The Best New Horror 2

by Ramsay Campbell

  David took another step down. His spine jarred; without noticing, he’d reached the ground floor. The man cleaning his nails at the desk had gone. The woman with the mop was working her way behind a pillar. He saw a door marked PRIVATE behind a jagged pile of unused shelving. He had an idea; the best he’d had all day.

  Moving quickly but carefully so that his trainers didn’t squeak, he crossed the shining wet floor, praying that his footsteps wouldn’t show. The door had no handle. He pushed it gently with the tips of his fingers. It opened.

  There was no light inside. As the door slid closed behind him, he glimpsed a stainless steel sink with a few mugs perched on the draining board, a couple of old chairs and a girlie calendar on the wall. It was a small room; there didn’t seem to be space for anything else. Certainly no room to hide if anyone should open the door. David backed his way carefully into one of the chairs. He sat down. A spring boinged gently. He waited.

  As he sat in the almost absolute darkness, his tiredness fought with his fear. The woman with the mop shuffled close by outside. She paused for a heart-stopping moment, but then she went on and David heard the clang of the bucket and the whine of the water pipes through the thin walls from a neighbouring room. She came out again, humming a snatch of a familiar but unplaceable tune. Da-de-da de-de-de dum-dum. Stevie Wonder? The Beatles? Wham? David felt his eyelids drooping. His head began to nod.

  Footsteps down the stairs. Someone coughing. He wondered if he was back at home. And he wondered why he felt so happy to be there.

  He imagined that he was Simon. He could feel the mannish strength inside him, the confident hands that could turn chaotic plastic into perfect machines, the warm, admiring approval of the whole wide world surrounding him like the glowing skin of the boy in the Ready Brek advert.

  A man’s voice calling goodnight and the clink of keys drew David back from sleep. He opened his eyes and listened. After what might have been ten minutes but seemed like an hour there was still silence. He stood up and felt for the door. He opened it a crack. The lights were still on at the windows but the shop was locked and empty. Quick and easy as a shadow, he made his way up the stairs. The Fortress was waiting for him, clean lines of silvered plastic, intricate and marvellous as a dream. He slid back the glass door of the case (no lock or bolt—he could hardly believe how careless people could be with such treasure) and took it in his hands. It was beautiful. It was perfect, and it lacked any life of its own. He sniffed back tears. That was the best thing of all. It was dead.

  It wasn’t easy getting the model home. Fumbling his way through the darkness at the back of the shop, he managed to find the fire escape door, but when he leaned on the lever and shoved it open an alarm bell started to clang close above his head. He stood rigid for a moment, drenched in cold shock, then shot out across the loading yard and along the road behind. People stared at him as he pounded the streets on the long, aching run home. The silver Fortress was far too big to hide. That—and the fact that the man in the shop would be bound to remember that he’d been hanging around before closing time—made David sure that he had committed a less than perfect crime. Like Bonnie and Clyde or Butch Cassidy, David guessed it was only a matter of time before the Law caught up with him. But first he would have his moment of glory; perhaps a moment glorious enough to turn around everything that had happened so far.

  Arriving home with a bad cramp in his ribs and Mum and Dad and Victoria still out at Gran’s, he found that the bucket in the garden still sat undisturbed with two bricks on top. Although he didn’t have the courage to lift it up to look, there was nothing to suggest that the old Fortress wasn’t sitting quietly (perhaps even dead) underneath. Lying on his bed and blowing at the model’s propellers to make them spin, he could already feel the power growing within him. Tomorrow, in the daylight, he knew he’d feel strong enough to get the spade and sort things out properly.

  All in all, he decided, the day had gone quite well. Things never happen as you expect, he told himself; they’re either far better or far worse. This morning he’d never have believed that he’d have a finished Flying Fortress in his hands by the evening, yet here he was, gazing into the cockpit at the incredible detail of the crew and their tiny controls as a lover would gaze into the eyes of their beloved. And the best was yet to come. Even as he smiled to himself, the lights of Dad’s Cortina swept across the bedroom curtains. The front door opened. David heard Mum’s voice saying shush, then Dad’s. He smiled again. This was, after all, what he’d been striving for. He had in his hands the proof that he was as good as Simon. The Fortress was the healing miracle that would soothe away the scars of his death. The family would become one. The grey curse would be lifted from the house.

  Dad’s heavy tread came up the stairs. He went into Victoria’s bedroom. After a moment, he stuck his head around David’s door.

  “Everything alright, Junior?”

  “Yes, Dad.”

  “Try to be quiet. Victoria fell asleep in the car and I’ve put her straight to bed.”

  Dad’s head vanished. He pulled the door shut. Opening and closing the bomb bay doors, David gazed up at the model. Dad hadn’t noticed the Fortress. Odd, that. Still, it probably showed just how special it was.

  The TV boomed downstairs. The start of 3–2–1; David recognised the tune. He got up slowly from his bed. He paused at the door to glance back into the room. No longer Simon’s room, he told himself—His Room. He crossed the landing and walked down the stairs. Faintly, he heard the sound of Victoria moaning in her sleep. But that was alright. Everything would be alright. The finished model was cradled in his hands. It was like a dream.

  He opened the lounge door. The quiz show colours on the TV filled his eyes. Red and silver and gold, bright and warm as Christmas. Mum was sitting in her usual chair wearing her usual TV expression. Dad was stretched out on the sofa.

  He looked up at David. “Alright, Junior?”

  David held the silver Fortress out towards his father. The fuselage glittered in the TV light. “Look, I’ve finished the model.”

  “Let’s see.” Dad stretched out his hand. David gave it to him. “Sure . . . that’s pretty good, Junior. You’ll have to save up and buy something more difficult with that money you’ve got in the Post Office. . . . Here.” He handed it back to David.

  David took the Fortress. One of the bomb bay doors flipped open. He clicked it back into place.

  On the TV Steve and Yvette from Rochdale were telling Ted Rogers a story about their honeymoon. Ted finished it off with a punchline that David didn’t understand. The audience roared.

  Dad scratched his belly, worming his fingers into the gaps between the buttons of his shirt. “I think your mother wanted a word with you,” he said, watching as Steve and Yvette agonised over a question. He raised his voice a little. “Isn’t that right, pet? Didn’t you want a word with him?”

  Mum’s face turned slowly from the TV screen.

  “Look,” David said, taking a step towards her, “I’ve—”

  Mum’s head continued turning. Away from David, towards Dad. “I thought you were going to speak to him,” she said.

  Dad shrugged. “You found them, pet, you tell him . . . and move, Junior. I can’t see the programme through you.”

  David moved.

  Mum fumbled in the pocket of her dress. She produced a book of matches. “I found these in the bin,” she said, looking straight at him. Through him. David had to suppress a shudder. “What have you been up to?”

  “Nothing.” David grinned weakly. His good-boy smile wouldn’t come.

  “You haven’t been smoking?”

  “No, Mum. I promise.”

  “Well, as long as you don’t.” Mum turned back to the TV. Steve and Yvette had failed. Instead of a Mini Metro they had won Dusty Bin. The audience was in raptures. Back after the break, said Ted Rogers.

  David stood watching the bright screen. A grey tombstone loomed towards him. This is what happens, a voice said, if y
ou get AIDS.

  Dad gave a theatrical groan that turned into a cough. “Those queers make me sick,” he said when he’d hawked his throat clear.

  Without realising what he was doing, David left the room and went back upstairs to Simon’s bedroom.

  He left the lights on and re-opened the curtains. The monkey puzzle tree waved at him through the wet darkness; the rain from Wetherby had finally arrived. Each droplet sliding down the glass held a tiny spark of streetlight.

  He sat down and plonked the Fortress on the desk in front of him. A propeller blade snapped; he hadn’t bothered to put the undercarriage down. He didn’t care. He breathed deeply, the air shuddering in his throat like the sound of running past railings. Through the bitter phlegm he could still smell the reek of plastic. Not the faint, tidy smell of the finished Fortress. No, this was the smell that had been with him for weeks. But now it didn’t bring sick expectation in his stomach; he no longer felt afraid. Now, in his own way, he had reached the summit of a finished Flying Fortress, a high place from where he could look back at the remains of his childhood. Everything had been out of scale before, but now he saw, he really saw. 1/72nd scale; David knew what it meant now. The Fortress was big, as heavy and grey as the rest of the world. It was him that was tiny, 1/72nd scale.

  He looked at the Fortress: big, ugly and silver. The sight of it sickened him more than the old model had ever done. At least that had been his. For all its considerable faults, he had made it.

  David stood up. Quietly, he left the room and went down the stairs, past the lounge and the booming TV, into the kitchen. He found the waterproof torch and walked out into the rain.

  The bucket still hadn’t moved. Holding the torch in the crook of his arm, David removed the two bricks and lifted it up. For a moment, he thought that there was nothing underneath, but then, pointing the torch’s rainstreamed light straight down, he saw that the model was still there. As he’d half expected, it had tried to burrow its way out from under the bucket. But it was too weak. All it had succeeded in doing was to cover itself in wet earth.

  The model mewed gently and tried to raise itself up towards David.

  This time he didn’t step back. “Come on,” he said. “We’re going back inside.”

  David led the way, levelling the beam of the torch through the rain like a scaled-down searchlight, its yellow oval glistening on the muddy wet grass just ahead. The rain was getting worse; heavy drops rattling on David’s skull and plastering his hair down like a wet swimming cap. The model moved slowly, seeming to weaken with every arch of its rotting fuselage. David clenched his jaw and tried to urge it on, pouring his own strength into the wounded creature. Once, he looked up over the roofs of the houses. Above the chimneys and TV aerials cloud-heavy sky seemed to boil. Briefly, he thought he saw shapes form, ghosts swirling on the moaning wind. And the ghosts were not people, but simple inanimate things. Clocks and cars, china and jewelry, toys and trophies all tumbling uselessly through the night. But then he blinked and there was nothing to be seen but the rain, washing his face and filling his eyes like tears.

  He was wet through by the time they reached the back door. The concrete step proved too much for the model and David had to stoop and quickly lift it onto the lino inside, trying not to think of the way it felt in his hands.

  In the kitchen’s fluorescent light, he saw for the first time just how badly injured the creature was. Clumps of earth clung to its sticky, blistered wings and grey plastic oozed from gaping wounds along its fuselage. And the reek of it immediately filled the kitchen, easily overpowering the usual smell of fish fingers. It stank of glue and paint and plastic; but there was more. It also smelt like something dying.

  It moved on, dragging its wings, whimpering in agony, growing weaker with every inch. Plainly, the creature was close to the end of its short existence.

  “Come on,” David whispered, crouching down close beside it. “There’s not far to go now. Please try. Please . . . don’t die yet.”

  Seeming to understand, the model made a final effort. David held the kitchen door open as it crawled into the hall, onwards toward the light and sound of the TV through the frosted lounge door.

  “You made that?” An awed whisper came from half way up the stairs.

  David looked up and saw little Victoria peering down at the limping model, her hands gripping the bannister like a prisoner behind bars. He nodded, feeling an odd sense of pride. It was, after all, his. But he knew you could take pride too far. The model belonged to the whole family as well. To Victoria sitting alone at night on the stairs, to Simon turning to mush and bones in his damp coffin—and to Mum and Dad. And that was why it was important to show them. David was old for a child; he knew that grownups were funny like that. If you didn’t show them things, they simply didn’t believe in them.

  “Come on,” he said, holding out his hand.

  Victoria scampered quickly down the stairs and along the hall, stepping carefully over the model and putting her cold little hand inside his slightly larger one.

  The model struggled on, leaving a trail of slimy plastic behind on the carpet. When it reached the lounge door, David turned the handle and the three of them went in together.

  KARL EDWARD WAGNER

  Cedar Lane

  KARL EDWARD WAGNER has won both the British and World Fantasy Awards, and trained as a psychiatrist before becomming a full-time writer and editor.

  His first book, Darkness Weaves With Many Shades, introduced readers to his offbeat heroic fantasy protagonist Kane, whose exploits he continued through three further novels and two collections.

  More recently he has edited twelve volumes of The Year’s Best Horror Stories (currently being reprinted in multi-edition hardcovers as Horrorstory), Intensive Scare and three volumes of Echoes of Valor.

  With artist Kent Williams he has collaborated on a major graphic novel, Tell Me, Dark, published by DC Comics, and his new novel The Fourth Seal is due from Bantam.

  “Cedar Lane” could be called “psychological science fiction”, but however you want to describe it, it will leave you with a chill long after you’ve finished reading it.

  Dream is a shadow of something real.

  —from the Peter Weir film The Last Wave

  HE WAS BACK AT CEDAR LANE again, in the big house where he had spent his childhood, growing up there until time to go away to college. He was the youngest, and his parents had sold the house then, moving into something smaller and more convenient in a newer and nicer suburban development.

  A rite of passage, but for Garrett Larkin it truly reinforced the reality that he could never go home again. Except in dream. And dreams are what the world is made of.

  At times it puzzled him that while he nightly dreamed of his boyhood home on Cedar Lane, he never dreamed about any of the houses he had lived in since.

  Sometimes the dreams were scary.

  Sometimes more so than others.

  It was a big two-story house plus basement, built just before the war, the war in which he was born. It was very solid, faced with thick stones of pink-hued Tennessee marble from the local quarries. There were three dormer windows thrusting out from the roof in front, and Garrett liked to call it the House of the Three Gables because he always thought the Hawthorne book had a neat spooky title. He and his two brothers each had his private hideout in the little dormer rooms—just big enough for shelves, boxes of toys, a tiny desk for making models or working jigsaw puzzles. Homework was not to intrude here, relegated instead to the big desk in Dad’s never-used study in the den downstairs.

  Cedar Lane was an old country lane laid out probably at the beginning of the previous century along dirt farm roads. Now two narrow lanes of much-repaved blacktop twisted through a narrow gap curtained between rows of massive cedar trees. Garrett’s house stood well back upon four acres of lawn, orchards, and vegetable garden—portioned off from farmland as the neighborhood shifted from rural to suburban just before the war.

  I
t had been a wonderful house to grow up in—three boys upstairs and a sissy older sister with her own bedroom downstairs across the hall from Mom and Dad. There were two flights of stairs to run down—the other leading to the cavernous basement where Dad parked the new car and had all his shop tools and gardening equipment, and where dwelt the Molochian coal furnace named Fear and its nether realm, the monster-haunted coal cellar. The yard was bigger than any of his friends had, and until he grew old enough to have to mow the grass and cuss, it was a limitless playground to run and romp with the dogs, for ball games and playing cowboy or soldier, for climbing trees and building secret clubhouses out of boxes and scrap lumber.

  Garrett loved the house on Cedar Lane. But he wished that he wouldn’t dream about it every night. Sometimes he wondered if he might be haunted by the house. His shrink told him it was purely a fantasy-longing for his vanished childhood.

  Only it wasn’t. Some of the dreams disturbed him. Like the elusive fragrance of autumn leaves burning, and the fragmentary remembrance of carbonizing flesh.

  Garrett Larkin was a very successful landscape architect with his own offices and partnership in Chicago. He had kept the same marvelous wife for going on thirty years, was just now putting the youngest of their three wonderful children through Antioch, was looking forward to a comfortable and placid fifth decade of life, and had not slept in his bed at Cedar Lane since he was seventeen.

  Garrett Larkin awoke in his bed in the house on Cedar Lane, feeling vaguely troubled. He groped over his head for the black metal cowboy-silhouette wall lamp mounted above his bed. He found the switch, but the lamp refused to come on. He slipped out from beneath the covers, moved through familiar darkness into the bathroom, thumbed the light switch there.