter and loud remarks that were far less amusing and original than they supposed; several dignified old women in widows’ weeds; a variety of the pale, anxious, recently bereaved. The only person of immediate interest was a white-haired man in an antique jacket and high-collared shirt, with a faint ineradicable sneer on his face and a bright, birdlike gaze that roved around the room. It settled on me for a moment, took note, and moved on. I was pinched toward the back, between a slight young man with the black hair and olive complexion of a native of Southern France or Spain, and a married couple, the woman in black with a veil across her face, her straight-backed husband attempting to seem dignified, but trembling with barely suppressed emotion; it was to his leg that the dead child clung, a stout but wan little thing no more than six years old.

  There were other presences in the room – blurred partial shells of the kind cast off in moments of intense emotion, and a foggy, bloated imp that peered out of the black shawl of a sharp-nosed old woman whom I took for one too fond of laudanum – but the little girl was the only true ghost. She looked at me with a kind of wonder, her eyes dark smudges, and asked in a tiny voice that only I could hear if I would help her sleep.

  I smiled down at her. Like her father, I was also possessed by emotion; a sick anticipation revolved like a ball of hot tar in my stomach.

  “I’m so tired,” the poor creature said. “I want to sleep and I can’t. I’m so tired.”

  She was too young to know what had happened to her. Like most ghosts, she was frightened and pathetic.

  I had an idea that she might prove useful, and said quietly, “Be patient, my dear, and I’ll help you sleep for as long as you like. But first, will you help me?”

  She gave me a wan smile, and nodded warily. The young man beside me must have heard me talking to her, for he frowned and seemed to be about to ask me a question, but at that moment the grey-haired, imp-infested old man who had taken the admission money limped around the edge of the room, leaning on a stout stick and pinching out all but one of the candles. He took up station in front of the chair, stamped his stick on the floor for silence, and made a long meretricious speech that I won’t trouble to repeat in any detail, explaining at the end that all questions must be directed through him, and that if anyone would like to contact “the other side” for the modest fee of just half a guinea, then they should now step forward, and tell him the name of their dear departed.

  Since most in the room had come there for that purpose, this took some time. The old man wrote down their requests on a scrap of paper, licking the point of his “permanent” pencil at every other letter, so that his lips were soon stained quite blue. I watched with growing impatience and dissatisfaction, already suspecting that I had squandered a florin to no good purpose. There was nothing of the matter of the dead here; only shabby showmanship and cheap spectacle. The swells passed around a silver flask and nudged each other; the olive-complexioned young man impatiently consulted a pocket watch; the white-haired man and I exchanged a glance, and his smirk grew a fraction, as if he had detected in me some impropriety.

  The married couple with the ghost child were the last to murmur into the old man’s ear. He licked and wrote, then tucked the pencil behind his ear and struck the floor with his stick. A corner of the red drapery was lifted to admit, with a great swirl of sweet-smelling white smoke, two burly men in collarless shirts and braces, escorting a plump girl of fourteen or fifteen in a plain black dress. She was endeavouring to seem calm, but I saw how her gaze darted around the room, and how she flinched when one of the men took her arm and led her to the chair.

  I told the little ghost to go and stand in front of the lady, and when she showed reluctance to let go of her father said, “Be brave now,” and gave her the tiniest pinch of compulsion to thrust her through the crowd.

  The remaining candle went out as soon as the plump girl sat down. A woman gasped; the swells tittered. Then someone uncovered a lantern and a ray of light shot across the room, transfixing the gypsy girl’s face. Her eyes were rolled back, showing only crescents of white behind flickering eyelashes, but I did not for a moment believe that was why she did not see the l
ittle ghost who stood in front of her. Bells rang here and there in the darkness and pale shapes flew through the air. The swells cheered; several of the women emitted muffled shrieks. The gypsy girl’s arms and then her whole upper body began to quake. Foam dripped from a corner of her mouth and she suddenly bent double, as if punched in the stomach, and began to chokingly regurgitate into her lap yards of white stuff. The little ghost watched this calmly, once or twice glancing back at me. The smoke grew thicker, defining the angled beam of the lantern. When she had spat out the last of what was clearly meant to be ectoplasm, the girl raised her face to the smoky light, like a burlesque of a blind Pietà, and asked in a croaking, thickly accented voice if there was any spirit who would speak with the living.

  I could no longer contain my impatience and disgust, and said loudly, “There is a ghost already here, madam. Perhaps you could point it out.”

  The audience stirred, trying to discover who amongst them had spoken. The girl repeated her question, like an actor insisting on the script after someone else botches a line or a piece of scenery falls over, and the old man said, “Let the unbeliever leave now, for the sake of those who want to speak with the dead.”

  My anger was a hot pulse behind my eyes. I said, “If you know anything about the matter of the dead, sir, you would have your daughter describe the poor shade who stands before her.”

  My eyes were adapting to the darkness. I could see that the two toughs on either side of the girl were looking this way and that, trying to locate me. The little ghost was looking at me too, plainly uncertain that she had done all I had asked of her. The olive-skinned young man stepped close and dug a sharp elbow in my ribs and whispered, more with delight than anger, “What the devil are you about, sir?”

  The old man thumped his stick three times on the floor, and said, “There are many spirits here. Let them show themselves.”