The Best New Horror 2

by Ramsay Campbell

  “Oh,” Kathy said airily. “I do. I—love my kids. You just have to—learn to cope, that’s all.”

  “I don’t know how.” Julie’s eyes were so full of tears she was afraid she’d drop the baby. She laid her down on the couch. Megan did not protest.

  Yolanda had started talking again. Yolanda’s voice was rough, as though her throat hurt. It was painful to listen to her, and she did talk a lot. “I was already way pregnant when my mama died, and after that she didn’t have much to say to me, even though she did talk all the time. I wasn’t a bit older than Regina is now when I had her. Barely eighteen. Now here she is, look at her, following right in her mama’s footsteps but not listening to her mama at all. Look at her. Tired all the time. Sick all the time. The baby’s eating her alive.”

  Julie did look at Regina, and was struck by how much Yolanda and Regina looked alike, mother and daughter, how closely they both must resemble the mother and grandmother who had died at the mouths of her children and who had not died.

  Diane trudged loudly up the basement steps and slammed the door behind her. The latch didn’t hold, and the door swung open again; Diane leaned back against it with all her considerable weight. Almost at once, the cacophony from the basement rose again. Julie thought uneasily of penned animals, of water in a cooking pot coming to a hard boil.

  Kathy got up and, stumbling a little, made her way across the rooms to open the curtains again. Julie didn’t say anything or try to stop her, though it was her house. The crowd outside was at the foot of the steps now, where the hill that the house sat on met the sidewalk. Julie held Megan up to the window so she could see, but the baby, of course, didn’t look. She was screwing up her red little face and grunting vehemently. Julie felt a warm stickiness on the inside of her forearm and knew that the diaper was leaking, but didn’t do anything about it. It wasn’t important. It made no difference. She could clean the baby and herself, change the diaper, wash the clothes, clean the carpet, wash the windows, turn the co-op mothers out of her house, chase the crowd away from the steps, and the baby would just mess again.

  Still leaning against the basement door, which gapped along the top, Diane sighed heavily. “How many times do you suppose I’ve done that over the years? For all the good it does.”

  “It would be worse if we didn’t,” Annette said serenely, glancing down at her folded hands as though she were consulting notes. “They’ll thank us when they grow up.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Yolanda said. “My girl doesn’t understand yet all the sacrifices I make for her, and here she is about to be a mama her own self.”

  Diane crossed to the littered table and filled a second plate. The paper of the plate got soggy almost immediately and bent around the edges; Julie watched a clot of cottage cheese fall to the floor, watched Diane step in it and smear it across the yellow and pink linoleum.

  While the other mothers chatted around them, Linda said quietly to Julie, “I’m glad you decided to join the co-op. I think you have a lot to add, and I think you’re ready for us.”

  Regina gasped and arched her back, gripped the arms of her chair, spread her legs and braced her feet against the floor. All eyes turned to her, even Megan’s, and her mother said her name. “Regina? Honey? Is it time?”

  “We need to get her to a hospital,” Julie said, but she could see out the windows that Cascadilla Street was completely flooded and impassable now. Water was up over the curbs and the sidewalks, rain still falling so hard that it looked like viscous sheets, all of a piece. Mothers and children were so crowded and faceless that she couldn’t tell one from another. Except that she saw Kathy join them, the stiff blonde hair getting stiffer in the rain, the thin skin parting to expose pale flesh, and Kathy’s pale blond grown son beside her, nearly indistinguishable from her.

  Regina cried out. Yolanda was standing over her, saying her name. The other mothers gathered around, murmuring, and the children began to come up from the basement.

  Regina’s baby was born on the kitchen floor, among the stains of food and the accumulating footprints of the mothers and their children. Julie watched, clutching her own baby, not knowing what to do. Labor was long and hard. There was a good deal of blood. Rain kept falling, and voices gathered. Children and mothers milled at the windows, inside and out, scratching at the glass and at each other, making wordless mewling sounds. Julie’s daughter cried and cried in her arms.

  When Regina’s baby was born, it tore out part of her body with it, and left part of its new body inside hers. Julie saw the tissue and the blood. Regina screamed. Yolanda said her name. Julie slid her own daughter’s tiny clawing hand into her mouth and bit down hard.

  NICHOLAS ROYLE

  Negatives

  NICHOLAS ROYLE has sold around forty-five stories to a wide variety of anthologies and magazines, including Interzone, Fear, Fantasy Tales, BBR, Reader’s Digest, Gorezone, New Socialist, Dark Fantasies, Year’s Best Horror Stories, Cutting Edge, Book of the Dead, Obsessions and Final Shadows.

  He was born in Sale, Cheshire, and is currently living in North London. Two novels, Counterparts and Saxophone Dreams are currently looking for a publisher, as is an anthology of new British horror fiction, and he is working on a third novel entitled The Appetite.

  With stories of the calibre of “Negatives” and regular appearances in the “Year’s Best” anthologies, we don’t think it will be too long before his book-length work finds a market.

  IF NIGHT-TIME MOTORWAY DRIVING didn’t have such a numbing effect on the mind and the senses, he wouldn’t have needed to wake himself up by accelerating down the inside lane and into trouble in the way that he did.

  The queues out of London had begun thinning out near Luton and disappeared after Milton Keynes. There were still plenty of cars on the road but now they were moving at a proper speed.

  He kept to a steady 70 in the inside lane, aware that it was a little too fast for the car over a long distance, and he would probably have to top up water and oil at Rothersthorpe or Watford Gap.

  The road was straight; the distance to the next car in front remained constant. He’d tried listening to music but couldn’t hear it over the noise of the engine. Now and again he looked over at the passenger seat and smiled at Melanie. Despite the noise and her conviction that she wouldn’t, she’d managed to fall asleep.

  For a brief moment he had a detached view of himself: sitting in a small chair hurtling through the darkness encased in this strange little shell called a car. It was like sitting in a chair at home and being taken somewhere. He felt as if he should be able to get up and go and make a coffee. The steering wheel and pedals seemed incidental. Then with a jolt he was back there driving the car again.

  The road disappeared under the car, perfectly uniform from one bridge to the next. He opened his eyelids and wondered how long they’d been closed: a split second, or two or three seconds? He only needed to nod off for two seconds and unconsciously depress the accelerator and they’d be up the back end of the car in front. He knew he should stop but also knew he wasn’t supposed to. Where would he stop if he decided to? On the hard shoulder, obviously, but where? After a mile, half a mile, a hundred yards? Its invariable aspect offered no invitation to pull in.

  Instead, he shifted in the seat and straightened his back. Gently he accelerated. The car ahead was drawn into sharper focus. It was a Fiesta, a new model. He eased the pedal down further. He glanced in the mirror and saw just red lights; it must be reflecting the other carriageway; the vibration had caused it to slant; he straightened it.

  He was suddenly right on top of the Fiesta.

  With a tug on the steering wheel he missed the car in front and sheered into the middle lane. A horn blared, tyres screeched. There were cars behind him. He stood on the accelerator and leapt into the empty space ahead. A large BMW passed him on the outside, faces peering his way. Ignoring them, he concentrated on eating up the middle lane. Drowsiness snatched away, like a veil from a bold, thrusti
ng sculpture, he bent over the steering wheel. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the speedometer needle leaning round the clockface to point at numbers it had not seen before.

  The needle was just tipping at 98 when the back end suddenly collapsed at one side and the car began to veer.

  His immediate reaction was enormous relief that Melanie was not with him. She’d been working out west and was going up in her own car to meet him there.

  Although he detested actually going to work, he was glad when they’d had to move from the old office to new premises. It had taken two months to find suitable new office space and they’d ended up having to move right out of Soho (much to Egerton’s regret) as far north as the Angel.

  Linden had been pleased because it meant he could now drive to work and find somewhere to park. In Soho it had been impossible.

  Of course, it meant sitting in traffic jams at the bottom of Holloway Road and where Essex Road joined Upper Street, but wasn’t it nicer to be stuck in your own car rather than suffocating in a tube tunnel surrounded by the barely alive, still smelling of their beds?

  He crunched into first and edged forward, but the Citroen in front had only been moving into space between it and the next car: the queue itself was not moving.

  He realised he’d still got the choke out a fraction. He pressed it home and the revs dropped to normal. It was still running a little low; it could easily cut out waiting in a queue like this. Still, the man at the garage who’d tuned it only last week said it was better that it should be running too low rather than too high. It would keep his fuel consumption down and that had been quite a problem before. For a twelve-year-old Mini, the man had said, it wasn’t in bad nick.

  In front of him in the rear-view mirror he saw someone cross behind the car. He knew he was rolling back so he brought the clutch up and stepped on the gas. Then the queue started to move.

  He parked in the private carpark in the courtyard of the new complex. The start of another week. He cursed at the thought of five more days in the company of Egerton. Five more days staring at that damned computer screen. He didn’t know which he disliked the most—Egerton or the computer. That was a lie. The computer was not sentient; it had no excuse. (Come to think of it, Egerton was barely sentient either.)

  Egerton was slowly climbing the stairs when Linden pushed open the ground-floor door. Not that the other man had, like Linden, just arrived—Egerton always got in at nine, an hour early—no, he’d come down to get the post so he could look at it before anyone else. That was why he was climbing the stairs so slowly, because he was devouring every bit of information the morning’s delivery had to offer. Linden didn’t care about the post—he wasn’t in the slightest bit interested in the industry which employed him—it was Egerton’s rapacious enthusiasm for everything connected with the job that irritated him.

  “Good morning, Brian. How are you today? Did you have a nice weekend?”

  Please somebody tell me why he has to be so bloody cheerful every Monday morning, Linden thought. The weekend, ah yes, the weekend—that precious island of time when he could escape. He knew Egerton often came in on Saturdays. He didn’t ask why any more.

  Egerton was grinning at him, waiting for an answer. He couldn’t bring himself to speak to the man.

  The computer was waiting for him. He sat down, switched it on and nothing happened.

  “Good morning, Brian.” Whitehead had come into the room. “It’s down. You’ll have to use the other one. You were working on floppies, weren’t you? Just stick them in the other machine.”

  Linden nodded. Whitehead was the boss. He pretended to be everybody’s equal. Until it came to writing out the salary cheques.

  He worked without a break all morning. The computer had a green screen, which he wasn’t used to. His eyes were tired by the time he’d saved all he’d done and was ready to go to lunch. One good thing about Egerton’s keenness was that Linden never had to worry about the man inviting himself along to lunch: Egerton generally worked right through, occasionally getting in a McDonald’s or a beanburger or something else equally Egerton-like.

  When Linden tried to read his paper, waiting for his food to arrive, he found he couldn’t concentrate properly. There were red dots all over the page. Wherever white was enclosed by black, like a b, an o, a p or an A, the little white space was now red. Consequently, the effect on a page of small newsprint was to turn the whole page red.

  He worked all afternoon on the computer. Egerton annoyed him with his exaggerated mannerisms—grasping his chin, swinging his arms, clicking his fingers. When he wasn’t striding around the office he was making telephone calls, mainly to the company’s debtors. It was a matter of personal betrayal if someone had lapsed with an invoice payment. When Egerton uttered the company name he did so with chest-swelling pride.

  Linden looked from the screen and grimaced at the tight little curls of blond hair on Egerton’s head.

  Driving home, Linden was tense. Occasionally he wavered over the red line in the middle of the road. A Triumph Vitesse barked its horn at him.

  The red effect didn’t wear off and allow Linden to read a book without straining his eyes until he was too tired to read anyway.

  “It’s the green, you see,” Whitehead explained. “After looking at the green screen for long enough, you look away at something white and you see it as red. Green and red are the reverse of each other, or negatives or something. It’s to do with that. Take a photo of a man in a red jumper and on the negative the jumper will be green.”

  Because the maintenance contract on the old computer had expired and Whitehead was too tight to get an engineer in, Linden had to work with the green screen all week. It only affects some people, Whitehead had said, but it’s not dangerous and is only short term.

  He knew he shouldn’t sit in front of the machine for too long at any one time but try telling that to Whitehead. They had a big job on—correction: Linden had a big job on. He was editing a 400-page handbook and it had to be done by the end of the week. Each page resembled the next; three entries on a page, all with their identical lists of superfluous information. Every decimal point had to be checked. The spelling, as usual, was abysmal.

  He ran off a hard copy of all he’d done, but the pages were bright red: it dazzled him. The material should be checked by someone else before it went off, but Egerton and Whitehead could barely spell their own names.

  Negotiating Highbury Corner, Linden almost killed a pedestrian.

  He’d thought the old man was in his rear-view mirror, but the wrinkle-smoothing shock on the aged face when the Mini snarled forward brought Linden’s foot crashing down on the brake pedal. The car juddered and stalled. Linden sank his head onto the wheel and waited for the old man and several bystanders to stop screaming at him.

  As soon as he got in he went to the fridge for a long drink of cold milk. He opened the fridge door and recoiled. There were two bottles of blood on the shelf.

  He washed and shaved to see if that would remove some of the tension. He looked awful in the mirror. His eyes were bloodshot.

  He switched on the television, but the newsreaders’ eyes were all bloodshot as well, and their red teeth made them look like they’d just been eating raw hamburgers with Egerton.

  He got hungry but couldn’t bring himself to touch the eggs which were all that he had in the way of food. He went out to a restaurant and ordered a salad. He shouted at the waitress: how dare she put tomato ketchup on his salad? Drawing angry red stares he stalked out of the restaurant and crossed the road to a fish and chip shop, but the woman started sprinkling little dried flecks of bloody dandruff onto his chips, so he left in disgust.

  By morning there was milk in his fridge again and he could enjoy a normal breakfast before driving to work.

  “Are you all right, Brian?” Whitehead wanted to know.

  “Yes. Why?” he snapped.

  “You look a bit harassed, that’s all.” Defensive. “You will get that editing d
one, won’t you?”

  There seemed to be more red cars on the roads than ever. The days were already getting shorter: as he drove up Holloway Road the premature sunset was turning low clouds vermilion.

  He finished at the computer on Friday morning and spent the rest of the day checking the hard copy in spite of the eyestrain. There would be no use anyone else in the office proofing it. Although he considered himself underpaid for the work he was doing, he wanted to make sure it was right, in the unlikely event of someone, somewhere appreciating the hard work that had gone into the handbook.

  He drove away from the Angel, down towards the roundabout. An enormous sense of release jostled with him for space in the Mini; the end of another week in the office, no more Egerton for two days, liberation from that infernal green computer screen. Since he’d finished on-screen editing before lunch, the effect had already begun to wear off.

  He just had to call in at the flat to collect his bag and any messages, then head off up the A1 to the M1 and freedom. Melanie had been working out in W14 and so was going up in her own car. She would probably have been able to get away early, so would be first at the cottage. By the time he got there she’d have it all cosy for him.

  The northbound lanes on Holloway Road were chock-a-block, as Linden knew the motorway would also be when he finally reached it. Through the windscreen he admired the beginnings of the sunset; the skies above Highgate were aglow with strange lilacs. Hadn’t he seen yesterday’s sunset in his rear-view mirror rather than through the windscreen? A small detail.

  He reached the turn-off for Sussex Way and his flat. The traffic being as bad as it was, he was glad he’d put his bag in the car that morning and didn’t have to make the detour to go and get it now.