The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 24 (Mammoth Books)

by Stephen Jones

  The awful howl came again. Martin could feel its vibrations through the water in every direction. His body ached with the sound as the darkness pressed against him, crushing him. Disoriented, he swung his torch around but there was only emptiness. He lost his bearings, gasping for breath and unable to tell which way was up. He hung in the black abyss, powerless and frightened. From somewhere far away he heard the Vyper, but there was no need to look; he knew he was past the point of no return.

  Slowly the pain subsided and the angles of the boat came into focus. He sank to the sandy bottom and knelt there like a penitent. He thought of the cave again, now impossibly distant. He was never meant to be here, never meant to see what he’d seen. The fish had tried to stop him seeing but now it was too late; they wouldn’t let him leave.

  He peered into the distance and saw he wasn’t alone. The dead were sitting up, their heads turned towards him, their vacant eyes watching him. The torch guttered like a flame and went out.

  Although he could no longer see clearly, Martin felt he was seeing more clearly than ever. The cave. He understood now, with a terrible clarity. A portal had been opened by the storm and something had emerged. Something that had been trapped there for a very long time.

  He was going to die. Just like all the other islanders who had stayed behind. He accepted the realisation with calmness and something approaching euphoria. The water felt alive with movement and gradually the sense of an even deeper black began to swell in the distance. Martin felt himself straining to reach it, to become part of it. Oblivion.

  He wondered if he could breathe without the scuba gear. So he released the catches of his buoyancy vest and eased the tank off his back. He peeled off his mask. He spat out the regulator and hesitated for only a moment before taking his first breath. The water entered his lungs easily and painlessly, warm and silky.

  A glow flickered like candlelight beside him. The silver shoal. His guardians, his guides. The curtain parted as he swam through to take his place with the others. Then it closed behind him in the liquid dark.

  MARK VALENTINE

  The Fall of the King of Babylon

  MARK VALENTINE has written biographies of the fantasy writers Arthur Machen (Seren, 1990) and Sarban (Tartarus Press, 2011) and several volumes of supernatural short stories. His most recent books are Selected Stories (Swan River Press, 2012) and Herald of the Hidden (Tartarus Press, 2013), a collection of episodes in the career of Ralph Tyler, Northamptonshire occult detective. He is also the editor of Wormwood, a journal of fantasy, supernatural and decadent literature, short-listed for a World Fantasy Award in 2012.

  As the author explains, “‘The Fall of the King of Babylon’ was inspired by a part of the Isle of Ely, cut off from the city by changes to the Great Ouse river in medieval times. This area became known as Babylon, a lawless and lonely place, embellished a bit in the story.

  “It could have been entitled ‘Eel Meet Again’, but thankfully the temptation was resisted.”

  THE THICK DARK water sucked greedily at the oars each time they dipped into the river’s jaws, as if it was reluctant to let them go. He could tell by the way the boatman pushed hard against them that the current was offering him no help at all. It was as well that they did not have far to go. It was only a few minutes since they had left the banks of the city, and already the tall warehouses on the other side glowered above them. The towers of Babylon, he thought. Dark-bricked, dimly lit on the bank side, with barred windows, and with foundations and lower chambers sunk deep in the ooze of the river, they were more like outgrowths than buildings.

  The night was moonless and clouded, and the wind was riding in from the black marshes to the south. There had been heavy rain for days, and the river was broad and high, bloated. Its deep bed mud had been stirred up, and had darkened and soiled the waters. He sniffed at the rich, loamy miasma that had been released. The moisture in the air, squatting just above the water, seemed to stick to his face like a grease, in silvery streaks.

  They thudded against the old quay: it consisted of slabs streaked with green spittle like a sick man’s tongue. There were a few great rusted iron rings: much bigger vessels than this had once tied up at the side. The boatman grunted and held the barque almost steady in the water, though still the river seemed to grip at it, as if it wanted to pull it under.

  His passenger looked up at the dank wall: there was a narrow set of rungs, dripping with green weed and oily moisture. He swung himself out onto one of these, and caught hold of the cold rail. The boat began to move away at once. But its passenger was quicker. With a swift twist of his limbs, he kicked out, and caught the boatman a heavy blow on the head. He followed it with another.

  There was a baffled cry, and a gurgling of the waters as the boat thrashed about, out of control. Then there was a heavy crash and a great jet of the green water thrust upwards, flicking over him. He watched carefully, licking at the rank liquid on his face: little sparks of light glinted in his dark eyes. Nothing came to the surface. The boat began to drift away, empty.

  Good, he thought: I won’t be needing you again anyway. Already he could feel his skin longing, and the river and its mud summoning him. Just a few more tide-hours, just a few.

  He heaved: briefly, he was not sure he could haul himself up further without his soles or his fingers slipping, but he clung on and gasped to the top and onto the dank slabs, filling his breath with their ripe stench. Then he scrambled to his feet. He had business in Babylon.

  That was what they called it, this mudbank of a place, an island of sorts, a backwater within the Isle of Ely itself, cut off from the city when they diverted the river centuries ago.

  It was a huddle of slimy buildings: the warehouses, twenty or so hovels, a few boatyards, the shed where they made osier baskets, and one pub. Some of its people were the ancestors of those who had always lived here, the original “exiles”. The freemen beyond the water, that’s what the city people had called them. Some of those families were still stubbornly clinging to the place. But most of the inhabitants had come later, drawn by its isolation, the way it was left alone, a law to itself, by the “mainland”, as they sardonically called the city. And so Babylon had been built outwards onto the spit of mud, and upwards, with ramshackle attachments to the older structures: and there were also tunnels and archways between buildings, so that even here, necessary things could be carried on clandestinely.

  And Babylon had a king, or that’s what they called him. The boss. He liked the title. Elias Smith, his real name, it was said; but it didn’t do to use it. He wasn’t worried about a crown or a throne, but he did want the power, and the deference. Nothing moved on this mudbank without him knowing about it. Nobody lived there without paying his taxes, and those were set at whatever rate he pleased.

  In the city there was a bishop and a soaring cathedral, with its great lantern tower, the glory of the Fens. But here in Babylon, there was no church, no chapel: just the eel warehouse, a ruined ziggurat of red bricks. And at its very top, in his own vaulted chamber, there resided the king. You had to be conducted there: no set of stairs led straight to it. There were different iron flights for each floor, and linking corridors, and empty halls, which you were hustled through in a blur. You went back, if you went back, a different way. But rumour said that from a concealed door in the king’s reception room, there was a chute, a steep chute that went down, down, straight into the Great Ouse. And at such force that nothing sent down ever surfaced again.

  In the warehouse, above smouldering pits of slow-burning alder-wood, skinned silver eels were being smoked in long rows of round gallows like dark chandeliers. The columns of flesh swayed and twisted in the draughts, as if they were still alive. There was an acrid smell from the embers and also, still, the deep dank odour of river mud, not yet burnt out of the bodies of the eels. The two together were almost overpowering. In the cellars, frequently flooded, and always dripping with damp and mould, were the slabs where the catch was first reamed of its gleaming
skin. A streaked tin tub of eel heads stood in one corner; the black eyes still glinted in the dim light.

  The King of Babylon owed a vast wealth to this gruesome river harvest. But he was restless this night. There was something wrong in his realm, he knew that, and although he could not say exactly what, there were signs. There hadn’t been a catch in days. The women in the weaving-sheds were murmuring amongst themselves; they shut up too quickly when they saw him. The river was too solid; he did not like the look of it. And from over in the city, there was too much talk of a foreigner seen, staring across at Babylon, asking questions. He had a strangeness in his tongue, the king’s spies said, and probably came from beyond the seas.

  The king’s heavy form paced about his high room, and he glared down from this eyrie to the darkened alleys and empty yards below, through the small panes of smeared grey glass. Like the bricks of his building, his face and hands were a blackened red. Abruptly, he turned away, and tugged at a bell-rope. A cracked clangour sounded. Boot-steps stumped in the stairwells and along the corridors. A young woman, with cropped hair, and dressed in rough black clothes, presented herself. She had a white scar on her left cheek. It gleamed silver in a face already a dirty pale, the colour of congealed candle-wax.

  He stared at her. She lowered her dark eyes, and fidgeted.

  “Who’s in Babylon tonight?”

  “Forty-two souls, sir. Eighteen down below, doin’ the skinnin’, smokin’ and saltin’. Balin, patrolling the building, with Den and Pulver. Twelve in The Anchor: that’s nine o’the fishing men, the potman, the barmaid, old Agar talking to ’imself. Then there’s Mother Shearn in her cottage . . .”

  “What’s she doing?”

  “Playing at cards, sir.”

  “Playing? Or reading them?”

  “Couldn’t tell, sir. Looked like playing though. She didn’t have that funny look in her eyes.”

  But you do, the king thought, that’s why you won’t look in mine. Hiding something. He gestured to her to go on.

  “Four o’the women in the basket shed. And then there’s them two men you put on the wharves, looking out. That you didn’t tell me, nor nobody about. But I spotted ’em. And then me, and you, see, sir, makes forty-two.”

  He grunted. “Been everywhere?”

  “Everywhere.”

  “Would you like to be skinned, Nix?”

  Still she would not look at him.

  “I have been everywhere,” she repeated, slowly.

  “Skinned, salted, smoked alive on one of the eel-gallows?”

  “Everywhere,” she murmured.

  Mother Shearn did not tarry long in the brick hovel she called her home, where dirty lace tried to escape through cracks in the smeared windows. After she saw Nix’s pale face glimmer in the grey panes, then vanish, she blew out the candle. She continued to count out the cards in their rows and columns, knowing them by touch in the gloom. She had been in Babylon longer than anyone remembered, and was rumoured to be the only one on the isle that the king, Elias, was afraid of: wisely, perhaps, she had never put this to any great test. Her face was silted and brown like the river’s leavings.

  She hunched over the cards for some time, then hastily gathered them up and stuffed them in a little pouch of frayed red satin, which hung from the thick leather belt at her waist. She wrapped a bundle of tawny shawls around her shoulders. Outside, she sniffed the dank night air. Her thick greasy nostrils seemed to suck in and sift the stench. Then she made a gurgling noise at the back of her throat, and shuffled towards The Anchor. Its door unleashed a babble, then swung closed behind her.

  Old Agar was reciting to himself from the Bible again: he seldom did anything else. At least, it sounded like the Bible. There was a lot of muttering about the things to come. He barely registered her arrival.

  A group of men in the corner looked up from their beer as she moved towards them. She thrust her face into their hoarse-throated circle.

  “Eels is risin’,” she said, quietly.

  They fell silent for a few moments then started to mutter.

  “Can’t be.”

  “Naw, not tonight, Mother.”

  “Have another look at they cards o’yours.”

  “Get her a gin.”

  “Eels is risin’,” she repeated.

  Reluctantly they began to get to their feet, clumsily lace up the boots they’d eased loose, and climb into heavy, soilstreaked coats, gather up kit bags. From a corner, they took up nets, clubs and the shining gleaves, long, speared forks, like primitive weapons. Grumbling and spitting, they headed for the door.

  She watched them go, and then signalled with a quick jerk of her head for a double genever. She felt the spirit graze her throat. Yes, they were rising, all right, swimming up from the silt and the mud, following some instinct old and blind. She knew that; she always did. Whatever the instinct was, she could catch its dim echoes, like a coiling of green miasma in her mind. But this time there was something else she could not fathom. There was a cold gap. She could not tell when the rising would end, when they would return to the slime, to the river’s depths. She shivered, drew her shawls closer about her, and signalled for another spirit.

  The men trudged, then waded, down to the shallows where the boats were kept. They lurched and jostled against each other. They could already tell the hag was right: the smell in the air was heavy enough to get through the beer in their heads. They bundled the eel-tools in a pile on the mudbank and hauled the boats toward them on their sodden ropes. The brown slime stuck to their hands. The coracles seemed heavy in the swollen waters, were reluctant to come. They heaved harder, their boots sinking into the clinging clay. At last, with a jolt and a surge, the dank wooden shells began to move towards them.

  Ben Crawke got his in first, but the sudden impetus took him by surprise and when the boat bumped against his shins, his fuddled brain wasn’t quick enough to react, and he toppled forward into the bottom of the boat. Cackles of laughter greeted his mishap, and were redoubled when Crawke screeched. The boat thrashed about in the water and in the dim light they could see his limbs flailing about comically. Why didn’t he steady himself ? He used to be able to hold his drink better than that. Still, it was worth watching.

  After they’d let him mess about for a few moments, still bellowing fit to burst the moon, one of the men stooped down quickly and caught up the trailing boat-rope, and another helped to try to steady the juddering. It took both of them to tug the boat back once again to the bank. And then Crawke’s head emerged.

  The youngest fisher, Thom, had been sent against his will to an elementary school in the city for a year or two, before he slipped away back to Babylon, where they didn’t come looking for him again. One day he had been shown a book of myths which he quite liked because it had a lot of pictures of strange things in it, things that even Babylon did not possess. And one of these was of a woman with a head all covered in snakes.

  Crawke looked like that now. Except they weren’t snakes. They were eels. And they weren’t just in his hair, like that woman’s. They were on his face too. No, not just on his face; in it. Some of the men stumbled forward, as if they could help, seizing their clubs and the long barbed spears.

  Then the river current, which had been slow and sluggish, seemed to give a great surge, to rise up in a sudden swell, and the ropes dropped slack as the rest of the boats rushed to the bank.

  And then they saw the writhing within them, a great mass of the dark coiling creatures. It would have been the greatest haul ever made, something to boast about in The Anchor for years to come. Except that it was all wrong: for the first, and last, time in their lives, they had no need to go out for the catch. It had come to them.

  The river surged again, lunging at them. The strong waters sucked at their limbs. They tried to ground their boots in the mud, to grab hold of the mooring posts, even to clutch at the sharp, yellow-green reeds. Still, they were summoned into the depths. And when they finally gave way, they found out why th
e current was so fierce. It wasn’t just the water that had sucked them under.

  Nix crouched in a dark corner. She had five dark corners on the isle, where neither Balin nor Mother Shearn nor Elias Smith could know where she was. To get to this one, she had quietly moved aside a huddle of osier baskets, then a stretch of oilcloth, revealing an iron lid. This she forced up with a little knife she’d filched once from one of the fishermen; it had grey string round the handle for better grip. The blade dislodged the seal of grit and mud around the lid, and she heaved it up. Below was a narrow rung, and at the bottom of this a platform above a black channel of water. It ran under the warehouse and came out under one of the unused cellars. Even Elias did not know about this. When she was alone she did not call him the king, even though she belonged to him. She rubbed the scar on her white face.

  They told her she had been born in Babylon, and so she belonged to him. There wasn’t anybody else claiming her, that was for sure. But she did not call him the king because she knew, somewhere inside her, that there was another ruler of this isle, and always had been, and he would come again.

  Maybe somebody had told her a story about it once, maybe she had overheard a few things and put them together, maybe she had always known it. But she was more certain of it even than the breath of the boss, Elias, when he took hold of her and pulled her close and stared at her.

  That breath was the thing she feared the most, because she could tell from it what would happen next. His breath, heavy, rotten, rank, seemed to enter her like poison. And then his venom worked in her veins, all the way through her. But when she later lay quivering, trying to secrete the poison, trying to get rid of it, she also called, far in the depths of her mind, called and sang – to the unknown king, to the one that she knew would one day hear her.