The Best New Horror 7

by Stephen Jones

  “In fact, they were based on the blood of langur monkeys. There were unfortunate side effects, but it really did promote rejuvenation of the skin. As for patient deaths, how many die in hospitals? How many are killed by the treatments that are supposed to help them? Modern medicine is a brutal business, a matter of poisoning the patient to the edge of death in the hope that his illness is more susceptible. Ah, Mr Cochrane, they come to my clinic because they are dying. Even if they are cured, many die of secondary infections they acquired during their illnesses.

  “But that is not what I wish to talk about. I am interested in your interest in my history. That’s why I allowed you here, as my guest.”

  “I’d say you’re looking at extradition, at families of your patients suing you for everything you have, at charges of murder and false practice. You don’t look like you’ve got long to live yourself, and I think you’ll spend the rest of your short life being reamed by sex-starved lifers.”

  “I did not realize you were homosexual,” Dr Pretorius said. “Ah, but perhaps you do not realize this yourself.” He looked amused. “You are thirty-two, Mr Cochrane. Your father died of heart failure in his fifty-eighth year; there is a history of pancreatic cancer in your mother’s family. Actuarial tables would give you no more than another thirty years. How would you like to live to be a hundred?”

  Cochrane had plans to live much longer than that. Keeping his face still, he said, “And end up looking like you?”

  “You would have to live a lot longer than that,” Dr Pretorius said.

  “How old are you?”

  “You already know the answer to that question, I believe,” Dr Pretorius said, calmly meeting Cochrane’s gaze.

  Cochrane called his bluff. “I’m supposed to believe what could be a bunch of fake documents?”

  “But you do believe. You are hungry for my secret, Mr Cochrane. That is why you think you are here, although, as I said, you are here because I allow it. Because I want my story known.”

  Cochrane made a counterstrike. “Maybe I’m not interested in your story. Maybe a better story would be your arrest and trial. Let’s face it, I’m here because I threatened to print an exposé of your crimes.”

  “I think you’ll find that most were committed in other countries, far away and long ago. It is not human justice I fear, Mr Cochrane, but it is true that you could be a . . . nuisance. Please, ask questions. I will answer as I can.”

  Cochrane was ready for this tactic. Everything was in his head: his memory was part of his success. He didn’t need to flip through notes, or pause to check facts. He said, “Let’s start with a simple one. You were involved with the Edinburgh surgeon, Dr Moreau. There was a scandal, and Moreau quit the country. It was rumoured that Burke and Hare – ”

  Dr Pretorius’s laugh was like the dry rattling of seeds in a gourd. “Moreau had no need of those gentlemen. His was more a veterinary art. He called himself a surgeon, but he was a butcher. He knew nothing of sepsis, to begin with. He stole secrets, Mr Cochrane. His end was quite fitting, an epitaph to all such meddlers.”

  “Then there was no connection between Moreau, yourself, and Dr Henry Jekyll? I have clippings from the Scotsman that says otherwise. 5 July 1886.”

  “Dr Jekyll was a poor unstable fellow. He fled to London, you know. Reports of his death were quite exaggerated. There was a spate of murders that had his stamp . . . Now, he did know something of surgery.”

  “And you vanished, too. There’s a gap in the records of about five years.”

  “Ah, Africa,” Dr Pretorius said. “It was a foolish expedition, but not one I regret. I have learned to regret nothing. Poor Ayesha. I loved her, you know. Oh, not in the coarse physical sense. It was something higher, something purer. It was a true meeting of minds. Haggard claimed her for himself in that ridiculous account, but he was no gentleman. He tried to force her in the worst way, and the wounds accelerated her aging – and so she tried to purify herself too early. Perhaps I do regret saving Haggard’s life, but one can’t live on regrets. I went there in search of rejuvenation, and it was one place untouched by science, as was my poor, lovely Ayesha, but Haggard and his jack-booted kind – I think also of that bombast Challenger – put an end to that. The last of magic vanished under a wash of British Empire red. Well, but I was already tainted myself, of course.”

  Cochrane wondered if the man’s bravado was nothing more than senility. Old men grow arrogant, forgetting the uncertainty of their youth, forgetting defeat and remembering only victory. Make a jump. Catch him in a lie, a contradiction. He said, “You were linked to a number of women in the thirties.”

  “No doubt you know their names better than I do. They were only human, Mr Cochrane. Gods on the silver screen, of course, but not in the flesh. Our friendships were, of course, purely platonic. All girls together, as it were.”

  “At least one had an abortion.”

  “More than one. They came to my clinic for that, amongst other things. I suppose you read it in one of Anger’s books. He was here, you know. A beautiful, puckish young thing. He rode up on a motorcycle with a Mexican lad who was surely underage. There was some scandal when Garbo found James Whale and Anger’s Mexican Adonis sucking off each other – her phrase, you understand – in the rose garden. She was here with her own lover, of course, a vain but rather glorious woman who made a habit of stealing women from men.”

  Dr Pretorius had slyly trumped Cochrane with this story. He was a harder target than he looked, and Cochrane thought that he would enjoy breaking him down. It was time to bring this round to the power he held over this old man.

  But Dr Pretorius quickly dismissed the allegations about collaboration with Ilsa Magall. He rolled up his sleeve and showed the blurry blue numbers tattooed on his wrist, and said, “I am a homosexual and a Jew. Luckily, they put the star on me, not the triangle: the queers flew up the chimney almost as soon as their feet touched the mud. Mr Cochrane, I worked as an alternative to death. Old men who did not work lasted no longer in the camps than the time it took to have them undress and step into the showers.”

  “The Israeli government will take a different view, if I choose to tell them where you are. They’re looking for a Dr Loew, but that number on your wrist will be enough identification.”

  Dr Pretorius shrugged inside his shawl. “You have no proof, or you would show it to me. You are my guest here, Mr Cochrane.”

  “Then you admit you’re guilty.”

  “Of course I’m guilty. I’m a damned soul, damned by my pact with Astorath, and proud of it. Perhaps you’re damned too, perhaps not, but I know I am. It is a privileged position.”

  A moment later, a male nurse and the PR man, Ransom, appeared through the sweating greenery. Just before he was wheeled away, Dr Pretorius said, “Look around as much as you want, but you will not be allowed beyond the ha-ha. It is for your safety, you understand: wild creatures live in the grounds. You interest me, Cochrane. I may allow you to tell my story. In the house you may find such evidence as you need, to convince you.”

  “Convince me?”

  “Of my history,” Dr Pretorius said, and then he was wheeled away through a curtain of hanging ferns. “Show him, Ransom.”

  Ransom was a bluff, British guy in his late sixties, ex-Royal Air Force and as stiff as a ramrod, his carefully ironed Jaeger blazer and crisp white haircut visibly wilting in the dry heat as he walked Cochrane through the extensive gardens to the guest bungalows. Dr Pretorius would see Cochrane the next day, Ransom said, he hoped that an overnight stay wasn’t an inconvenience?

  “I guess that’s the Brit way of saying I’m a prisoner.”

  “Oh no. No no. A guest.”

  Cochrane wondered if this was some way of making a move on him. If they tried, they were in for a surprise. He said, “I’d have to make a call to my office. They like to know where I am, if you know what I mean.”

  “Oh, quite,” Ransom said. “We want you to enjoy your stay here.”

  “
Yeah? I think I will look around. Soak up the atmosphere. Shake off the stink off the boonie fishing village I just spent two days in. I don’t like being made to hang about, Ransom. In fact, I fucking hate it. The only compensation is that I get to write everything up. If I don’t get what I want, your fucking boss will hang in Tel Aviv.”

  “Dr Pretorius wants you to write the truth. His true history.”

  “And what’s that? Beyond the fact he’s ready to make a run for it?”

  Ransom emitted a patently false laugh. “I believe you should talk to your researcher, Larry, but before that perhaps I could show you around the house and grounds. This place has seen quite a bit of history. Chaplin stayed in the bungalow we’ll put you up in, and Churchill next door. Still has the cigar humidor Dr Pretorius had installed for him. Did I give you the information pack?”

  “I glanced at it.”

  “Best thing to do with that kind of stuff,” Ransom said. He was the kind of PR flack who agreed to everything. “Better at first hand, eh? I believe Dr Pretorius suggested that you look around the house.”

  “Sure,” Cochrane said. He was already tired of the man’s bluff, hollow heartiness, and said that perhaps he’d go freshen up.

  “Look around by yourself, by all means,” Ransom said. “But please, as Dr Pretorius suggested, don’t wander across the ha-ha – the perimeter ditch? We wouldn’t like any of the animals chasing after you.”

  “Someone was killed, weren’t they?”

  “Ah, I see you’ve done some research. Yes, some minor fifties starlet was killed by a jackal. Silly girl couldn’t hold her drink and wandered off downhill towards the sea. But that was a long time ago, and you’re more sensible, I know. I believe that your cocaine habit is quite cured, for instance.”

  Cochrane wasn’t surprised that Pretorius’s people had been checking up on him. He said, “The fifties, that was when they were coming up here for so-called rejuvenation injections, right?”

  “Oh no, not here at the house. That would be the clinic.”

  “The one that’s closing down.”

  “Relocating,” Ransom said firmly.

  “Whatever. I heard she was found naked.”

  “Animals often do that before they eat. Strip the clothes off. I was in Africa,” Ransom added, then said goodbye to Cochrane at the door of the guest bungalow.

  The bungalow was a big, airy room with a tiled bathroom in back. Cane furniture, white shutters, a fan slowly turning up in the rafters, gave it an old-fashioned British colonial ambience.

  Cochrane’s bag was at the foot of the bed; his clothes neatly folded away in the bamboo dresser. Cochrane opened up his Compaq portable and unshipped his phone coupler – but the only way of dialing out was through an old-fashioned mechanical switchboard that wouldn’t support computer traffic.

  “Can you believe this shit,” he said to Howie Zaslow, when he finally got through to LA on the phone “The fucker’s got the biggest satellite dish outside of NASA sitting in back of his stately pile, and I bet all he uses it for is to jack off to the Playboy channel. I want to download stuff from you, I’m going to have to get someone to drive me to the nearest public phone.”

  Zaslow’s voice crackled down a thousand miles of copper cable and bad connections into the cream bakelite handset. “Did he talk?”

  “Not exactly. He’s playing games. He agreed with everything I said, then tried to fob me off with sex scandals from the Jurassic, and even more blatant shit about pacts with devils. The Nazi stuff shook him, though. He has me shut up in the estate right now.”

  “Are you in trouble?”

  “Hell no. This is just part of the negotiations.” Cochrane thought it funny, Zaslow concerned about his safety when he had nothing but bad news for the little nerd.

  Zaslow said, “He might come after me, too.”

  “Don’t be chickenshit. I’m the one who’s out here. You want to benefit from this, you better work your sad ass digging dirt.”

  “You still don’t know if he has a secret,” Zaslow said. “For instance, he could be a mutant. You wouldn’t be able to benefit from an oddity in his genetic makeup.”

  “He’s as human as you and me. Just a hell of a lot older.”

  “Not every mutant is a monster. In fact, most aren’t. There are plenty of single-locus mutations – ”

  “So I’ll sell him to science,” Cochrane said impatiently. They’d been through all this before, and it hadn’t convinced Cochrane then. “Do what I tell you,” Cochrane said. “Speculate on your free time.”

  Zaslow said, “Well, I got more on his career. There was a Dr Pretorius teaching natural philosophy and chemistry at the University of Ingolstadt in the 1800s. He was involved with a scandal concerning some Swiss student. Something about robbing graves, and maybe necrophilia. The student disappeared after a riot.”

  “I don’t give a fuck about ancient history. We’ll only get Pretorius to come across with the goods if he knows we have evidence that could hang him.” Cochrane was about to put down the phone, then said on a whim, “Oh, check out the name Astorath for me.”

  “Animal, vegetable or mineral?”

  “How the fuck should I know? Pretorius said he had some kind of deal going with him. Just do your job, and I’ll try and find a place to plug in my modem.”

  The manicured gardens around the house were extensive: long formal beds of roses, shedding petals in the heat, between trimmed evergreen hedges; neatly pruned fruit trees; a formal Japanese garden with sinuously raked gravel and an arrangement of the oldest bonsai Cochrane had ever seen. Tennis courts, a manicured croquet lawn, a swimming pool in white marble with a reproduction of Rome’s Trevi fountain spouting water at the deep end, and Neptune and mermaids worked in mosaic tile at the bottom of the crystal clear water. A row of brightly painted cabins beyond; Cochrane checked one out, grinned when he saw the hand-carved daybed inside. The place had been famous for its discreet orgies in the thirties and forties, Hollywood stars in cross-border hi-jinks safe from the press’s prying eyes.

  The gardens stretched around the back of the house towards a winding service road. Cochrane was watching two trucks toil up the dusty road when he heard the cry.

  It came from somewhere near the back of the house, husky and plaintive, like the cry of a tired child, or a woman who’d worn her voice out crying. Cochrane walked along the path in the shadow of the house’s high wall, looking through the first floor’s mullion windows, but it was only when he heard the cry again that he found the grating. It was set flush in a square of concrete, a hinged grid of strong steel bars fastened by a padlock to a steel staple, with a covering of rusting wire mesh. Cochrane kicked aside the mesh and then stepped back with a start when fingers reached up through the bars.

  “Hey,” Cochrane said. “Who’s down there?”

  The fingers were long and white and slender, with coarse hair sprouting at the joints. They flexed like sea anemone tentacles, as if tasting the air.

  “Hey,” Cochrane said again. He glanced around, but there was no one in sight. “Hey. Are you one of Pretorius’s guests?”

  The fingers gripped the bars, and for a moment an oval shape – a face – glimmered in the darkness before sinking back down out of sight. There was a scent . . . orange blossom and the musk of roses . . . it was suddenly all around Cochrane, like a presence. More plaintive cries drifted up from the darkness; Cochrane thought he heard the word friend. He looked around again. The sun-stunned gardens were still deserted.

  Friend. Someone down there needed his help. Dreamily, he took the 9mm automatic from his shoulder holster and shot off the grating’s padlock.

  The pistol’s vicious crack, although reflected by the house’s high walls, was not as loud as Cochrane expected – he’d only ever shot it in the gallery of his local target range, never before in open air. There was a shriek from the darkness beneath the grating, then silence. Cochrane lifted up the grating, called down that it was okay, but there was no respon
se.

  Cochrane waited a few minutes, calling down into the darkness at intervals. Frustrated, and suddenly nervous that security guards would at any moment come crashing onto the scene, he walked away, then came back and called again. Nothing. And the smell – a zoo stench, thick and cloacal. No way was he climbing down into some fucking unlit, stinking cellar. Not that he was afraid of what was down there. No, he didn’t want to fuck up his $2,000 Armani suit.

  Cochrane headed back towards the cluster of guest bungalows. As he started to cross the wide, billiard-smooth croquet lawn, Ransom drove up in a golf cart decorated with Pretorius’s crest – a shield embraced by a thing half snake, half dragon.

  Dinner would be served soon, Ransom said. “Hop in. No need to walk in this heat.”

  Cochrane, feeling the warm weight of the automatic inside the shoulder holster under his jacket, said, “I need a modem connection.”

  “I’ll see it’s ready for you after dinner.”

  “Will your boss be there?”

  “He eats alone. Always has done. Come on, you can keep me company. Gets lonely up here. No one to talk to.”

  “What about the other servants?”

  “They’re hardly human,” Ransom said, and made a neat turn onto the gravelled drive that led up to the house.

  At the time, Cochrane put this remark down to Ransom’s Tory English xenophobia. Later, he wished he’d paid more attention to the PR man.

  Certainly, he didn’t take much notice of the brief tour of the public rooms of the house: he already knew most of what he was shown from Zaslow’s research. There was a library with thousands of leather bound volumes, some of them chained to their shelves (“Incunabula,” Ransom explained), a long hall with Tudor oak panelling black as pitch, suits of armour standing to attention under faded banners hanging from high rafters and a vast fireplace, a small cinema with a yellowing screen and cracked leather armchairs, and what Ransom called the museum, where hundreds of glass jars of every size stood on steel shelving. Inside, floating in alcohol, were slabs of tissue, organs, and human and animal embryos at every stage of development. A man hung on a rack in a glass jar taller than Cochrane, his skin flayed to show the muscles beneath, his eyes burned milky white by alcohol. An entire pickled menagerie of creatures Cochrane couldn’t begin to identify.