The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 24

by Stephen Jones

  Sleepless, I wandered Hollywood Boulevard amongst the hookers of both sexes. They looked in better shape than I did. Scored near Grauman’s Chinese. Did hopscotch on the handprints in the cement. Watched the stretches sail by to fame and fortune. Watched pimps at their toil. Sometimes someone wanted to shake my black hand, other times wanted to shake my white.

  In McDonald’s I picked up a discarded Enquirer and saw what I didn’t want to see: photographs of Doctor Bob leaving The Ivy with the winner of Bride on his arm. Lissom. Tanned. Augmented. A conglomerate of cheerleader from Wichita, swimmer from Oregon and pole-dancer from Yale. There she was, grinning for the cameras with her California dentition, just like I used to do.

  Yes, I sent him texts. The texts that they showed in court: I admit that. Yes, I said I was going to destroy him. Yes, I said I was more powerful than him now and he knew it. In many ways I wanted him to suffer. I hated him, pure and simple.

  But I didn’t kill her. I swear on my mother’s life.

  Yes, she came to my house. Obviously, because that’s where they found the body. But she came there, drunk and high, saying she wanted to reason with me and persuade me to mend broken bridges with Doctor Bob. When the prosecution claimed I abducted her, that I drugged her, that was all made up. She came to me doped up and in no fit state to drive home. I told her to use the bedroom, drive home with a clear head in the morning. It was raining, too, and I wasn’t sure this girl – any of her – would know where to find the switch for the windshield wipers. Her pole-dancer arms were flailing all flaky and I saw the scars on her wrists and on the taut, fat-free swimmer muscles of her shoulders.

  I put two calls in to Doctor Bob but they went to “message” so I hung up. She had two blocked numbers on her phone and my guess is she called someone to come pick her up while I was out.

  I had an appointment with a supplier because my anti-rejection drugs were low. Maybe I shouldn’t have left her but I did. Fact is, when the police found my fingerprints all over the carving knife – of course they did, it was in my house. From my kitchen. Anyway, their fingerprints were all over the damn thing too.

  I didn’t break the law. Not even in that slow-mo car chase along the interstate where I kept under the speed limit and so did they.

  I know I was found not guilty, but a good portion of the American people still believed I killed her. Thirty-two wounds in her body. Had to be some kind of . . . not human being. And I am. I know I am.

  But the public didn’t like it that way. They blamed American justice. Blamed money. Yes, I came out free, but was I free? Really free? No way. I was acquitted, but everyone watching the whole thing on TV thought it was justice bought by expensive lawyers and I was guilty as sin. They near as hell wanted to strap me to the chair right there and then, but there wasn’t a damn thing they could do about it.

  God bless America.

  I had to sell my place on Mulholland Drive. Live out of hotel rooms. Pretty soon I was a cartoon on South Park. A cheap joke on Jon Stewart. Couldn’t get into The Ivy any more. Looked in at Doctor Bob, eating alone.

  Now, where am I?

  Plenty of new pitches to sell. Trouble is, I can’t even get in the room. Maybe it’s true that the saddest thing in Hollywood is not knowing your time is over.

  Now the personal appearances are in bars and strip joints smelling of semen and liquor. Not too unlike the anaesthetic, back in the day. I ask in Alfry’s voice if this signed photo, book, album is for them. They say, no, it’s for their mother. And that’s the killer. Nobody wants to say the autograph of the person who used to be something is for them.

  Night, I flip channels endlessly on the TV set in some motel, the cocktail in my veins making me heavy-lidded but nothing less than alert. If I see a clip of me I write it in my notebook. Radio stations, the same. Any of my songs, I chase them for royalties. I’m human. Everybody wants a piece of me, but I’m not giving myself away any more. Not for free, anyway.

  I look in the bathroom mirror and I see flab. Scrawn. Bone. Disease. Wrinkles. Puckers. Flaps. I’m wasting away. I’m a grey blob. What they didn’t say when they build you is that you die like everybody else. Only quicker. Six times quicker. The techniques weren’t registered and peerreviewed, turns out. Nobody looked into the long-term effects of the anti-rejection regime. That’s why I’ve been eating like a horse and my body keeps nothing in but the toxins. When I was passing through Mississippi and collapsed at the wheel, the intern at the hospital said the protein was killing me, the fat, cholesterol, all of it. My body was like a chemical plant making poison. I said, “What? Cut the munchies? “He said, “No more munchies. No more midnight snacks. One more hamburger will kill you.”

  I’m a nineteen-year-old concoction, hurting like hell. Each part of me wants the other part of it back. It’s not a spiritual or mental longing, it’s a physical longing and it’s pain and it’s with me every sleepless second of the goddamned day.

  My only crime was, I wanted to be somebody.

  Trouble is, I was six people.

  At least six, in fact.

  To be honest, I lost count after the second penis.

  Maybe you can hear the music in the background, in the next room. They’re playing “Teenage Lobotomy” by the Ramones on the tinny radio beside my king-size bed.

  While I’m here, sitting on toilet pan, coughing up blood.

  Truthful? I’d be writing this the old-fashioned way, paper and pen, except Murph’s fingers are feeling like sausages and I’m getting those flashes again in the corner of Salvator’s left eye right now. They’re like fireworks. Hell, they’re like the fourth of July. That’s why I’m talking into this recorder. The one Doctor Bob gave me, way back. The one I needed for interviews, he explained. “They record you, but you record them. You have a record of what you say. They get it wrong, sue their ass.” Doctor Bob was full of good advice, till it all went wrong, which is why I guess I’m sitting here, wanting to set it all down, from the beginning. Like it was. Not like folks say it was. Not like the lies they’re saying about me out there.

  Half-an-hour ago I rang for a take-out and a mixed-race kid in a hoodie rang the doorbell, gave me a box with a triple bacon cheeseburger and large fries in it. Gave him a fifty. Figured, what the heck?

  I’ve got it in my hand now, the hamburger, Anthony’s fingers and Vince’s fingers sinking into the bun, the grease dripping onto the bathroom floor between my feet, feet I don’t recognise and never did. The smell of the processed cheese and beef thick and stagnant and lovely in its appalling richness – a big fat murderer. The intern was right. One more bite will kill me. I know it. The drugs were too much. The side-effects, I mean. Like steroids shrink your manhood, this shrinks me. The dairy, the fat. And nobody gave me a twelve-step. Nobody took me in.

  I texted Doctor Bob just before I started talking into this thing. He’ll be the first to know. He’ll come here and he’ll find me. Which is how it should be. There’s a completeness to that I think he’ll understand. For all that came between us, and boy, a lot did, I think we understood each other, deep down.

  That’s why I know, absolutely, this is what I have to do.

  Whether he listens to this story – whether anybody presses “Play” and listens, is up to them. Whether they care. Whether anybody cares, any more.

  All I know is, I’m taking a big mouthful. God, that tastes good . . . A great big mouthful, and I taste that meaty flavour on my tongue, and that juice sliding down my throat . . . And the crunch of the iceberg lettuce and the tang of the pickle and the sweetness of the tomato . . . God, oh God . . . And, you know what?

  I’m loving it.

  ROBERT SHEARMAN

  Blue Crayon, Yellow Crayon

  ROBERT SHEARMAN is an award-winning writer for stage, television and radio. He was resident playwright at the Northcott Theatre in Exeter, and regular writer for Alan Ayckbourn at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough.

  For BBC Radio he is a recurrent contributor to the aft
ernoon play slot, but he is probably best known for his work on TV’s Doctor Who, bringing the Daleks back to the screen in the BAFTA-winning first series of the revival in an episode nominated for a Hugo Award.

  His first collection of short stories, Tiny Deaths, was published by Comma Press in 2007. It won the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection. His second collection, Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical, published by Big Finish Productions, won the British Fantasy Award and the Edge Hill Readers Prize, and was joint winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. A third collection, Everyone’s Just So So Special, won the British Fantasy Award. In 2012, the best of his horror fiction – half taken from these previous collections and half new work – was published by ChiZine as Remember Why You Fear Me.

  “I wrote this story whilst I was serving a year’s term as resident writer at Edinburgh Napier University,” recalls Shearman. “It was a heady time. Space in which to work! An office with my name on the door! A stream of students who would ask me for writing advice – and, no doubt, be scuppered by my vaguely unhelpful replies. I was in egoboost heaven.

  “The only downside was the five-hour commute to the office. I live in London – that name on the door that made me feel so smug was a very long way from home. Every Wednesday morning I’d take the train up to Scotland, and every Friday evening I’d take the train back home again. I assumed that over time I’d get used to the journey. It was not to be.

  “It never seemed to matter which carriage I sat in – sooner or later, there would be a noisy child sitting close to me. The sort of child who wanted to fill each and every painstaking hard-fought-for mile with screaming and shouting. I have nothing against children at all. I dimly remember being one myself. But I have a theory that children mutate into something alien when put in a metal box and flung about at high speeds.

  “The following story is based upon a real event where a child was acting up most aggressively across the aisle from me. I glared at his parents in that ineffectual way we British do when we want to make a complaint without actually daring to say anything; true to form, the parents ignored me.

  “I closed my eyes tight and pretended that through sheer will alone I could sleep, and I honestly prayed that the child would disappear. When I next dared to open my eyes, some minutes later, the child was gone. The parents sat in their seats, talking quietly, perfectly happily. I assumed the child was in the lavatory, and I dreaded his inevitable return. I determined to enjoy the peace for as long as I could. I dozed a bit.

  “Whenever I thought to open my eyes to check, the child still hadn’t returned. And he never did. We arrived in Edinburgh some hours later; we all got off the train; the parents got off too, and never seemed to remember they had had a child in the first place.

  “I went straight to my office, and started to write.”

  ANDREW KAPLAN WAS coming home, at last, and it’d be for a real holiday, not like that time last August when the company called him back to work after only four days’ leave, they’d guaranteed he wouldn’t be needed in until January 5th, that would very nearly give him two weeks. “Great,” his wife had said, when he’d phoned her and told her the good news, and Andrew asked whether his daughter would be excited too, and his wife assured him that she would be. The flight from Boston was packed with British people who’d be getting to see their families, and there was a revelry in the air, nothing too outspoken, nothing drunken or boisterous, they were respectable denizens of middle management – but there were polite smiles everywhere, everyone seemed to be sporting a smile, and the stewardesses were wearing tinsel on their name badges, it all seemed very festive.

  The aeroplane took off half an hour late, but Andrew wasn’t too worried, he knew that nine times out of ten any delay is made good in transit. But when the pilot came over the intercom and apologised once again that they were going to have to circle Heathrow for the fourth time – “The runways are all full, everyone wants to get back for Christmas!” – Andrew began to worry about his connecting flight from London to Edinburgh. By the time that all the passengers had filed off the plane and made their way to baggage claim no one was smiling any more. Andrew was almost resigned to the idea that he’d missed the connection, but then he dazedly realised that his suitcase was the first on to the conveyor belt – and that never happened! – and if he ran he might just make it to the check-in desk on time; and so that’s what he did, he ran, and his case was heavy, laden down with so many special presents for his family, but he didn’t let that stop him – he raced down the travelator from terminal three to terminal two, apologising as he pushed other passengers to one side – and it was going to be okay, if he kept up this pace he was going to make it with minutes to spare, and he burst into the departures hall and looked up at the monitors for his flight details – and there they were, it hadn’t taken off yet! – and there was a word in red right beside it, and the word was CANCELLED.

  And for a moment he felt quite relieved, because it meant he had no reason to run any more, and he’d done his best, hadn’t he? And for another moment he was quite angry. And then he just didn’t feel anything very much, he was just so tired.

  No more flights to Scotland tonight. Sorry. Yes, the inconvenience is highly regrettable. There will, of course, be compensation, and somewhere for Mr Kaplan to rest until service resumed in the morning. But Andrew didn’t want an airport hotel, or, God knows, did they just mean some sort of darkened lounge he could sit in? – it’s all he had thought about on the flight over, that after three months away he was going home. He remembered what his wife had said, one of those last times he’d managed to get through to her on the phone – “We’ve never been apart so long before.” He’d asked her whether his daughter was looking forward to Christmas, and his wife had said, “Of course she is, she’s five years old, Christmas is all she thinks about!” And she’d explained that they had already decorated the tree together, and sent out the cards, and been carol singing – all the things they’d always done as a family, and this time he’d been away for them, and she didn’t press that point, she didn’t try to make him feel guilty – but then, she didn’t need to. And Andrew stood in the airport terminal and fumed; by rights he should be flying home right now, by rights he should be somewhere in the air over Birmingham. “I need to get back,” he said to the woman behind the counter, “I need to get back tonight, whatever it takes.” It was Christmas Eve tomorrow, he needed to know that when his daughter woke up on Christmas Eve her father would be there ready for her.

  He was told there was a last train to Edinburgh, leaving from Kings Cross station within the hour. He joined the queue for a taxi, then pleaded with the people in front to let him go first, then paid them all ten pounds each. The taxi fare cost him fifty quid, but by this stage of the proceedings Andrew didn’t care about money any more – on the radio there was playing a non-stop medley of Christmas hits, and Andrew wasn’t in the mood for them, and the driver seemed quite put out when Andrew told him to turn them off. Andrew apologised with a healthy tip that used up all his spare cash. Andrew tried to call his wife to tell her he’d be late home, but his mobile phone was confused, it was still hunting for a signal from an American network provider. He asked the taxi driver whether he could use his phone. The taxi driver refused.

  He bought a ticket with his credit card. The train was already filling up. He dragged his suitcase down the platform, and carriage after carriage he couldn’t spot an empty seat. He was starting to despair – and there, at the very last compartment, there were seats galore, the train was almost deserted. He couldn’t see why, he looked for a sign that said it was a different class, or required special reservation, but no, nothing. He climbed aboard, heaved his case into the empty luggage rack, plopped himself down wearily into a seat. He had a whole table to himself. He smiled at the people around him – “Pretty lucky!” he said, but they didn’t reply. There were a couple of businessmen sitting together, a young mother with a girl, an elderly mother reading a magazine, a middle-ag
ed man who was asleep. Andrew decided to take his cue from this last passenger; he closed his eyes, and by the time the train pulled out of the station Andrew was snoring gently.

  “Bang!”

  And Andrew was awake, and there was the little girl, and she was leaning over his table as if she owned it, and she was pointing a gun at him, except it wasn’t a gun, it was two fingers, with a third wiggling underneath as a trigger. “Bang! Bang! Bang!”

  Andrew wasn’t sure whether to respond or not. With his own daughter he tried to play along as much as possible, no matter what strange pretending game she flung at him, that was what a daddy was supposed to do. But this wasn’t his daughter, and he didn’t know whether he should encourage her, frankly he didn’t know whether he should be talking to her at all. So he sort of half went for it; he clutched at his chest, he said, “Ugh!” quietly, as if he’d been shot, as if he were dying, but it was all a bit pathetic, and even as he did it, Andrew could feel himself blushing red with embarrassment.

  The little girl didn’t seem to mind. She looked delighted by this unexpected piece of playacting. “Bang! Bang!” she went, she shot him twice more for good measure, and Andrew didn’t know what he was supposed to do this time, he was already dead, wasn’t he? And she laughed out loud, and then, with a scream, turned and ran down the aisle to the other end of the carriage. She didn’t shoot at any of the other passengers, and Andrew didn’t know how he felt about that, whether he was annoyed or just a little bit proud.

  He looked towards the girl’s mother, but she didn’t appear even to have noticed, she was staring dully out of the window. He looked around the rest of the carriage, with a rueful smile – kids! – but no one caught his eye. The old woman was still reading her magazine; the businessmen had run out of things to say, and were looking away from each other; the middle-aged man was still asleep.