The Best New Horror 2

by Ramsay Campbell

  In the middle of the street behind me, standing ankle-deep in snow, was Thoss and another figure. When I looked closely at the other I recognized him as one of the boys whom I surprised in that diner. But he had now taken on a corrupt and listless resemblance to his new family. Both he and Thoss stared at me, making no attempt to forestall my departure. Thoss knew that this was unnecessary.

  I had to carry the image of those two dark figures in my mind as I drove back home. But only now has the full weight of my experience descended upon me. So far I have claimed illness in order to avoid my teaching schedule. To face the normal flow of life as I had formerly known it would be impossible. I am now very much under the influence of a season and a climate far colder and more barren than all the winters in human memory. And mentally retracing past events does not seem to have helped; I can feel myself sinking deeper into a velvety white abyss.

  At certain times I could almost dissolve entirely into this inner realm of awful purity and emptiness. I remember those invisible moments when in disguise I drifted through the streets of Mirocaw, untouched by the drunken, noisy forms around me: untouchable. But instantly I recoil at this grotesque nostalgia, for I realize what is happening and what I do not want to be true, though Thoss proclaimed it was. I recall his command to those others as I lay helplessly prone in the tunnel. They could have apprehended me, but Thoss, my old master, called them back. His voice echoed throughout that cavern, and it now reverberates within my own psychic chambers of memory.

  “He is one of us,” it said. “He has always been one of us.”

  It is this voice which now fills my dreams and my days and my long winter nights. I have seen you, Dr Thoss, through the snow outside my window. Soon I will celebrate, alone, that last feast which will kill your words, only to prove how well I have learned their truth.

  IAN R. MACLEOD

  1/72nd Scale

  IAN R. MACLEOD was born in Solihull, West Midlands and after taking a degree in Law at Birmingham Polytechnic, where he met his wife Gillian, he spent ten years working in the Civil Service.

  He was nearly thirty by the time he started trying to get a novel published and despite receiving a number of rejection slips, he was truly hooked on writing. Through the wreckage of another couple of novels he began to experiment seriously with shorter fiction. There were more rejection slips, but they started to get more friendly.

  “1/72nd Scale” was his first sale, although not, in the way that things inevitably work out, his first story to appear in print. In 1990 he summoned up the courage to quit work and devote more time to writing, with published work appearing in Interzone, Weird Tales, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Amazing Stories, Interzone The 5th Anthology and Best New SF 5.

  “I remember that I had Ramsey Campbell’s story “The Chimney” in the back of my mind as a kind of role model of how you make an every day object gain a life of its own,” recalls the author of “1/72nd Scale”. Despite its strong horror premise, the story was nominated for a 1990 Nebula Award by the Science Fiction Writers of America.

  DAVID MOVED INTO SIMON’S ROOM. Mum and Dad said they were determined not to let it become a shrine: Dad even promised to redecorate it anyhow David wanted. New paint, new curtains, Superman wallpaper, the lot. You have to try to forget the past, Dad said, enveloping him in his arms and the smell of his sweat, things that have been and gone. You’re what counts now, Junior, our living son.

  On a wet Sunday afternoon (the windows steamed, the air still thick with the fleshy smell of pork, an afternoon for headaches, boredom and family arguments if ever there was one) David took the small stepladder from the garage and lugged it up the stairs to Simon’s room. One by one, he peeled Simon’s posters from the walls, careful not to tear the corners as he separated them from yellowed Sellotape and blobs of Blutac. He rolled them into neat tubes, each held in place by an elastic band, humming along to Dire Straits on Simon’s Sony portable as he did so. He was halfway through taking the dog-fighting aircraft down from the ceiling when Mum came in. The dusty prickly feel of the fragile models set his teeth on edge. They were like big insects.

  “And what do you think you’re doing?” Mum asked.

  David left a Spitfire swinging on its thread and looked down. It was odd seeing her from above, the dark half moons beneath her eyes.

  “I’m . . . just . . .”

  Dire Straits were playing “Industrial Disease.” Mum fussed angrily with the Sony, trying to turn it off. The volume soared. She jerked the plug out and turned to face him through the silence. “What makes you think this thing is yours, David? We can hear it blaring all through the bloody house. Just what do you think you’re doing?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. A worm of absurd laughter squirmed in his stomach. Here he was perched up on a stepladder, looking down at Mum as though he was seven feet tall. But he didn’t climb down: he thought she probably wouldn’t get angry with someone perched up on a ladder.

  But Mum raged at him. Shouted and shouted and shouted. Her face went white as bone. Dad came up to see what the noise was, his shirt unbuttoned and creased from sleep, the sports pages crumpled in his right hand. He lifted David down from the ladder and said it was alright. This was what they’d agreed, okay?

  Mum began to cry. She gave David a salty hug, saying she was sorry. Sorry. My darling. He felt stiff and awkward. His eyes, which had been flooding with tears a moment before, were suddenly as dry as the Sahara. So dry it hurt to blink.

  Mum and Dad helped him finish clearing up Simon’s models and posters. They smiled a lot and talked in loud, shaky voices. Little sis Victoria came and stood at the door to watch. It was like packing away the decorations after Christmas. Mum wrapped the planes up in tissues and put them carefully in a box. She gave a loud sob that sounded like a burp when she broke one of the propellers.

  When they’d finished (just the bare furniture, the bare walls. Growing dark, but no one wanting to put the light on) Dad promised that he’d redecorate the room next weekend, or the weekend after at the latest. He’d have the place better than new. He ruffled David’s hair in a big, bearlike gesture and slipped his other arm around Mum’s waist. Better than new.

  That was a year ago.

  The outlines of Simon’s posters still shadowed the ivy wallpaper. The ceiling was pinholed where his models had hung. Hard little patches of Humbrol enamel and polystyrene cement cratered the carpet around the desk in the bay window. There was even a faint greasy patch above the bed where Simon used to sit up reading his big boy’s books. They, like the model aircraft, now slumbered in the attic. The Association Football Yearbook, Aircraft of the Desert Campaign, Classic Cars 1945–1960, Tanks and Armoured Vehicles of the World, the Modeller’s Handbook . . . all gathering dust, darkness and spiders.

  David still thought of it as Simon’s room. He’d even called it that once or twice by accident. No one noticed. David’s proper room, the room he’d had before Simon died, the room he still looked into on his way past it to the toilet, had been taken over by Victoria. What had once been his territory, landmarked by the laughing-face crack on the ceiling, the dip in the floorboards where the fireplace had once been, the corner where the sun pasted a bright orange triangle on summer evenings, was engulfed in frilly curtains, Snoopy lampshades and My Little Ponys. Not that Victoria seemed particularly happy with her new, smart bedroom. She would have been more than content to sleep in Simon’s old room with his posters curling and yellowing like dry skin and his models gathering dust around her. Little Victoria had idolised Simon; laughed like a mad thing when he dandled her on his knee and tickled her, gazed in wonderment when he told her those clever stories he made up right out of his head.

  David started Senior School in the autumn. Archbishop Lacy; the one Simon used to go to. It wasn’t as bad as he’d feared, and for a while he even told himself that things were getting better at home as well. Then on a Thursday afternoon as he changed after Games (shower steam and sweat. Cowering in a
corner of the changing rooms. Almost ripping his Y-fronts in his hurry to pull them up and hide his winkle) Mr Lewis the gamesmaster came over and handed him a brown window envelope addressed to his parents. David popped it into his blazer pocket and worried all the way home. No one else had got one and he couldn’t think of anything he’d done sufficiently well to deserve special mention, although he could think of lots of things he’d done badly. He handed it straight to Mum when he came in, anxious to find out the worst. He waited by her as she stood reading it in the kitchen. The Blue Peter signature tune drifted in from the lounge. She finished and folded it in half, sharpening the crease with her nails. Then in half again. And again, until it was a fat, neat square. David gazed at it in admiration as Mum told him in a matter-of-fact voice that School wanted back the 100-metres swimming trophy that Simon had won the year before. For a moment, David felt a warm wave of relief break over him. Then he looked up and saw Mum’s face.

  There was a bitter argument between Mum and Dad and the School. In the end—after the local paper had run an article in its middle pages headlined “Heartless Request”—Archbishop Lacy agreed to buy a new trophy and let them keep the old one. It stayed on the fireplace in the lounge, regularly tarnishing and growing bright again as Mum attacked it with Duraglit. The headmaster gave several assembly talks about becoming too attached to possessions and Mr Lewis the gamesmaster made Thursday afternoons Hell for David in the special ways that only a gamesmaster can.

  Senior School also meant Homework. As the nights lengthened and the first bangers echoed down the suburban streets David sat working at Simon’s desk in the bay window. He always did his best and although he never came much above the middle of the class in any subject, his handwriting was often remarked on for its neatness and readability. He usually left the curtains open and had just the desk light (blue and white wicker shade. Stand of turned mahogany on a wrought-iron base. Good enough to have come from British Home Stores and all Simon’s work. All of it) on so that he could see out. The streetlamp flashed through the hairy boughs of the monkey puzzle tree in the front garden. Dot, dot, dash. Dash, dash, dot. He often wondered if it was a message.

  Sometimes, way past the time when she should have been asleep, Victoria’s door would squeak open and her slippered feet would patter along the landing and half way down the stairs. There she would sit, hugging her knees and watching the TV light flicker through the frosted glass door of the lounge. Cracking open his door quietly and peering down through the top bannisters, David had seen her there. If the lounge door opened she would scamper back up and out of sight into her bedroom faster than a rabbit. Mum and Dad never knew. It was Victoria’s secret, and in the little he said to her, David had no desire to prick that bubble. He guessed that she was probably waiting for Simon to return.

  Dad came up one evening when David had just finished algebra and was turning to the agricultural revolution. He stood in the doorway, the light from the landing haloing what was left of his hair. A dark figure with one arm hidden, holding something big behind its back. For a wild moment, David felt his scalp prickle with incredible, irrational fear.

  “How’s Junior?” Dad said.

  He ambled through the shadows of the room into the pool of yellow light where David sat.

  “All right, thank you,” David said. He didn’t like being called Junior. No one had ever called him Junior when Simon was alive and he was now the eldest in any case.

  “I’ve got a present for you. Guess what?”

  “I don’t know.” David had discovered long ago that it was dangerous to guess presents. You said the thing you wanted it to be and upset people when you were wrong.

  “Close your eyes.”

  There was a rustle of paper and a thin, scratchy rattle that he couldn’t place. But it was eerily familiar.

  “Now open them.”

  David composed his face into a suitable expression of happy surprise and opened his eyes.

  It was a big, long box wrapped in squeaky folds of shrinkwrap plastic. An Airfix 1/72nd scale Flying Fortress.

  David didn’t have to pretend. He was genuinely astonished. Overawed. It was a big model, the biggest in the Airfix 1/72nd series. Simon (who always talked about these things; the steady pattern of triumphs that peppered his life. Each new obstacle mastered and overcome) had been planning to buy one when he’d finished the Lancaster he was working on and had saved up enough money from his paper round. Instead, the Lancaster remained an untidy jumble of plastic, and in one of those vicious conjunctions that are never supposed to happen to people like Simon, he and his bike chanced to share the same patch of tarmac on the High Street at the same moment as a Pickfords lorry turning right out of a service road. The bike had twisted into a half circle around the big wheels. Useless scrap.

  “I’d never expected . . . I’d . . .” David opened and closed his mouth in the hope that more words would come out.

  Dad put a large hand on his shoulder. “I knew you’d be pleased. I’ve got you all the paints it lists on the side of the box, the glue.” Little tins pattered out onto the desk, each with a coloured lid. There were three silver. David could see from the picture on the side of the box that he was going to need a lot of silver. “And look at this.” Dad flashed a craft knife close to his face. “Isn’t that dinky? You’ll have to promise to be careful, though.”

  “I promise.”

  “Take your time with it, Junior. I can’t wait to see it finished.” The big hand squeezed his shoulder, then let go. “Don’t allow it to get in the way of your homework.”

  “Thanks, Dad. I won’t.”

  “Don’t I get a kiss?”

  David gave him a kiss.

  “Well, I’ll leave you to it. I’ll give you any help you want. Don’t you think you should have the big light on? You’ll strain your eyes.”

  “I’m fine.”

  Dad hovered by him for a moment, his lips moving and a vague look in his eyes as though he was searching for the words of a song. Then he grunted and left the bedroom.

  David stared at the box. He didn’t know much about models, but he knew that the Flying Fortress was The Big One. Even Simon had been working up to it in stages. The Everest of models in every sense. Size. Cost. Difficulty. The guns swivelled. The bomb bay doors opened. The vast and complex undercarriage went up and down. From the heights of such an achievement one could gaze serenely down at the whole landscape of childhood. David slid the box back into its large paper bag along with the paints and the glue and the knife. He put it down on the carpet and tried to concentrate on the agricultural revolution. The crumpled paper at the top of the bag made creepy crackling noises. He got up, put it in the bottom of his wardrobe and closed the door.

  “How are you getting on with the model?” Dad asked him at tea two days later.

  David nearly choked on a fish finger. He forced it down, the dry breadcrumbs sandpapering his throat. “I, I er—” He hadn’t given the model any thought at all (just dreams and a chill of unease. A dark mountain to climb) since he’d put it away in the wardrobe. “I’m taking it slowly,” he said. “I want to make sure I get it right.”

  Mum and Dad and Victoria returned to munching their food, satisfied for the time being.

  After tea, David clicked his bedroom door shut and took the model out from the wardrobe. The paper bag crackled excitedly in his hands. He turned on Simon’s light and sat down at the desk. Then he emptied the bag and bunched it into a tight ball, stuffing it firmly down into the wastepaper bin beside the chair. He lined the paints up next to the window. Duck egg green. Matt black. Silver. Silver. Silver . . . a neat row of squat little soldiers.

  David took the craft knife and slit open the shining shrinkwrap covering. It rippled and squealed as he skinned it from the box. Then he worked the cardboard lid off. A clean, sweet smell wafted into his face. Like a new car (a hospital waiting room. The sudden taste of metal in your mouth as Mum’s heirloom Spode tumbles towards the fireplace tiles) or
the inside of a camera case. A clear plastic bag filled the box beneath a heavy wad of instructions. To open it he had to ease out the whole grey chittering weight of the model and cut open the seal, then carefully tease the innards out, terrified that he might lose a piece in doing so. When he’d finished, the unassembled Flying Fortress jutted out from the box like a huge pile of jack-straws. It took him another thirty minutes to get them to lie flat enough to close the lid. Somehow, it was very important that he closed the lid.

  So far, so good. David unfolded the instructions. They got bigger and bigger, opening out into a vast sheet covered with dense type and arrows and numbers and line drawings. But he was determined not to be put off. Absolutely determined. He could see himself in just a few weeks’ time, walking slowly down the stairs with the great silver bird cradled carefully in his arms. Every detail correct. The paintwork perfect. Mum and Dad and Victoria will look up as he enters the bright warm lounge. And soon there is joy on their faces. The Flying Fortress is marvellous, a miracle (even Simon couldn’t have done better), a work of art. There is laughter and wonder like Christmas firelight as David demonstrates how the guns swivel, how the undercarriage goes up and down. And although there is no need to say it, everyone understands that this is the turning point. The sun will shine again, the rain will be warm and sweet, clear white snow will powder the winter and Simon will be just a sad memory, a glint of tears in their happy, smiling eyes.

  The preface to the instructions helpfully suggested that it was best to paint the small parts before they were assembled. Never one to ignore sensible advice, David reopened the box and lifted out the grey clusters of plastic. Like coathangers, they had an implacable tendency to hook themselves onto each other. Every part was attached to one of the trees of thin plastic around which the model was moulded. The big pieces such as the sides of the aircraft and the wings were easy to recognise, but there were also a vast number of odd shapes that had no obvious purpose. Then, as his eyes searched along rows of thin bits, fat bits, star shaped bits and bits that might be parts of bombs, he saw a row of little grey men hanging from the plastic tree by their heads.