Red Gloves, Volumes I & II

by Christopher Fowler

  A moment later the Were-Tiger rose up on its hind legs, surprisingly agile, and threw itself at me. I fled back to the roller coaster, slung myself into the car and launched down the next dip with the creature forced into close pursuit, attached to me by the length of chain.

  The speed of my descent was tremendous. I plummeted down the rusted iron rails, up over a hump that lifted my stomach and down again, steeper than the last, as the ground rushed up towards me. My speed had increased so much now that I was pulling the Were-Tiger in my slipstream, and its hurtling bulk threatened to crash forwards on top of me. Its immense teeth closed over my left ear and tore away a piece of my lobe, but now the pace of the car increased again and the chain was pulled taut, and he fell back.

  The ground was racing up to meet my face, closer, closer, and I crash-landed with a tremendous smash. The infuriated creature landed on its head and rolled aside in a spray of blood and spittle, knocked unconscious. And there was the Cherub again, laughing as he unbuckled the great chain from my trousers and reattached it to a drainpipe, holding the Were-Tiger in place.

  It felt as if every bone in my body was broken. Luckily my face had landed in a pile of small soft black rocks that had protected my fine good looks from damage.

  ‘You’re going to bleed in Sitges,’ said the Cherub.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ I cupped my bloody ear at him.

  ‘You’re going to need some stitches.’ The Cherub hauled me to my feet and poked me in the ribs. ‘Does that hurt?’

  ‘Yes, quite a lot,’ I told him, dripping earlobe blood onto my shirt-front.

  ‘I think you’ve cracked a couple of ribs. Can you see your heart now?’

  ‘Yes, I think I can.’

  ‘Come on, let’s get you sorted out.’

  ‘Do you think I could have a lie down?’ I asked. ‘I’m suddenly feeling rather tired. Can I go home?’

  ‘I don’t know. How many fingers am I holding up?’

  I counted them. ‘Fifteen,’ I replied. ‘Can I collect my purchases now?’

  ‘Better give it another couple of minutes. You’ll start to feel peckish soon.’

  We walked through a thick jungle filled with glossy ferns, and I gingerly stepped over a sleeping boa constrictor, its iridescent scales sparkling in the night air. Something that looked like an enormous armour-plated mosquito landed on my arm and stung me. I yelped, although the cry turned into laughter.

  The Cherub kicked open another door—also painted red—and led me inside. A runway of flickering candles led to a very attractive Hawaiian scene. There was a beach, and a distant waterfall, and that strange Hawaiian music that sounds like a banjo being repeatedly stretched, and a girl in a grass skirt and coconut shells came over and draped a necklace of brightly coloured artificial flowers around my neck.

  She traced her hand delicately across my back, and passed me a beautiful bag made of woven reeds. ‘Here are your purchases,’ she said, smiling.

  ‘Thank you, you’re very nice. I like your Hawaiian island,’ I told her, and she laughed.

  ‘He needs some fresh hair,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve got hair.’

  ‘No, fresh air.’

  My clothes were soaked in sweat, and I suddenly started to feel cold and very hungry. The bright colours had begun to fade down to drab greys and browns. I blinked and opened my eyes wide, then blinked again. I wasn’t on a beach, I was in a basement full of builders’ sand, and the waterfall was a tap running noisily into a floor drain. My mouth felt as if it was full of wool. I realised the Cherub was talking to me.

  ‘I told you, there’s no addicts out there on the street now, and I need to test the effects of this shit. Thanks for your feedback. Sorry the dog bit you.’ He gave a pleasant smile. I looked around, taking in my surroundings. The great Were-Tiger had been replaced by a brindle bull mastiff on a bit of string. It was chewing happily a child’s plastic baby doll. Oddly, the girl in the grass skirt and coconut shells was still dressed that way. I imagined she was going out later. I tried to speak but no sound came out.

  ‘We had a laugh trying to get you down the fire escape,’ he said. ‘Well, it was nice doing business with you. You’d better get off now.’

  ‘Wait,’ I said, ‘who was Father Christmas?’

  ‘Oh, the Baron. My old man. It’s his flat.’

  And he shut the basement door in my face. Outside there was no jungle, just weeds and dirt and an old green plastic hosepipe curled on the floor. I climbed back up to the street and out into the alleyway. My arms and legs felt as if they were made of lead.

  It felt as if the temperature had dropped to below zero. Back on the main road the taillights of cars and taxis were still leaving faint vapour trails, but the effect was much more muted now. I seemed to be carrying a white plastic Tesco bag. Everything seemed suddenly scratchy and real and rather boring.

  When I got back to the apartment, I checked my watch and realised that I had been gone for over two hours. Worse, I had unthinkingly locked the downstairs door with the chub key when I left, shutting everyone in. With a growing sense of dread, I made my way upstairs. Even as I was putting my key in the lock, I heard someone say ‘Thank God’.

  As I pushed open the door, I tried to be nonchalant. ‘Sorry about the delay,’ I said cheerfully. ‘Had a bit of a problem, but it’s all sorted now.’

  All the wine had gone. My dinner party guests had the trapped look of prison inmates and lay slumped around the room. As I came in, they sat up and stared at me with their mouths open.

  ‘What the fucking hell happened to you?’ asked Renata. ‘Your ear is all torn up, you’ve got blood and bits of coal stuck all over your face, someone’s written WANKER across the back of your jacket in white paint and a chunk of your hair is missing.’

  ‘And you locked us in, you dick,’ said Lucio, which was a bit rich coming from him.

  ‘Yes, sorry about that, I ran into a spot of bother.’ I stepped further into the room. Everyone gasped.

  ‘Your junk, man,’ said Tamar, appalled.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Elliot, your penis is hanging out,’ said Cheryl, ‘and you’ve got no shoes.’

  ‘Thank you, Cheryl, well done for noticing.’ I tucked myself back in. I’d thought it was a bit draughty walking home.

  ‘And Jesus! You’ve got a fish-hook in your arm!’

  ‘So I have. Well, never mind. Don’t worry about me, I wasn’t raped or anything, but I did fight a were-tiger on a roller coaster. Just so you could enjoy yourselves a little bit more. Sorry about locking you in.’

  ‘Not that any of us are in the mood now,’ said Renata huffily, ‘but did you get what you went for?’

  ‘Oh yes, absolutely.’ I held up the bag, then emptied it out onto the table. I found myself staring at a large bunch of bananas. ‘Ah. Right. Not cocaine then.’

  ‘Who said anything about cocaine?’ said Renata incredulously. ‘I thought you went to get chocolate.’

  ‘So did I,’ said Tamar. Everyone else agreed with him.

  ‘Did you now. Well, I must have misread that signal. Never mind.’ I dumped the bananas on the table before them. ‘Enjoy.’

  I dropped down and fell instantly into a deep snoring coma.

  Tamar got my job, which was probably just as well. I imagine he’s a lot better at it than me. He’s probably a CEO by now. Me, I’m a gardener on my father’s estate. I’m paid a pittance and it’s not exactly taxing, but I quite like the work. The natural order has reasserted itself. There’s a moral here somewhere, but I’m not entirely sure what it is.

  I do know one thing. If you’re ever in King’s Cross and see an angelic-faced skinhead with a bull mastiff on a bit of string, don’t buy any bananas from him.

  Red Gloves, Volume II

  Infernal—The World Horrors

  Unheimlich

  It costs a lot of money to bring a body back from overseas.

  When my best friend died in France, we had to decide whethe
r to ship him back or have him cremated on the spot. We opted for the latter option. Some of him was sprinkled from the back of a boat in Monte Carlo, some of him came home to a cemetery in England and some of him remained in a duffel bag under the stairs, and in a friend’s handbag. As a man who was known far and wide, he would have appreciated the irony of being in so many places at once, even after his death.

  I love travel, but I’m not a loner. I don’t understand people who travel alone—how do they share their experiences? So I end up waiting for my partner or friends to become free, so they can travel with me. Plus I’m a liability, the tourist most likely to board the wrong train/plane/boat in any given situation, so it’s good to travel with somebody sensible. I have a history of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was in Mumbai during the bombings and in Sri Lanka during the floods. But if you followed the Foreign Office guidelines about overseas travel, you’d never go anywhere. Part of the thrill is not knowing what will happen next. London is never a boring city, but for the majority of us it’s surprisingly consistent and safe. I worry that this nice warm safety net will dull my senses and make me a boring writer, so I travel whenever circumstances allow.

  Oddly, I’ve never felt very safe in America, although here I’m talking about the coast cities—one day I hope to travel to the parts that Europeans rarely visit. There is a wonderful German word, unheimlich, meaning ‘uncanny’, which has deeper connotations because it suggests the unease that is caused by being away from home, literally un-home-like. The Yiddish word shpilkes catches how I feel in the USA—to be on shpilkes is to be jittery, walking on needles, unsettled.

  Europeans travel to more countries than most because the distances are smaller. I can get to Paris more quickly than I can get to Manchester, because I live beside the Eurostar terminal, and being able to switch into a less familiar society so easily refreshes the senses.

  As is always the case, some of the stories were written as commissions and appear in other volumes. There’s a general idea that you should try not to overlap stories in order to maximize your readership, but launch dates slip around like molasses, and overlaps can occur. However, I strongly believe in looking at collections and anthologies in their entirety. I’m a collector/list maker, and it’s important to me that I assemble my stories in chronological order in my own collections, so that readers can see how stories evolve and influence each other. For that reason, I try to make them as definitive as possible. In fact, I often rewrite commissioned stories before including them in my own collections, so even if you’ve chanced across any of them elsewhere, you may well find these versions to be different. This is the first time any of them has appeared in one of my own collections, and this double-volume will bring you up to date with my work as a whole.

  The following stories take place in Poland, America, France, Russia, the Middle East, India and Thailand. I never write about any place I haven’t been, because I like to get the details right, although I tend to concentrate on the atmosphere more than the minutiae of exotic locales.

  My parents never travelled much. I count myself lucky that I’m part of the generation that is able to move about, but I’m still appalled at how little of the world I’ve really seen. We are creatures of habit and tend to stay in our tribes, so we’ll pick hotels in destinations where friends have been before us, because it reduces anxiety. But a little anxiety can be a good thing, as I hope you agree after reading these stories. And if you read both volumes, you’ll see that whether you stay home or go travelling, bad situations are never very far away.

  Apart from owing a debt of gratitude to Pete Crowther for getting this collection into print, I’d also like to thank editor Steve Jones, who has frequently commissioned my stories over the years, and whose name on an anthology is a genuine seal of excellence.

  —Christopher Fowler, King’s Cross, London

  The Eleventh Day

  The First Day

  Mia Terebenin worked in the St Petersburg International Archive, cataloguing documents pertaining to postwar Russian-American oil initiatives. She was twenty-two years old, a little too slender, pale and blond, with ice-blue eyes and a translucence to her skin that gave her a haunted quality that men either found attractive or disturbing. Her colleagues joked that during the season of white nights she all but disappeared in the dull glare of falling snow.

  For the past eighty years the archive had been situated in a grand municipal building to the south of the city on Moskovsky Prospekt, but now it was gradually being transferred to a vast, impersonal data facility some fifteen kilometres further out of town. Mia had worked in the gloomy maze of corridors for nineteen months, and was looking forward to being in an office that had sunlight and reliable heating. It meant she would no longer have to cross half a kilometre of icy marble to find a functioning toilet, or arrive at the office to find the radiator pipes frozen solid.

  The archivists with whom she worked were mostly older, unsociable academics from Moscow who had chosen the job so that they could work uninterrupted by the demands of normal life. Here they could hide themselves away with their documents in an isolated building that protected them from the intrusions of the world.

  At 6:48 p.m. on the last Friday evening in September, Mia cleared her desk, packed her suitcase and locked her office. Masha and Andrei, her two colleagues, had moved to the new building at the end of the previous week, and although they had not been great friends she missed hearing someone else’s conversation, because there was nobody left on the seventh floor except a couple of young men who were being employed to check the contents of document boxes and tape them up, ready for removal.

  She never took the elevator because it was supposed to be unreliable, but she decided to do so tonight because the lights were out on the staircase, and because she was wearing heels and the marble steps were treacherous. Usually she had boots or trainers to change into, but this morning she had overslept and did not have time to pack her bag with everything she needed.

  When bad things happen, who is to say where their roots lie? In the days to come Mia found herself saying, ‘If only I hadn’t…’ and ‘Things would have been different if…’ She should have had an early night, she should have changed the batteries in her alarm clock, but later she realised that fate is simply an implacable predetermination, the disastrous consequence of destiny’s journey. She came to understand that there was nothing she could have done to prevent this chain of events from occurring, and was reconciled by the thought.

  She was crossing the marble landing, looking apprehensively into the darkened stairwell that lay ahead, when she heard the loud, tinny ping of the elevator arriving. She looked up above the brushed steel doors to see its triangular red light flick on. The doors slid open and because there was already someone inside the car her apprehension evaporated and she ran to catch it.

  The doors closed and she checked the panel to make sure that the stranger was also going to the ground floor. He was, so she stepped back and held her briefcase with both fists closed over the handle, and stared at the floor as people do, out of modesty and awkwardness, and a desire not to attract attention to themselves.

  The elevator passed the fifth floor. It had mirrored walls of mottled gold, a fake-wood frame and ceiling which was actually painted steel, and a scuffed metal floor. According to the sign on the wall it could hold eight passengers, and was equipped with an intercom in the event of emergency. She glanced into the mirror and caught sight of the other passenger. He was tall and slender, with a long, high-cheekboned face, a strong nose and eyes so deep-set that from the side they just looked like holes in his head. His sleek black hair was cropped to a line above his ears. He wore a thick red check shirt, a cheap, generic brand of jeans and dirty trainers. His briefcase was metal and hard-edged.

  She looked back at her shoes, thinking she needed to save up some money and buy a new pair because these had scuffed toecaps, when the lift came to an abrupt stop between floors five and four. Mia’s k
nees absorbed the brief buckle in gravity and she righted herself. The lights flickered once but remained on.

  ‘What the hell?’ said the man. He had been leaning against the panel, which was set into the side wall of the elevator, and now he jumped back as if he had been bitten.

  ‘Did you press something?’ Mia asked.

  ‘No, I wasn’t touching it,’ said the man. ‘Anyway, the buttons are recessed. It’s probably a break in the power.’ He pressed the ground floor button again and raised his head, listening, but nothing happened. ‘That’s not good.’

  ‘What?’ asked Mia.

  He held up a finger. ‘I can’t hear any machinery. If it’s an electrical fault it might have tripped the circuit.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Well, the system would have to be reset.’

  ‘But the lights are still working.’

  ‘They’re on a different circuit.’ He studied the wall panel.

  ‘You seem to know a lot about it,’ Mia said, watching him.

  ‘I’m an electrician. I’m installing trunking in the new building. I came here for a meeting to see if we can take any of the old telephone equipment with us.’ He seemed to notice her for the first time. ‘Hello, I’m Galia Sokolov.’ He had to bend a little to shake her hand.

  ‘I’m Mia,’ she said. ‘I’m in records, but I’m moving out next week. I hope the new building has better lifts than this.’

  ‘Don’t worry, they’re super-modern. I’m surprised this thing is still in service. I just hope the intercom has been checked lately.’ He pressed the speaker button and kept his ear close to the grille. There was a distant crackle, like a faraway radio station being tuned, but the sound ended abruptly. ‘See, there’s a hard line to a response station, but if the line isn’t regularly tested it can kick off.’ He listened again. ‘No, that’s completely dead. Sounds like someone hasn’t been doing their monthly check.’