The Best New Horror 7

by Stephen Jones

  I grabbed the harpoon as the bear lumbered towards me, driving it hard. It struck near the massive chest, reddening where the wind riffled the pelt. The beast was slowed, but still he came towards me. I had an odd strength in me – the strength to throw a harpoon harder and faster than the wind – yet I was light, thinly bound by rigored muscle and spongy ropes of blood. The bear reached me and tumbled me over and his jaw opened and teeth closed over my arm and shoulder. The teeth gave me no pain. It was the carrion-hot breath that terrified me.

  Somehow, I pulled away from beneath him, dragged back on the bones of elbows and knees. I think he sensed then that he already had victory. Grey strands of ligament hung from his mouth, and my right collarbone dangled beneath. He shook it away. There was something playful and cat-like about the way he struck out at me with the massive pad of his paw. I was blown back as if by the wind as the claws striped my chest. I struck an outcrop of rock, feeling my left hand snap and roll away, and my leg break where the wound had exposed the bone, raising a pointed femur. The bear leapt at me, coming down, blocking the sky.

  My broken femur struck into his belly like a stake. He bellowed and the blood gushed in a salt wave. I knew that I would have to get away before the heat dissolved me entirely.

  I didn’t kill the bear. He ran back up the beach, trailing blood. The wound, which seemed so terrible as it broke over me from his belly, will probably heal easily enough. Spring is coming soon, and life will regather itself, and the bear will survive. I wish him luck, and the flesh of the seal when we have finally finished with her. I use the harpoon as a kind of crutch now that I can no longer walk easily. I have lashed the remains of my left arm to it, and struggle along the shore like a broken-winged bird.

  I have to keep the harpoon lashed that way even when I hunt, but the seal now comes easily. She has died for us so many times now that she no longer fears death.

  How I envy her. The bear’s blood-heat and his teeth and claws have exposed and melted the flesh of my chest and belly. I can look down now as I shelter by a rock from the long ice-glittering shadows of the gathering sunlight. The dark frozen organs inside their cage, furred with ice.

  I look up at the rim of the sky. Aagyuuk is rising. Across sixteen light years, Altair winks at me. While still I have time, I must catch the seal again.

  The thaw is coming now, as Tirkiluk said it would once Aagyuuk had risen. There is faint light much of the day, and sudden flashes of the blazing rim of the sun through the clouds and glaciers that lie piled on the horizon. The wind is veering south. The seabirds are returning.

  The ice in the bay booms now, and cracks like thunder. For Tirkiluk and Naigo, even though I know that there will be bitter storms to come, death has receded. She came out to see me today when the sun was sailing clear of the horizon and I was crouching in the ice-shadows where the cold wind drives deepest at the eastern end of the shore. She brought Naigo with her, gathered deep under her furs. She wept when she saw me, yet she held the child out for me to see. He slept despite the chill. Gently, I let the ragged claw of my remaining hand brush against his forehead, where the marks of birth have left his skin entirely. Then she drew him away, and held him to her breast and wept all the more. I would have wept with her, had I any tears left in me.

  I went today to the place of bones. I’ve known for some time that it is where I should seek to avoid the gathering heat. I stood at the rim of the shadowed ravine with rags of my rotting flesh streaming in the wind, gazing down at those clean and serene skulls. But I know that the souls live elsewhere. They live on the wind, in the ice, and beneath the soft lids of Naigos sleeping eyes.

  I write with difficulty now as the skin sloughs off my fingers like old seaweed. These pages are filthy from the mess I leave, and I can only go out when the wind veers north, or in the cold of the night. Why should I strive to continue now, anyway? I can think of no reason other than fear.

  A wide crack has appeared in the sheet of ice that covered the bay. It runs like a road from the horizon right up to the shore. Somehow, I believe I can smell the sea on it, the salt breath of the ocean.

  Must write before I lose fingers of remaining hand.

  Went out on to the beach. As I gazed at the widening gap in the ice, the seal emerged from the wind-ripped water. She lumbered up across the rocks towards me, and stared without fear with the steam of life rising from her smooth dark pelt. I could only marvel and wonder, and feel a kind of love. She forgives, after all the times that her life has been taken. She turned then, and went back into the water, and dived in a smooth deep ripple.

  I thought then I stood alone in the wind, yet when I looked behind me, Tirkiluk was there. A dark figure, standing just as I have stood so many times at the edge of this shore, looking out at the crystal mountains, the glacier, the bay. She let me hold her, and touch the baby again. I knew that we were saying goodbye, although there were no words.

  I can hear the seal mewling on the midnight wind. She is out on the shore again. Calling. Waiting. All I must do now is stand, and lift these limbs, and walk down towards the glittering path of water that spreads out across the bay. And the seal will lead me to the place in the ocean where a lantern gleams, dark hair streams, and fingerless hands spread wide in an embrace.

  From there, the rest of my journey should be easy.

  * * *

  From the log of John Farragar, Ship’s Captain, Queen of Erin. 12 May 1943: Sailed 12:00 hours Tuiak Bay SSE towards Neimaagen. A fire has destroyed Logos II Weatherbase, and a thorough search has revealed no trace of Science Officer Seymour. Have radioed Meteorological Intelligence at Godalming and advised that he should be listed as missing, presumed dead.

  Also advised Godalming that an Eskimo woman and infant survived amid the burnt-out wreckage. They are aboard with us now, and I have no reason to doubt that the truth of this sad matter is as the woman has told me:

  Seymour befriended her when she was abandoned by her tribe, and the fire was caused by an accident with a lantern at the time broadcasts ceased. He died soon after from injuries caused by his attempts to recover supplies from the burning hut, and the body was subsequently taken by wolves. The later journals I have recovered are undated, and clearly the product of a sadly deranged mind. I would not wish them to reach the hands of his relatives, and I have thus taken the responsibility upon myself to have them destroyed in the ship’s furnace.

  Tirkiluk, the Eskimo woman, has asked to be landed at Kecskemet, where the tribe is very different to her own, and the wooded land is somewhat warmer and kinder. As the deviation from our course is small, I have agreed to her request. Her journey aboard the Queen should take little more than two days, but I am sure that by then we shall miss her.

  CHRISTOPHER FOWLER

  The Most Boring Woman

  in the World

  CHRISTOPHER FOWLER LIVES and works in central London, where he runs the Soho movie marketing company The Creative Partnership, producing TV and radio scripts, documentaries, trailers and promotional shorts. For half of each day, Fowler works with the writers, producers and artists at The Creative Partnership, while he spends the remainder of the day writing short stories and novels.

  His books include Roofworld, Rune, Red Bride, Darkest Day, Spanky, Psychoville, Disturbia, and the collections City Jitters, City Jitters Two, The Bureau of Lost Souls, Sharper Knives, Flesh Wounds and Dracula’s Library. Most of his novels are in various stages of development as movies, while his story “The Master Builder” was filmed by CBS-TV as Through the Eyes of a Killer (1992) starring Tippi Hedren, and Left Hand Drive, based on his first short story, won Best British Short Film in 1993.

  As the author explains, the following tale is the only oral story he has ever written: “I did it as an audition piece for an actress friend of mine called Maggie, something that would allow her to ‘perform’ as she progressed through it. It’s interesting seeing what someone else does with a short story, and Maggie really brought it to life as she went off the de
ep end.

  “J.G. Ballard was once described thus: ‘He doesn’t care where he lives, because he lives inside his head.’ It’s impossible to know what others are thinking, or whether their self-evaluations are accurate. That gap in perception gave me this story and led in turn to Psychoville, which is the first non-supernatural novel I’ve written. It will hopefully be seen as not simply as a ‘mad housewife’ tale, but one making the point that extraordinary things happen to ordinary people, and it seems to be a uniquely British character trait to downplay the extraordinariness when describing one’s life to a stranger. It’s an area that interests me, and something I’ll do more of.”

  I CAN’T IMAGINE why you’d want to interview me, I’m the most boring woman in the world.

  I’m nobody. Nothing interesting ever happens in my life. I live in a house like thousands of others, in a banjo crescent called Wellington Close in a suburban part of South London, in a semidetached with three bedrooms and a garden filled with neatly pruned roses that have no scent and a lawn covered with broken plastic children’s toys. I have a labrador called Blackie, two children, Jason and Emma, and a husband called Derek. I keep my clothesline filled and my upstairs curtains closed (to protect the carpets from the sun – blue fades easily) and my days are all the same.

  Derek works for a company that supplies most of Southern England with nonflammable sofa kapok. I met him when I was a secretary at Mono Foods, where he was senior floor manager. One afternoon he came by my desk and asked me out to the pub. I’ll always remember it because he drank eight pints of lager to my three Babychams and I’d never met anyone with that much money before. Six weeks later he proposed. We were married the following June and spent two weeks on the Costa where I picked up a painful crimson rash on the beach and had to be hospitalized in a clinic for skin disorders.

  Before that? Well, nothing much to report. I was a happy child. People always say that, don’t they? My older brother, to whom I was devoted, died in a motorbike accident when a dog ran out in front of him, and at the funeral they muddled his cremation with someone else’s, an old lady’s, so that we got the wrong urns and her family were very upset. Also, the dog was put down. Things like that were always happening in our family. On Christmas Eve 1969, my father got completely drunk, fell down the coal-hole chute and landed in the cellar, and nobody found him until Boxing Day. His right leg didn’t knit properly so he had to walk with a stick. One day the stick got stuck in a drainage grating, and he had a heart attack trying to pull it out. My mother passed on a few weeks later. They say one often follows the other, don’t they? At around the same time I lost one cousin through faulty electric blanket wiring and another when a gas tap jammed in a Portuguese villa.

  No such calamities ever occur now. Now my days are all the same.

  When I was young I was a pretty girl, with straight white teeth and hair that framed my face like curls of country butter, but I didn’t know I was pretty until I was thirteen, when John Percy from three doors down tried to rape me in exchange for a Chad Valley Give-A-Show projector. I told my mother and she went over to the Percy house. They moved away soon after. They had to. John came around and hit me when I opened the front door to him. He broke my nose, and I wasn’t so pretty after that.

  When I was sixteen I wanted to go to art college, I wanted to be an artist, but my father said there was no call for it and I would be better off in an office. So I went to work for Mono Foods, met Derek, got married. I didn’t have to or anything, it just felt like the right thing to do. He didn’t have his bald spot back then. He didn’t blow his nose and analyse the contents of his hankie. He didn’t fall asleep all the time. He really seemed interested, and nobody else was, so I said yes. My father joked about it being a relief to get me off his hands, but he wasn’t really joking.

  For a while we moved in with Derek’s mother, but that didn’t work out because she hated me for taking away her son and stood over me in the kitchen while I cooked, saying things like, “That isn’t how he likes his eggs,” until I felt like strangling her. Then I fell pregnant and we moved here. We put her in a very nice old folks’ home, but the first night she was there she wrote and told me I was cursed for stealing her boy, that she was going to die and that it would be on my conscience for ever.

  The awful thing was that she had a stroke that night and died, and I had to go into therapy. Derek took his mother’s side and while he didn’t actually call me murderer to my face, I knew what he was thinking.

  Since then I always joke that I’m not addicted to Valium, I just like the taste.

  My days are always the same.

  Here’s my routine:

  The white plastic radio alarm clock goes off at seven-fifteen. The DJ makes jokes about the day’s newspaper headlines as I rise and slip into a powder-blue dressing gown covered in little pink flowers. I’ll have been awake since five, lying on my back listening to the ticking of the pipes as the boiler thermostat comes on. Derek sleeps through the alarm. I wake him and he totters off to the bathroom moaning about his workload and complaining about people at the office I’ve never heard of because I’m just a silly housewife who can’t retain any information that isn’t about the price of fucking washing powder.

  I drag the children out of their beds and pack them off to wash and dress, then make them breakfast (cereal and toast in the summer, porridge in the winter), check that they’re presentable and send them off to school. Derek usually finds something to bitch about, like I’ve ironed his shirt with the creases going in the wrong direction or there’s a button missing from his braces, and tuts and fuffs until I’ve sorted out the problem. Then he takes the Vauxhall, leaves me the Renault and the house falls silent. And I sit down with a cigarette, a nice glass of Scotch and a Valium.

  They don’t know I smoke. I have to sling the ashtrays in the dishwasher and open the windows before the kids get back.

  During the day all sorts of exciting things happen. Last Tuesday the knob came off the tumble dryer, on Thursday next door’s cat nearly got run over, and on Friday I found out that my husband was having an affair. Her name is Georgina. She works in his department. His pet name for her is “my little Gee Gee”, and explains all of the awkward, stilted phonecalls that take place here in the evenings. If you’re going to have an affair it’s a good idea to remember to empty the pockets of your trousers before you give them to me for dry-cleaning, that’s all I can say.

  I don’t get on with the neighbours. The stuck-up bitch next door won’t talk to me because I once got a little soused in the middle of the day and fell into her fishpond. Sometimes I sit in the car and rev the engine just to blow smoke over her washing.

  Jason and Emma come home and lie on the floor on their stomachs in that curiously impossible position children use for watching television. They remain glued to cartoons, space serials and Save The Fucking Zebra updates, all presented by some perky fresh-faced teenaged boy I’d secretly like to ride naked.

  I cook. I make sausage, egg and beans with chips, and fishfingers with chips, and beefburgers with chips, and chops, chips and peas. The meals I cook are so bright and dry you’d think they were carved from seaside rock. Everything comes with chips at number 11 Wellington Close. I’m the only one who doesn’t like chips. I’d like to cook langoustine swimming in garlic, loup grillé with capers and shallots. But you can’t get langoustine around here, just doigts de poisson avec frites.

  I don’t eat with the others. After the smell of frying has permeated my clothes I’m no longer hungry. I have a brandy. I keep a bottle at the back of the sink. Sometimes Derek comes into the kitchen to refill the saltcellar or something and finds me on all fours with my head somewhere near the U-bend, and I tell him that the waste disposal is playing up again.

  Then I clear away the dinner things while Derek provides more news about the people he works with and who, for me, only exist as a series of names with personality quirks attached. The Byzantine intrigue of the sofa kapok world is such that if
Lucrezia Borgia applied for a job she’d barely make a secretarial position.

  I don’t wash up very well. By now the kids are yelling and I’m getting jumpy. Anything I drop goes in the bin. We’ve all this missing crockery. Nobody notices. Nobody notices anything. My days are all the same. I listen to the pounding in my head and watch as the lounge fills up with blood. You can’t see the telly when there’s blood in the way.

  At the weekend I go shopping. Sometimes I go shopping in my mind, but I don’t come back with anything. Oh how we love to shop! B&Q, M&S, Safeway, Tesco, Homebase, Knickerbox, Body Shop, we just wander around lost in amazement at the sheer choice and ready availability of luxury products at the end of the twentieth century. If the excitement was running any higher it would be leaking from our arseholes. Derek doesn’t come with us, of course; he stays behind at the house to creep around making furtive phone calls from the bedroom. He says he’s “doing the accounts”, presumably a coded phrase which means “telephoning the trollop”. He misses the chance to watch me shoplift. I only take things I don’t want, although the complete set of Sabatier steak-knives I hoisted last month proved useful for throwing at next-door’s spaniel.

  On Sunday mornings we rise later than usual and I prepare a cooked breakfast before Derek heaves his flabby body from the chair and chooses between his pastimes of straightening up the garden and hoovering his floozie’s hairpins from the car. Do they still have hairpins? I can’t remember the last time I saw one. There are so many things you don’t see any more. Those little pieces of green string with metal rods at either end that used to hold bits of paper together. Animal-shaped Peak Freen biscuits. Jubblies, sherbet dabs and Jamboree Bags. You never see any of them any more. Instead I see the white plastic radio alarm clock and the powder-blue dressing gown and the hairs on Derek’s indifferently turned back.