The Best New Horror 2

by Ramsay Campbell

  In the light of my helmet lamp I saw his lips twitch, and I wanted to smash him in the mouth.

  “Had? You mean it’s over?”

  “Not completely. But there’s still you. You’re in the way. Sheena, being the woman she is, still retains some sort of loyalty toward you. Can’t see it myself, but there it is.”

  “We’ll sort this out later,” I said, “between the three of us.”

  I made a move to get past him, but he blocked the way.

  Then a second, more shocking realization hit me, and again I was not ready for it. He must have seen it in my face, because his lips tightened this time.

  I said calmly now, “You’re going to lose me in here, aren’t you? Sheena said she wouldn’t leave me, and you’re going to make sure I stay behind.”

  “Your imagination is running away with you again,” he snapped back. “Try to be a little more level-headed, old chap.”

  “I am being level-headed.”

  His hands were on his hips now, in that gwailo stance I knew so well. One of them rested on the butt of his revolver. Being a policeman, he of course carried a gun, which I did not. There was little point in my trying force anyway. He was a good four inches taller than I and weighed two stone more, most of it muscle. We stood there, confronting one another, until we heard the scream that turned my guts to milk.

  The ear-piercing cry was followed by a scrabbling sound, and eventually one of the two policemen appeared in the light of our lamps.

  “Sir, come quick,” he gasped. “The guide.”

  Our quarrel put aside for the moment, we hurried along the tunnel to where the other policeman stood. In front of him, perhaps five yards away, was the guide. His helmet light was out, and he seemed to be standing on tiptoe for some reason, arms hanging loosely by his sides. John stepped forward, and I found myself going with him. He might have wanted me out of the way, but I was going to stick closely to him.

  What I saw in the light of our lamps made me retch and step backward quickly.

  It would seem that a beam had swung down from the ceiling, as the guide had passed beneath it. This had smashed his helmet lamp. Had that been all, the guide might have got away with a broken nose, or black eye, but it was not. In the end of the beam, now holding him on his feet, was a curved nail-spike. It had gone through his right eye, and was no doubt deeply imbedded in the poor man’s brain. He dangled from this support loosely, blood running down the side of his nose and dripping onto his white tennis shoes.

  “Jesus Christ!” I said at last. It wasn’t a profanity, a blasphemy. It was a prayer. I called for us, who were now lost in a dark, hostile world, and I called for Sang Lau. Poor little Sang Lau. Just when he had begun to make it in life, just when he had escaped the Walled City, the bricks and mortar and timber had reached out petulantly for its former child and brained it. Sang Lau had been one of the quiet millions who struggle out of the mire, who evolve from terrible beginnings to a place in the world of light. All in vain, apparently.

  John Speakman lifted the man away from the instrument that had impaled him, and laid the body on the floor. He went through the formality of feeling for a pulse, and then shook his head. To give him his due, his voice remained remarkably firm, as if he were still in control of things.

  “We’ll have to carry him out,” he said to his two men. “Take one end each.”

  There was a reluctant shuffling of feet, as the men moved forward to do as they were told. The smaller of the two was trembling so badly he dropped the legs straight away, and had to retrieve them quickly under Speakman’s glare.

  I said, “And who the hell is going to lead us out, now he’s gone?”

  “I am,” came the reply.

  “And I suppose you know which way to go?”

  “We’re near the heart of the place, old chap. It doesn’t really matter in which direction we go, as long as we keep going straight.”

  That, I knew, was easier said than done. When passageways curve and turn, run into each other, go up and down, meet forks and crossroads and junctions with choices, how the hell do you keep in a straight line? I said nothing for once. I didn’t want the two policemen to panic. If we were to get out, we had to stay calm. And those on the outside wouldn’t leave us here. They would send in a search party, once nightfall came.

  Nightfall. I suppressed a chill as we moved into the heart of the beast.

  Seven months ago Britain agreed with China that Hong Kong would return to its landlord country in 1997. It was then at last decided to clean up and clean out the Walled City, to pull it down and rehouse the inhabitants. There were plans to build a park on the ground then covered by this ancient city within a city, for the use of the occupants of the surrounding tenement buildings.

  It stood in the middle of Kowloon on the mainland. Once upon a time there was a wall around it, when it was the home of the Manchus, but Japanese invaders robbed it of its ancient stones to build elsewhere. The area on which it stood is still known as the Walled City. When the Manchus were there, they used it as a fort against the British. Then the British were leased the peninsula, and it became an enclave for China’s officials, whose duty it was to report on gwailo activities in the area to Peking. Finally, it became an architectural nightmare, a giant slum. An area not recognized by the British, who refused to police it, and abandoned by Peking, it was a lawless labyrinth, sometimes called the Forbidden Place. It was here that unlicensed doctors and dentists practiced and every kind of vice flourished. It was ruled by gangs of youths, the Triads, who covered its inner walls with blood. It is a place of death, the home of ten thousand ghosts.

  For the next two hours we struggled through the rank-smelling tunnels, crawling over filth and across piles of trash, until we were all exhausted. I had cuts on my knees, and my hair felt teeming with insects. I knew there were spiders, possibly even snakes, in these passageways. There were certainly lice, horseflies, mosquitoes and a dozen other nasty biters. Not only that, but there seemed to be projections everywhere: sharp bits of metal, cables hanging like vines from the ceiling and rusty nails. The little Cantonese policeman had trodden on a nail, which had completely pierced his foot. He was now limping and whining in a small voice. He knew that if he did not get treatment soon, blood poisoning would be the least of his troubles. I felt sorry for the young man, who in the normal run of things probably dealt with the tide of human affairs very competently within his range of duties. He was an official of the law in the most densely populated area of the world, and I had seen his type deal cleanly and (more often than not) peacefully with potentially ugly situations daily. In here, however, he was over his head. This situation could not be handled by efficient traffic signals or negotiation, or even prudent use of a weapon. There was something about this man that was familiar. There were scars on his face: shiny patches that might have been the result of plastic surgery. I tried to recall where I had seen the Cantonese policeman before, but my mind was soggy with recent events.

  We took turns to carry the body of the guide. Once I had touched him and got over my squeamishness, that part of it didn’t bother me too much. What did was the weight of the corpse. I never believed a man could be so heavy. After ten minutes my arms were nearly coming out of their sockets. I began by carrying the legs, and quickly decided that the man at the head, carrying the torso, had the best part of the deal. I suggested a change round, which was effected, only to find that the other end of the man was twice as heavy. I began to hate him.

  After four hours I had had enough.

  “I’m not humping him around anymore,” I stated bluntly to the cop who was trying to take my wife from me. “You want him outside, you carry him by yourselves. You’re the bloody boss man. It’s your damn show.”

  “I see,” John said. “Laying down some ground rules, are we?”

  “Shove it up your arse,” I replied. “I’ve had you up to here. I can’t prove you planned to dump me in here, but I know, pal, and when we get out of this place, y
ou and I are going to have a little talk.”

  “If we get out,” he muttered.

  He was sitting away from me, in the darkness, where my lamplight couldn’t reach him. I could not see his expression.

  “If?”

  “Exactly,” he sighed. “We don’t seem to be getting very far, do we? It’s almost as if this place were trying to keep us. I swear it’s turning us in on ourselves. We should have reached the outside long ago.”

  “But they’ll send someone in after us,” I said.

  And one of the policemen, added. “Yes. Someone come.”

  “’Fraid not. No one knows we’re here.” It came out almost as if he were pleased with himself. I saw now that I had been right. It had been his intention to drop me off in the middle of this godforsaken building, knowing I would never find my own way out. I wondered only briefly what he planned to do with the two men and the guide. I don’t doubt they could be bribed. The Hong Kong Police Force has at times been notorious for its corruption. Maybe they were chosen because they could be bought.

  “How long have we got?” I asked, trying to stick to practical issues.

  “About five more hours. Then the demolition starts. They begin knocking it down at six A.M.”

  Just then, the smaller of the Chinese made a horrific gargling sound, and we all shone our lights on him instinctively. At first I couldn’t understand what was wrong with him, though I could see he was convulsing. He was in a sitting position, and his body kept jerking and flopping. John Speakman bent over him, then straightened, saying, “Christ, not another one . . .”

  “What?” I cried. “What is it?”

  “Six-inch nail. It’s gone in behind his ear. How the hell? I don’t understand how he managed to lean all the way back on it.”

  “Unless the nail came out of the wood?” I said.

  “What are you saying?”

  “I don’t know. All I know is two men have been injured in accidents that seem too freakish to believe. What do you think? Why can’t we get out of this place? Shit, it’s only the area of a football stadium. We’ve been in here hours.”

  The other policeman was looking at his colleague with wide, disbelieving eyes. He grabbed John Speakman by the collar, blurting. “We go now. We go outside now,” and then a babble of that tonal language, some of which John might have understood. I certainly didn’t.

  Speakman peeled the man’s stubby fingers from his collar and turned away from him, toward the dead cop, as if the incident had not taken place. “He was a good policeman,” he said. “Jimmy Wong. You know he saved a boy from a fire last year? Dragged the child out with his teeth, hauling the body along the floor and down the stairs because his hands were burned too badly to clutch the kid. You remember. You covered the story.”

  I remembered him now. Jimmy Wong. The governor had presented him with a medal. He had saluted proudly, with heavily bandaged hands. Today he was not a hero. Today he was a number. The second victim.

  John Speakman said, “Good-bye, Jimmy.”

  Then he ignored him, saying to me, “We can’t carry both bodies out. We’ll have to leave them. I . . .” but I heard no more. There was a quick tearing sound, and I was suddenly falling. My heart dropped out of me. I landed heavily on my back. Something entered between my shoulder blades, something sharp and painful, and I had to struggle hard to get free. When I managed to get to my feet and reached down and felt along the floor, I touched a slim projection, probably a large nail. It was sticky with my blood. A voice from above said, “Are you all right?”

  “I—I think so. A nail . . .”

  “What?”

  My light had gone out, and I was feeling disoriented. I must have fallen about fourteen feet, judging from the distance of the lamps above me. I reached down my back with my hand. It felt wet and warm, but apart from the pain I wasn’t gasping for air or anything. Obviously, it had missed my lungs and other vital organs, or I would be squirming in the dust, coughing my guts up.

  I heard John say, “We’ll try to reach you,” and then the voice and the lights drifted away.

  “No!” I shouted. “Don’t leave me! Give me your arm.” I reached upward. “Help me up!”

  But my hand remained empty. They had gone, leaving the blackness behind them. I lay still for a long time, afraid to move. There were nails everywhere. My heart was racing. I was sure that I was going to die. The Walled City had us in its grip, and we were not going to get out. Once, it had been teeming with life, but we had robbed it of its soul, the people that had crowded within its walls. Now even the shell was threatened with destruction. And we were the men responsible. We represented the authority who had ordered its death, and it was determined to take us with it. Nothing likes to die alone. Nothing wants to leave this world without, at the very least, obtaining satisfaction in the way of revenge. The ancient black heart of the Walled City of the Manchus, surrounded by the body it had been given by later outcasts from society, had enough life left in it to slaughter these five puny mortals from the other side, the lawful side. It had tasted gwailo blood, and it would have more.

  My wound was beginning to ache, and I climbed stiffly and carefully to my feet. I felt slowly along the walls, taking each step cautiously. Things scuttled over my feet, whispered over my face, but I ignored them. A sudden move and I would find myself impaled on some projection. The stink of death was in the stale air, filling my nostrils. It was trying to drive fear into me. The only way I was going to survive was by remaining calm. Once I panicked, it would all be over. I had the feeling that the building could kill me at any time, but it was savoring the moment, allowing it to be my mistake. It wanted me to dive headlong into insanity, it wanted to experience my terror, then it would deliver the coup de grace.

  I moved this way along the tunnels for about an hour: Neither of us, it seemed, was short of patience. The Walled City had seen centuries, so what was an hour or two? The legacy of death left by the Manchus and the Triads existed without reference to time. Ancient evils and modern iniquity had joined forces against the foreigner, the gwailo, and the malodorous darkness smiled at any attempt to thwart its intention to suck the life from my body.

  At one point my forward foot did not touch ground. There was a space, a hole, in front of me.

  “Nice try,” I whispered, “but not yet.”

  As I prepared to edge around it, hoping for a small ledge or something, I felt ahead of me, and touched the thing. It was dangling over the hole, like a plumb-line weight. I pushed it, and it swung slowly.

  By leaning over and feeling carefully, I ascertained it to be the remaining local policeman, the muscled northerner. I knew that by his Sam Browne shoulder strap: Speakman had not been wearing one. I felt up by the corpse’s throat and found the skin bulging over some tight electrical cords. The building had hanged him.

  Used to death now, I gripped the corpse around the waist and used it as a swing to get myself across the gap. The cords held, and I touched ground. A second later, the body must have dropped, because I heard a crash below.

  I continued my journey through the endless tunnels, my throat very parched now. I was thirsty as hell. Eventually, I could stand it no longer and licked some of the moisture that ran down the walls. It tasted like wine. At one point I tongued up a cockroach, cracked it between my teeth, and spit it out in disgust. Really, I no longer cared. All I wanted to do was get out alive. I didn’t even care whether John and Sheena told me to go away. I would be happy to do so. There wasn’t much left, in any case. Anything I had felt had shriveled away during this ordeal. I just wanted to live. Nothing more, nothing less.

  At one point a stake or something plunged downward from the roof and passed through several floors, missing me by an inch. I think I actually laughed. A little while later, I found an airshaft with a rope hanging in it. Trusting that the building would not let me fall, I climbed down this narrow chimney to get to the bottom. I had some idea that if I could reach ground-level, I might find a way to g
et through the walls. Some of them were no thicker than cardboard.

  After reaching the ground safely, I began to feel my way along the corridors and alleys, until I saw a light. I gasped with relief, thinking at first it was daylight, but had to swallow a certain amount of disappointment in finding it was only a helmet with its lamp still on. The owner was nowhere to be seen. I guessed it was John’s: He was the only one left, apart from me.

  Not long after this, I heard John Speakman’s voice for the last time. It seemed to come from very far below me, in the depths of the underground passages that wormholed beneath the Walled City. It was a faint pathetic cry for help. Immediately following this distant shout was the sound of falling masonry. And then, silence. I shuddered, involuntarily, guessing what had happened. The building had lured him into its underworld, its maze below the earth, and had then blocked the exits. John Speakman had been buried alive, immured by the city that held him in contempt.

  Now there was only me.

  I moved through an inner darkness, the beam of the remaining helmet lamp having faded to a dim glow. I was Theseus in the Labyrinth, except that I had no Ariadne to help me find the way through it. I stumbled through long tunnels where the air was so thick and damp I might have been in a steam bath. I crawled along passages no taller or wider than a cupboard under a kitchen sink, shared it with spiders and rats and came out the other end choking on dust, spitting out cobwebs. I knocked my way through walls so thin and rotten a single blow with my fist was enough to hole them. I climbed over fallen girders, rubble, and piles of filthy rags, collecting unwanted passengers and abrasions on the way.

  And all the while I knew the building was laughing at me.

  It was leading me round in circles, playing with me like a rat in a maze. I could hear it moving, creaking and shifting as it readjusted itself, changed its inner structure to keep me from finding an outside wall. Once, I trod on something soft. It could have been a hand—John’s hand—quickly withdrawn. Or it might have been a creature of the Walled City, a rat or a snake. Whatever it was, it had been alive.