The Best New Horror 2

by Ramsay Campbell

  Derek Leech was on the radio now, defending the record of his security staff during the riots. He had pitched in to help the police, using his news helicopters to direct the action, and sending his people into the fighting like troops. The police were obviously not happy, but public opinion was forcing them to accept the tycoon’s assistance. Leech made a remark about “the spirit of Dr Shade,” and Greg’s hand jumped, squirting ink across the paper.

  “Careful, careful,” said P, dipping in with a tissue and delicately wiping away the blot, saving the artwork. Her hair was growing out. She’d never be a Comet Knock-Out, but she was turning into a surprisingly housewifely, almost maternal, girl. In the end, Shadeheads believed a woman’s place was with her legs spread and her hands in dishwater.

  In the final panel, Dr Shade was standing over his vanquished enemies, holding up his fist in a defiant salute. White fire was reflected in his goggles.

  The news was over, and the new Crusaders single came on. “There’ll Always Be an England.” It was climbing the charts.

  Greg looked out of the window. He imagined fires on the horizon.

  He took a finer pen, and bent to do some detail work on the strip. He wished he had held out longer. He wished he’d taken more than one beating. Sometimes, he told himself he was doing it for Harry, to protect the old man. But that was bullshit. They hadn’t been Reggie Barton and Hank Hemingway. Imaginative torture hadn’t been necessary, and they hadn’t sworn never to give in, never to break down, never to knuckle under. A few plain old thumps and the promise of a few more had been enough. Plus more money a month than either of them had earned in any given three years of their career.

  Next week, the Doctor would execute Papa Dominick. Then, he would do something about the strikers, the scroungers, the slackers, the scum . . .

  A shadow fell over the easel, cloak spreading around it. Greg turned to look up at the goggled face of his true master.

  Dr Shade was pleased with him.

  D. F. LEWIS

  Madge

  D.F. LEWIS is perhaps the most prolific published author working in the horror field today. While that’s no idle boast, it’s easier to understand when you realize that most of his stories only cover a few pages at most.

  “Madge” is no exception, yet despite its brief length, Des Lewis manages to pack as much of a punch into his sparse prose as many horror writers take a whole book to achieve.

  Recent outlets for his fiction have included such small press publications as Winter Chills, BBR, Cobweb, Dementia 13, Flickers ‘n’ Frames, Peeping Tom, Dreams & Nightmares, Dark Star, Deathrealm, Arrows of Desire, Dream, Overspace and After Hours, along with appearances in The Year’s Best Horror Stories and, of course, Best New Horror.

  THE WOMAN SAT THERE CROONING of one she loved.

  The sea’s roar was backdrop to the song, those listening swaying with its rhythms, their hair forking in the tumbling winds; they’d heard the song several times before, supposedly understanding the deep sorrow it betokened, but never so plangent, never so heartfelt as now.

  The woman caught her breath momentarily, wrapped her shawl tighter against the seaspray that was borne as far inland tonight as it ever had; and she took up some new verses heretofore unsung, except when on her own late at night, to lull herself into fitful sleep.

  Those listening ceased swaying, tankards poised upon their lips, not drinking, but ready to drink when the song ended . . . but the end now was so unpredictable. Many held their breath; but amid such winds as blew along those coasts, it was possible for the lungs to respire without the consent of mind or body.

  The song entered areas to which none would dare listen, given the choice. Many hoped that the growing thunder of the encroaching seas would deafen . . .

  Later, in her cot, as the storm neared its peak, she attempted lullaby after lullaby, not only to take sleep upon herself from the pitch darkness, but also gently to entice her partner for the night into a rest which, he told her, would help him to work the trawler through the next week or so. They had loved long and hard since day-repair, so surely sleep would be easy.

  He whispered:

  “Your song was hard to bear, this night, Madge.”

  “I could hardly bear it myself, but I was determined to get through all the verses . . .”

  “The others did not know where to put their faces . . . But I hoped, I really hoped, you would choose me tonight, and you must have read as much in my eyes, for here I be.”

  “I needed someone strong this night of all nights, not only because the storm is fiercer than I at least can remember, but my mother once told me that if I sang the song straight through, without break, he of which it speaks will know he can finally rest—but will need to see me for the last time. And, if he comes tonight, I want him to know I’m happy, strongly serviced by the likes of you.”

  “Madge, don’t you think he’ll be bitter seeing me share your cot?”

  “Ghosts can never be bitter, man, they can only hope for the happiness of those they leave behind. That’s where all the tales and songs be wrong.”

  “If you say so . . .”

  The storm hurtled louder than the quaking of the Earth at the end of time.

  She wrapped herself tighter into his arms, feeling that his breath was staunched, like hers, for the duration of the moment’s sanctity.

  Day-break, with the storm quickly passing over, the rest of the village woke to hear her renewed crooning. This time it was with a morning’s melody and lightsome words.

  Madge’s mother found her still locked in the twine of the man’s white unmoving limbs, as she carolled of a new ghost . . .

  The tides were too far out to hear. But, when her song was done, she listened to the squelch of boots as men mumbled into their beards and dragged their boats through new-made troughs to the distant sea.

  CHERRY WILDER

  Alive in Venice

  CHERRY WILDER is a New Zealander who lives in Germany. Her first story was published in 1974 and, although she is better known as a science fiction writer, a number of her recent tales have been in the horror genre.

  Her work has appeared in such anthologies and magazines as New Terrors, Dark Voices, Skin of the Soul, Interzone, Omni and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, while her books include Second Nature, the Torin and Rulers of Hylor trilogies, and Cruel Designs, the latter a horror novel set in her adopted country.

  Like “The House on Cemetery Street” by the same author, which was one of the most popular stories in our first volume, “Alive in Venice” is a deceptively quiet story in which the horror builds slowly and surely to a powerful resolution.

  THE PENSIONE GUARDI WAS A SOMBRE BUILDING fifteen minutes’ brisk walk from the Accademia. It stood at the end of a brick tunnel, a sottoportego, on the banks of a canal that had long been filled in. The Pensione was crushed up against the rambling rear walls of a palace . . . perhaps it had once been an annex of the more splendid edifice. When Susan Field looked out of her bedroom window, craning her neck to the right, she could see the wings and rump of a stone lion, outlined against blue sky.

  The bedroom was very small and mercifully it was around one corner of the corridor from the larger bedroom inhabited through the langorous summer nights by Jamie and Olive. Susan was not ignorant of the “facts of life”. Fate, she saw, had played her brother and sister-in-law a cruel trick. Bad enough to have a family misfortune which banished their wedding to a country church in Oxfordshire but worse, far worse to go on honeymoon accompanied by—ugh—the groom’s fourteen-year-old sister.

  Honeymooners, as everyone knew, needed to be alone. Susan was not sure what this “alone” really meant. Alone in bed together? Far away from their families and friends? Venice was crowded and the young couple would not have dreamed of travelling without Kidson, a dour woman of fifty, Olive’s personal maid.

  Susan set out to be good and self-effacing. She succeeded so well that she became a sort of ghost; Jamie and Olive jumpe
d when she spoke or tugged them by the sleeve. She was surprised when confronted by her own reflection in one of a thousand mirrors, framed in gold. She hung back in the teeming streets, became lost and found herself again. At the Pensione she explored all the rooms in which she could reasonably spend time by herself. Her favourite was the writing room.

  It had faded gilt furniture, a desk topped in dove-grey leather, and a soft watery light from the eastern windows. No one ever seemed to write although the inkwells were full and there was a sand shaker as well as blotting paper. She would not have been surprised to find a quill pen and a roll of parchment. She bought postcards but because of her peculiar situation she had no one to send them to except herself. She addressed them to the London house which was quite empty now and thought of them falling through the letter-box on to the mat with a ghostly Susan running down the stairs to pick them up.

  One wall of the room was unpapered and had no windows; it was of grey stone relieved by four large woven panels. Three of these panels were covered with a repeating pattern of arabesques and flowers, but the larger central panel was a tapestry picture of two ladies stepping down into a gondola. Masked revellers watched them idly from a bridge; the moon was rising; servants carried a ribboned mandolin, a lap-dog, a basket of flowers. It was an interesting picture and she sat watching it by the hour. She decided that the ladies—one of them was really a young girl—were going home after a visit. Perhaps they had been at a party or a masquerade; the older woman wore a half-mask and powdered hair.

  Sometimes people came to fetch her from the writing room.

  “Oh there you are, Tuppence!” said Jamie, still her teasing big brother.

  “They’re waiting, Miss!” said Kidson, stiff with disapproval.

  “Ah, poverina . . .” sighed the Signora, who had red hair and a comfortable figure. Worst of all was Mrs Porter, wife of Canon Porter, who had struck up an acquaintance at breakfast in the courtyard. This good woman had a most particular interest in Susan herself and had offered to “mind” her while the young couple went off by themselves. Mrs Porter had read the London papers, even the more gruesome ones, and when the girl was in her clutches she asked questions. Susan, crimson in the face, refused to answer.

  Luckily Mrs Porter had a heavy tread and a habit of calling before she reached the door. Susan found a place to hide behind one of the patterned panels; there was a recess in the wall, an old doorway. When Mrs Porter had seen the room empty and gone away Susan could slip out into the corridor, run down a little back stair to the courtyard and take her place beside Jamie and Olive. She sat in the shadows, they smiled and yawned in the sunshine. Mrs Porter, bustling in to say that the child was nowhere to be found, stared as if she had seen a ghost.

  There was no one else who mattered at the Pensione Guardi: two families of Germans, a group of art students from the Slade School, jolly Bohemian girls who were suspected of smoking cigarettes. Then there was the American with whom Jamie had a nodding acquaintance from Cambridge. Hadley, he said, was a bit of a dry stick who studied old buildings, wrote books about them in fact. No need to worry about old Hadley knowing anything; he lived in a dream. Susan looked enviously at Hadley, who was neither Bohemian nor jolly, lounging in the shade of the oleanders. She had written, on a postcard to herself, Sometimes I think I am living in a nightmare.

  During the endless summer they went many times to the Piazza San Marco. They glimpsed Hadley in the distance gazing at the empty space left by the Campanile, which had fallen down something over a year ago. A golden age had ended for Susan at about this time: the London house was decorated for the coronation but Father—what else could she call him—went to stay at his club. Her mother wept in a darkened room. Mrs Field was not at home to anyone ever again except the doctor and nurse who bore her away, by night, in a closed carriage.

  Now, inside the glittering cavern of the cathedral, they all hid from their neighbours, the Farquhars, and some acquaintances of Olive’s family, the Misses Black. The pillars behind which they loitered until the coast was clear were of porphry, writhing upwards like the serpents that crushed Laocoön.

  Once, in a smaller church, they simply hid Susan, the living proof that things were not as they should be. The honeymooners presented themselves (Olive all softness and blushes, Jamie with his shoulders back) to disarm the Misses Black, while Susan slipped into a side chapel. It was here that she recognized the presence for the first time.

  She crouched down low in one of the little black chairs for worshippers. There were a few candles, a picture of the saint with the Virgin and angels. Candlelight penetrated the small glass box on the altar which contained a relic. A splinter of black bone lay on folds of apricot satin embroidered in turquoise and gold. The colour brought back associations which were so warm and vivid that Susan caught her breath with longing. Why, it was her dream again and it was the tapestry in the writing room.

  The dream was not quite a dream of home. Better than that. She was driven in a closed carriage up to a pillared portico. Golden light streamed out and a low, sweet voice cried: “Cara mia . . .” She ran up the steps into the lady’s arms, was half-smothered in soft folds of cloth of exactly this colour. Then there were crowds of people, the hallway was full and someone else said: “We are so awfully pleased to see you!” She knew that she was being rewarded for some heroic deed; she had been a great help to some absolutely splendid person who was under a cloud.

  In the writing room again—she had been impatient to get back to the Pensione—she saw that the lady with the mask wore a cloak of the same shade. It came to her that the scene showed the beginning of some adventure, not the end. The lady with the mask was drawing her companion out of the gondola towards the door of the palazzo. The young girl hung back a little; the maskers on the bridge, Harlequin, Columbine and one with a death’s head, seemed to say: “Oh go along, silly goose! Why are you so shy?”

  On summer afternoons, during the long siesta, Susan left her bedroom and stole through the empty corridors to the writing room. She lay down on a striped sofa near the windows. Currents of warm air curled through the room lifting the upper edges of the tapestry panels and tinkling the lusters upon the chandelier. Once there was a soft sound as if one of these glass prisms had fallen down. She went to look and found a silver chain with a broken clasp lying in a heap against the stone wall. Next time it was a tiny bottle of Murano glass, white and gold, with a stopper in the shape of a fish. Days passed and she found, in more or less the same area of the room, a miniature fan with black lacquer sticks. Unfolded it was no bigger than the palm of her hand.

  Susan could see that the tapestry panels hung upon the stone wall like banners, each with a rod and cord suspended from a hook. Higher than this, in the shadows, there were two outcrops in the stone in the shape of lions’ heads. During the siesta when no one was likely to come in she lay full length upon the carpet and saw that the lions’ heads, as she suspected, covered small dark openings in the wall. They were or had been ventilators. She blinked, as motes of dust fell from the tapestries. Right before her eyes a flying fish, a strip of paper with its ends ingeniously slotted together, came twirling down from the second lion’s head, over the picture.

  She jumped up and ran to the last panel. The door in the recess was locked but she did not think it was bolted; it moved slightly when she turned the handle and pushed against it. Something rattled in the half darkness above her head. She bent the tapestry aside and the sleepy afternoon light showed her the large key, hanging on a hook against the wall.

  About this time there was a harsh intrusion from the real world. A packet of letters from London was sent to James Field, Poste Restante, at the post office where he picked up his copies of The Times. Tremendously embarrassed he took Susan aside and sat with her on a stone bench. At a distance Olive stared out over the lagoon and unfurled her sunshade. One letter was for Susan herself, on stiff cream paper, written out in copperplate by a stranger, a lawyer’s clerk.

&nbs
p; The letter must have been difficult to begin . . . what could be written at the top? The compromise was sensible: “To Susan—”, with a suggestively long dash. “In view of the findings of the court” it was preferable for all concerned that she should be known henceforth as Susan Anne Markham. She would be entered in August at Madame Kerr’s School in Berne, Switzerland, under this name and it would be as well if she learned to get along with the new arrangement.

  The letter had the air of an act of God. She believed for a few seconds that it had been written by a lawyer or even a judge. The full horror of the thing was contained in the last lines of copperplate and in the familiar signature. “Your mother is still under the care of Dr Rassmussen at Malvern Spa. Yours truly, H.B.L. Field.”

  It was the way that he signed his letters to tradespeople; the pain of his disavowal broke over her like a black wave; she trembled and clutched Jamie’s arm. Markham was their mother’s maiden name and they had distant Markham cousins.

  “The Guvnor is going too far,” said Jamie wretchedly. “He can’t really make you do this, legally and all that.”

  “He means,” said Susan, “to cast me off.”

  James Field made an effort to explain the disaster that had struck their house but it was very nearly too late.

  “You see, Tuppence,” he brought out, “the whole thing may not be true. Mother is very sick, the doctors say she has . . . she has lost her reason. Ladies sometimes accuse themselves of . . . of things that are not true.”

  Susan felt herself blushing again. Mrs Porter had asked her if she knew the meaning of the word adultery.

  “If Mummy is mad,” she said, “why is Father so dreadfully unkind to her . . . and to me?”