The Best New Horror 2

by Ramsay Campbell

  The first of the men was crouching in an oddly foetal position. When David pulled him off the plastic tree, his neck snapped instead of the join at the top of his head.

  David spent the evenings and most of the weekends of the next month at work on the Flying Fortress.

  “Junior,” Dad said one day as he met him coming up the stairs, “you’re getting so absorbed in that model of yours. I saw your light on last night when I went to bed. Just you be careful it doesn’t get in the way of your homework.”

  “I won’t let that happen,” David answered, putting on his good-boy smile. “I won’t get too absorbed.”

  But David was absorbed in the model, and the model was absorbed into him. It absorbed him to the exclusion of everything else. He could feel it working its way into his system. Lumps of glue and plastic, sticky sweet-smelling silver enamel worming into his flesh. Crusts of it were under his nails, sticking in his hair and to his teeth, his thoughts. Homework—which had been a worry to him—no longer mattered. He simply didn’t do it. At the end-of-lesson bells he packed the exercise books into his satchel, and a week later he would take them out again for the next session, pristine and unchanged. Nobody actually took much notice. There was, he discovered, a group of boys and girls in his class who never did their homework—they just didn’t do it. More amazing still, they weren’t bothered about it and neither were the teachers. He began to sit at the back of the class with the cluster of paper-pellet flickers, boys who said Fuck, and lunchtime smokers. They made reluctant room for him, wrinkling their noses in suspicion at their new, paint-smelling, hollow-eyed colleague. As far as David was concerned, the arrangement was purely temporary. Once the model was finished he’d work his way back up the class, no problem.

  The model absorbed David. David absorbed the model. He made mistakes. He learned from his mistakes and made other mistakes instead. In his hurry to learn from those mistakes he repeated the original ones. It took him aching hours of frustration and eye strain to paint the detailed small parts of the model. The Humbrol enamel would never quite go where he wanted it to, but unfailingly ended up all over his hands. His fingerprints began to mark the model, the desk and the surrounding area like the evidence of a crime. And everything was so tiny. As he squinted down into the yellow pool of light cast by Simon’s neat lamp, the paintbrush trembling in one hand and a tiny piece of motor sticking to the fingers of the other, he could feel the minute, tickly itchiness of it drilling through the breathless silence into his brain. But he persevered. The pieces came and went; turning from grey to blotched and runny combinations of enamel. He arranged them on sheets of the Daily Mirror on the right-hand corner of his desk, peeling them off his fingers like half-sucked Murraymints. A week later the paint was still tacky: he hadn’t stirred the pots properly.

  The nights grew colder and longer. The monkey puzzle tree whispered in the wind. David found it difficult to keep warm in Simon’s bed. After shivering wakefully into the grey small hours, he would often have to scramble out from the clinging cold sheets to go for a pee. Once, weary and fumbling with the cord of his pyjamas, he glanced down from the landing and saw Victoria sitting on the stairs. He tiptoed down to her, careful not to make the stairs creak and wake Mum and Dad.

  “What’s the matter?” he whispered.

  Little Victoria turned to him, her face as expressionless as a doll’s. “You’re not Simon,” she hissed. Then she pushed past him as she scampered back up to bed.

  On Bonfire Night, David stood beneath a dripping umbrella as Dad struggled to light a Roman candle in a makeshift shelter of paving stones. Tomorrow, he decided, I will start to glue some bits together. Painting the rest of the details can wait. The firework flared briefly through the wet darkness, spraying silver fire and soot across the paving slab. Victoria squealed with fear and chewed her mitten. The after-image stayed in David’s eyes. Silver, almost aeroplane-shaped.

  The first thing David discovered about polystyrene cement was that it came out very quickly when the nozzle was pricked with a pin. The second was that it had a remarkable ability to melt plastic. He was almost in tears by the end of his first evening of attempted construction. There was a mushy crater in the middle of the left tailplane and grey smears of plastic all along the side of the motor housing he’d been trying to join. It was disgusting. Grey runners of plastic were dripping from his hands and he could feel the reek of the glue bringing a crushing headache down on him.

  “Getting on alright?” Dad asked, poking his head around the door.

  David nearly jumped out of his skin. He desperately clawed unmade bits of the model over to cover up the mess as Dad crossed the room to peer over his shoulder and mutter approvingly for a few seconds. When he’d gone, David discovered that the new pieces were now also sticky with glue and melting plastic.

  David struggled on. He didn’t like the Flying Fortress and would have happily thrown it away, but the thought of Mum and Dad’s disappointment—even little Victoria screwing her face up in contempt— was now as vivid as his imagined triumph had been before. Simon never gave up on things. Simon always (David would show them) did everything right. But by now the very touch of the model, the tiny bumps of the rivets, the rough little edges where the moulding had seeped out, made his flesh crawl. And for no particular reason (a dream too bad to remember) the thought came to him that maybe even real Flying Fortresses (crammed into the rear gunner’s turret like a corpse in a coffin. Kamikaze Zero Zens streaming out of the sky. Flames everywhere and the thick stink of burning. Boiling grey plastic pouring like treacle over his hands, his arms, his shoulders, his face. His mouth. Choking, screaming. Choking) weren’t such wonderful things after all.

  Compared with constructing the model, the painting— although a disaster—had been easy. Night after night, he struggled with meaningless bits of tiny plastic. And a grey voice whispered in his ear that Simon would have finished it now. Yes siree. And it would have been perfect. David was under no illusions now as to how difficult the model was to construct (those glib instructions to fit this part to that part that actually entailed hours of messy struggle. The suspicious fact that Airfix had chosen to use a painting of a real Flying Fortress on the box rather than a photograph of the finished model) but he knew that if anyone could finish it, Simon could. Simon could always do anything. Even dead, he amounted to more than David.

  In mid November, David had a particularly difficult Thursday at Games. Mr Lewis wasn’t like the other teachers. He didn’t ignore little boys who kept quiet and didn’t do much. As he was always telling them, he Cared. Because David hadn’t paid much attention the week before, he’d brought along his rugger kit instead of his gym kit. He was the only boy dressed in green amid all the whites. Mr Lewis spotted him easily. While the rest of the class watched, laughing and hooting, David had to climb the ropes. Mr Lewis gave him a bruising push to get started. His muscles burning, his chest heaving with tears and exertion, David managed to climb a foot. Then he slid back. With an affable, aching clout, Mr Lewis shoved him up again. More quickly this time, David slid back, scouring his hands, arms and the inside of his legs red raw. Mr Lewis spun the rope; the climbing bars, the mat covered parquet floor, the horse and the tall windows looking out on the wet playground all swirled dizzily. He spun the rope the other way. Just as David was starting to wonder whether he could keep his dinner of liver, soggy chips and apple snow down for much longer, Mr Lewis stopped the rope again, embracing David in a sweaty hug. His face was close enough for David to count the big black pores on his nose—if he’d had a few hours to spare.

  “A real softy, you are,” Mr Lewis whispered. “Not like your brother at all. Now he was a proper lad.” And then he let go.

  David dropped to the floor, badly bruising his knees.

  As he limped up the stairs that evening, the smell of glue, paint and plastic—which had been a permanent fixture in the bedroom for some time—poured down from the landing to greet him. It curled around his face like a
caressing hand, fingering down his throat and into his nose. And there was nothing remotely like a Flying Fortress on Simon’s old desk. But David had had enough. Tonight, he was determined to sort things out. Okay, he’d made a few mistakes, but they could be covered up, repaired, filled in. No one else would notice and the Flying Fortress would look (David, we knew you’d do a good job but we’d never imagined anything this splendid. We must ring Granny, tell the local press) just as a 1/72nd scale top-of-the-range Airfix model should.

  David sat down at the desk. The branches of the monkey puzzle tree outside slithered and shivered in the rain. He stared at his yellow-lit reflection in the glass. The image of the rest of the room was dim, like something from the past. Simon’s room. David had put up one or two things of his own now: a silver seagull mobile, a big Airlines of the World poster that he’d got by sending off ten Ski yoghurt foils; but, like cats in a new home, they’d never settled in.

  David drew the curtains shut. He clicked the PLAY button on Simon’s Sony portable and Dire Straits came out. He didn’t think much of the music one way or another but it was nice to have a safe, predictable noise going on in the background. Simon’s Sony was a special one that played one side of a cassette and then the other as often as you liked without having to turn it over. David remembered the trouble Simon had gone to to get the right machine at the right price, the pride with which he’d demonstrated the features to Mum and Dad, as though he’d invented them all himself. David had never felt that way about anything.

  David clenched his eyes shut, praying that Simon’s clever fingers and calm confidence would briefly touch him, that Simon would peek over his shoulder and offer some help. But the thought went astray. He sensed Simon standing at his shoulder alright, but it was Simon as he would be now after a year under the soil, his body still twisted like the frame of his bike, mossy black flesh sliding from his bones. David shuddered and opened his eyes to the grey plastic mess that was supposed to be a Flying Fortress. He forced himself to look over his shoulder. The room was smugly quiet.

  Although there was still much to do, David had finished with planning and detail. He grabbed the obvious big parts of the plane that the interminable instructions (slot parts A, B, and C of the rear side bulkhead together, ensuring that the upper inside brace of the support joint fits into dovetail iv as illustrated) never got around to mentioning and began to push them together, squeezing out gouts of glue. Dire Straits droned on, “Love Over Gold,” “It Never Rains,” then back to the start of the tape. The faint hum of the TV came up through the floorboards. Key bits of plastic snapped and melted in his hands. David ignored them. At his back, the shadows of Simon’s room fluttered in disapproval.

  At last, David had something that bore some similarity to a plane. He turned its sticky weight in his hands and a great bird shadow flew across the ceiling behind him. One of the wings drooped down, there was a wide split down the middle of the body, smears of glue and paint were everywhere. It was, he knew, a sorry mess. He covered it over with an old sheet in case Mum and Dad should see it in the morning, then went to bed.

  Darkness. Dad snoring faintly next door. The outline of Simon’s body still there on the mattress beneath his back. David’s heart pounded loudly enough to make the springs creak. The room and the Airfix-laden air pulsed in sympathy. It muttered and whispered (no sleep for you my boy. Nice and restless for you all night when everyone’s tucked up warm and you’re the only wide-awake person in the whole grey universe) but grew silent whenever he lay especially still and dared it to make a noise. The street light filtered though the monkey puzzle tree and the curtains on to Simon’s desk. The sheet covering the model looked like a face. Simon’s face. As it would be now.

  David slept. He dreamed. The dreams were worse than waking.

  When he opened his eyes to Friday morning, clawing up out of a nightmare into the plastic-scented room, Simon’s decayed face still yawned lopsidedly at him, clear and unashamed in the grey wash of the winter dawn. He couldn’t face touching the sheet, let alone taking it off and looking at the mess underneath. Shivering in his pyjamas, he found a biro in a drawer and used it to poke the yellowed cotton folds until they formed an innocuous shape.

  It didn’t feel like a Friday at school. The usual sense of sunny relief, the thought of two whole days of freedom, had drained away. His eyes sore from lack of sleep and the skin on his hands flaky with glue, David drifted through Maths and Art followed by French in the afternoon. At the start of Social Studies, the final lesson of the week, he sat down on a drawing pin that had been placed on his chair: now that Mr Lewis had singled him out, the naughty boys he shared the back of the class with were beginning to think of him as fair game. Amid the sniggers and guffaws, David pulled the pin out of his bottom uncomplainingly. He had other things on his mind. He was, in fact, a little less miserable about the Flying Fortress than he had been that morning. It probably wasn’t as bad as he remembered (could anything really be that bad?) and if he continued tonight, working slowly, using silver paint freely to cover up the bad bits, there might still be a possibility that it would look reasonable. Maybe he could even hang it from the ceiling before anyone got a chance to take a close look. As he walked home through the wet mist, he kept telling himself that it would (please, please, O please God) be alright.

  He peeled back the sheet, tugging it off the sticky bits. It was like taking a bandage from a scabby wound. The model looked dreadful. He whimpered and stepped back. He was sure it hadn’t been that bad the night before. The wings and the body had sagged and the plastic had a bubbly, pimply look in places as though something was trying to erupt from underneath. Hurriedly, he snatched the sheet up again and threw it over, then ran downstairs into the lounge.

  Mum glanced up from The Price Is Right. “You’re a stranger down here,” she said absently. “I thought you were still busy with that thing of yours.”

  “It’s almost finished,” David said to his own amazement as he flopped down, breathless, on the sofa.

  Mum nodded slowly and turned back to the TV. She watched TV a lot these days. David had occasionally wandered in and found her staring at pages from Ceefax.

  David sat in a daze, letting programme after programme go (as Simon used to say) in one eye and out of the other. He had no desire to go back upstairs to his (Simon’s) bedroom, but when the credits rolled on News at Ten and Dad smiled at the screen and suggested it was time that Juniors were up in bed, he got up without argument. There was something less than affable about Dad’s affable suggestions recently. As though if you didn’t hop to it he might (slam your head against the wall until your bones stuck out through your face) grow angry.

  After he’d found the courage to turn off the bedside light, David lay with his arms stiffly at his sides, his eyes wide open. Even in the darkness, he could see the pin marks on the ceiling where Simon had hung his planes. They were like tiny black stars. He heard Mum go up to bed, her nervous breathing as she climbed the stairs. He heard the whine of the TV as the channel closed, Dad clearing his throat before he turned it off, the sound of the toilet, the bedroom door closing. Then silence.

  Silence. Like the taut skin of a drum. Dark pinprick stars on the grainy white ceiling like a negative of the real sky, as though the whole world had twisted itself inside out around David and he was now in a place where up was down, black was white and people slithered in the cracks beneath the pavement. Silence. He really missed last night’s whispering voices. Expectant silence. Silence that screamed Something Is Going To Happen.

  Something did. Quite matter-of-factly, as though it was as ordinary as the kettle in the kitchen switching itself off when it came to the boil or the traffic lights changing to red on the High Street, the sheet began to slide off the Flying Fortress. Simon’s face briefly stretched into the folds, then vanished as the whole sheet flopped to the floor. The Fortress sat still for a moment, outlined in the light of the street lamp through the curtains. Then it began to crawl across th
e desk, dragging itself on its wings like a wounded beetle.

  David didn’t really believe that this could be happening. But as it moved it even made the sort of scratchy squeaky noises that a living model of a Flying Fortress might be expected to make. It paused at the edge of the desk, facing the window; it seemed to be wondering what to do next. As though, David thought with giggly hilarity, it hasn’t done quite enough already. But the Fortress was far from finished. With a jerky, insectile movement, it launched itself towards the window. The curtain sagged and the glass went bump. Fluttering its wings like a huge moth, it clung on and started to climb up towards the curtain rail. Half way up, it paused again. It made a chittering sound and a ripple of movement passed along its back, a little shiver of pleasure: alive at last. And David knew it sensed something else alive in the room. Him. The Fortress launched itself from the curtains, setting the street light shivering across the empty desk and, more like a huge moth than ever, began to flutter around the room, bumping blindly into the ceiling and walls. Involuntarily, he covered his face with his hands. Through the cracks between his fingers he saw the grey flitter of its movement. He heard the shriek of soft, fleshy plastic. He felt the panicky breath of its wings. Just as he was starting to think it couldn’t get any worse, the Fortress settled on his face. He felt the wings embracing him, the tail curling into his neck, thin grey claws scrabbling between his fingers, hungry to get at the liquid of his eyes and the soft flesh inside his cheeks.