The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 19

by Stephen Jones

  He seemed to travel back a considerable distance before he replied.

  “Went away to school,” he said eventually. “Far away. I chose the school I went to because it was far away. I thought I would never see anyone from around here again.”

  “Did you?”

  He smiled oddly. “No, not really.” He reached for a bottle, knocked it off the table. We were both pretty drunk at this point.

  “But something followed me,” Dougal said after he had retrieved the rolling bottle and topped up.

  “Something? What do you mean?”

  “Something. Little things, at first. Little reminders. Just to let me know I wasn’t forgotten, wasn’t forgiven. Little things like you would hardly notice.” He looked over at me in the dark, squinting through the shadows and the whiskey.

  “Like when I went to my dorm room, the first time. My roomie hadn’t showed up yet; I was there by myself. When I sat down on my bed, to get a feel for the place, it was wet. I pulled the sheets off: it was soaked through, as if someone had turned a hose on it.”

  “A practical joke? People do terrible things to freshmen sometimes.”

  “Maybe. But it was salt water. You could smell it. And not clean salt water. It smelled like the mudflats at low tide, with every dying thing in the universe turning to rotten black mud, bubbling and stinking. It smelled like that.

  “I ran out of there.

  “But when I went back later, my new roomie was there, unpacking. My bed was dry. I couldn’t smell anything.

  “That’s the way it was. At every important point in my life, every time something was about to happen, to change, to begin, there would be a reminder. I knew it was Finn.”

  “Finn?”

  Dougal nodded. “I knew. Things like that didn’t just happen by accident. He was letting me know, telling me it would never be all right.

  “When I went to take my bar exam, the first time, for instance. They had those plastic chairs, you remember, with the Formica slab to write on, metal legs. The seats were contoured to fit your ass. But in the seat of my chair there was a pool of water, with a strand of eelgrass floating in it. Eelgrass! I was in the mid-west, miles inland. How did eelgrass get on my chair? How did he know which chair I was going to pick?

  “Things like that kept happening. They fucked me up, threw me off my stride. I failed that bar exam, you know. The second time, too. I gave up after that. I knew Finn would never let me pass it.

  “Some mornings I’d wake up wet and chilled, as if I’d slept outside all night. The sheets lay on me thick and heavy, like wet sailcloth. Everything smelled of mud and death.

  “Then I knew he’d been there, with me, all night.”

  Dougal’s lost his mind, I thought, lost his mind from guilt and drink and sorrow. My own grief woke up and opened up a pit in me. I poured whiskey into it. Maybe losing your mind, I thought, wasn’t the worst thing that could happen.

  “Little things like that,” Dougal went on. “He was always with me. Isn’t that what they say? ‘I am with you always,’” he laughed derisively.

  “But I tried to get on, you know? I kept trying to live my life.”

  “You can get used to anything,” I lied.

  “Not this. I began to brace for it. I tried to be ready for it. But it always seemed to take me by surprise.

  “I got married at one point,” Dougal said, as if he couldn’t believe it. “To Marcie, someone I worked with, a great woman. We were pretty happy together at first. I couldn’t believe Finn would let it happen. I kept waiting for something to go wrong, for him to show himself, but nothing happened. I actually began to think it was over, that he was satisfied somehow, and would leave me alone now. That by falling in love and getting married I had atoned, or balanced things in some way.

  “But I was wrong. He was just waiting, waiting for things to get good for me, so that when he ruined them there would be something to lose, something that would hurt.

  “Marcie and I did the whole married thing – car, house in the ‘burbs. No kids, thank god, but we talked about having them, made plans.

  “Then, after about a year, I began to smell that smell, that evil lowtide reek, everywhere. I tried to scrub it out of the house. I became a fanatic, cleaning everything constantly. My wife thought I’d lost my mind.

  “I began to find things, too. Between the pages of a book, there’d be a piece of marsh grass, still damp. And there was sand everywhere all of a sudden, gritty underfoot. Sand in my bed. That smell. We were still in the mid-west, I was determined never to go back to the coast, never to smell salt water again, never see anyone I knew from here. But it all came to me.

  “Then, I started hearing him.”

  “Finn? Did he speak to you? What did he say?”

  “Not words. That might have been better. It couldn’t have been worse. What I heard was breathing, someone breathing. But not regular breathing – gasping, gurgling, choking – the sounds of someone trying to breathe under water. It got so it was the background music to everything I did.

  “ ‘What are you always listening for?’ my wife would ask me. It aggravated her. I never listened to her, she said, right before she left me. She said she wanted to be with someone who was actually there all the time, who wasn’t always sitting there wishing he were anywhere else, listening to things no one else could hear.

  “There was more to it than that, of course. You fill in the gaps. But the upshot of it was that we got divorced. I left town, bummed around a while. That’s when I started drinking, seriously, I mean.

  “I stopped hearing the breathing after the divorce. Everything stopped. But I knew he was just waiting for me to settle down, to get happy again. So I kept moving, kept drinking.

  “I lived that way for years.

  “Then my mom died, down in Florida. Dad had died the year before – I missed the funeral. When I went down there to take care of things, I found out we still had this house – they couldn’t bear to sell it, and had rented it out when they moved to Florida. So I came back here to get rid of it.

  “That was a mistake. I knew as soon as I walked in the door that I would never leave here again. Finn wanted me here. All of his persecution had this one end, to drive me back to this house.

  “And here I was.

  “I would sit here and drink, like this, night after night. I would sit here and yell at the water, challenge him.

  “ ‘Come on out, Finn! Here I am! I’m waiting for you!’”

  “Then, finally, he came up out of the water and showed himself to me.”

  I shuddered; in spite of everything Dougal had told me up to now, I wasn’t ready for this.

  “You saw him?”

  Dougal nodded. “I still see him.”

  “When does this happen?” I asked, “on the anniversary of his death or something?”

  “Oh, no.” He shook his head. “Every night.”

  I glanced out the window at the moonlit deck. “Are we waiting for him now? Tonight?”

  Dougal nodded. “He should come soon. He comes around this time. Every night. You’ll see.”

  After that first time, Dougal told me, he had kept the curtains drawn. “But I knew he was out there. I could feel him, smell him. Hear him, too, feeling along the glass, looking for a way in.”

  It was late now, and in the heavy stillness of that summer night you could hear everything: insects chirring, a distant speedboat gunning through the darkness, out of sight across the bay, the waves shushing in on the beach, lapping against the bulkhead.

  Then there was a sound that cut across the regular rhythm of the waves, a slopping, wallowing sound. Dougal stopped talking; his face fell apart, as if someone had just cut the strings that held it together. A rotten, low-tide stench filled the room, getting stronger and stronger until I could barely breathe.

  Deep in the shadows, I saw something lying on the deck; I was sure it hadn’t been there earlier.

  Then whatever it was stood up. It stumbled ac
ross the deck and pressed itself against the glass.

  “He wants to come in,” I said, surprised at the sound of my own voice in the still room.

  “I won’t let him in,” Dougal said. “I’ll never let him in.”

  The figure felt its way along the windows until it reached the far railing of the deck. You could hear the soft pat of its hands against the glass, hear the slight creaking of the window-frames as it pressed against them.

  It was too dark to see clearly. I got no more than a glimpse of white flesh through the window, flesh too white to be living, and somehow soft, corrupt, swollen.

  I saw the palms of its hands against the glass.

  It was appalling. I shut my eyes, and shielded them with an open hand, the way you do against sun-glare, to make sure, I guess, that no image of that thing could get through, light or no light.

  When I opened my eyes again it had gone, though I thought I could make out a dim form moving slowly towards the end of the dock. Another minute and something clambered down the pilings and slipped into the bay water.

  We sat there in silence for a long time. Dougal’s breathing was rough and uneven, as if he’d just run up a flight of stairs. I had to consciously keep myself from holding my breath. I didn’t want to draw the dense, rotten miasma of salt marsh and mudflat that filled the room into my lungs.

  “You saw that?” Dougal asked after a while.

  “Yes,” I admitted. “I saw it. How do you know it’s Finn?”

  “It’s Finn. No doubt about that.”

  “What does he want?”

  “This is what he wants. He wants me to remember. He doesn’t want me to forget. He doesn’t want me to have any more happiness, any more life, than he does.”

  I thought of Dougal, sitting here in the dark, night after night, waiting for his dead brother to visit him.

  “Are you afraid? Do you think it’s trying to get in to do you harm?”

  Dougal shook his ruined head. “Oh no. He can’t harm me. He hasn’t the power to hurt me, physically. That’s why I opened the curtains, to confront him, to show him I’m not afraid of him. That way he can’t hurt me.”

  I looked around the empty house, its shut-up rooms smelling of mildew, stuffy, peeling walls, the whole house falling apart. I looked at Dougal, his body destroyed by alcohol, his life reduced to a nightly vigil of horror and guilt.

  “I think I’d better go,” I said. Dougal nodded, never taking his eyes off the window, staring out over the bay.

  “He won’t come back now,” Dougal said. “Not tonight.”

  “Good night, Dougal,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  Dougal just sat there, silently, cradling a bottle in his lap, staring out at the water.

  I let myself out.

  Dougal had done all the talking, but I had had something I meant to tell him. In the event I never came out with it. That was just as well.

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I had married Jeanne Cary. I thought he had enough to bear without that.

  I drove her home the night of the graduation party. She had been planning on getting a ride from Finn, or Dougal. Otherwise I might not have met someone like her. I comforted her. No, it wasn’t like that. But when we met again, there was an opening, an emotional contact already made. We started from there. One thing, as they say, led to another. We spent some good years together before I had to watch her die of cancer. Now that was over and I was back where it all started.

  I wouldn’t have minded seeing her again, but that was not given to me.

  Driving back home along the shore road, I stopped just before the road bends away from the water and looked back towards the admiral’s house. On the far point I could just make out the looming shape of it, shadows hovering over a spark of yellow light, the small table lamp burning at the back of the room overlooking the deck. I knew now why Dougal hadn’t lit the other lamps.

  I knew Dougal was still sitting there, drinking and staring out at the bay. I also knew that one night, when he felt he had waited long enough, been punished enough, Dougal would get up and open the door.

  I opened all the windows of my car to let the warm summer night air chase out the heavy, rotten stink of low tide mud that had followed me from the admiral’s house and filled the car interior to choking. By the time I pulled up in front of my house I couldn’t smell it any more.

  TONY RICHARDS

  Man, You Gotta See This!

  TONY RICHARDS BEGAN his career writing for classic anthologies such as The Pan Book of Horror Stories and The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories. Since then, he has gone on to see six books and more than seventy short stories in print.

  Widely travelled, he often sets his fiction in locations that he has visited. His latest novel, Dark Rain – the first of a projected series set in the fictional town of Raine’s Landing, Massachusetts – is published by Eos/HarperCollins. He lives in north London with his wife.

  As for the origin of the apocalyptic story that follows, Richards reveals: “I did go to see the last big Monet exhibit at the Royal Academy, and this is the result.”

  SEE, THERE’S THIS THING about Jer.

  There was a Monet exhibition in our city once. I and Kara – my then girlfriend – trooped through with the rest. Gazed upon the garden scenes and renderings of fog-bound London. Were awed by the way the paintings changed with age and failing eyesight. Loved it. But. . .

  There is something more than love, in art. I found that out right at the end.

  The exhibit reached its conclusion, you see, in a big square room that just contained one painting. A triptych, they called it. Three almighty canvases put together to form one.

  It was water lilies, of course. Took up an entire wall.

  And there were benches in front of it, so I just sat down. And then allowed my mind to fall forward into that weightlessness of pastel colour.

  I didn’t realize Kara had gone wandering back to see the scenes near Tower Bridge again.

  When she tapped my shoulder, asked me if I’d been sitting here all this time, more than half an hour had passed.

  I had gone completely elsewhere. I’d been lost. Blissfully so.

  And Jer would never understand that.

  Jerry Mulligrew – almost like the jazz saxophonist – my oldest and closest friend. Thirty-four, but looking rather younger. Pony-tailed and scrawny. Avoider of honest labour, as, for the most part, was I. Connoisseur of soft and medium-soft drugs. Lover of heavy metal. Expert puller of the student babes at our local bar – thus proof that earnest eyes, a winning smile and a quick sense of humour compensate for what I’d call weasely looks and dubious dress-sense.

  Jer just wasn’t into beauty of that kind. It was a concept, he often told me, which had had its day. All of that was misty-eyed stuff, far removed from actual life. We were in the Cyber Age now, and that kind of beauty was old hat.

  “And we should replace it with what?” I’d ask him.

  “Wonderment, man. Just . . . infinite possibilities. There ain’t nothin’ we can’t do.”

  We both lived on Packwell Street, me in a pokey one-bedroom apartment that had had its rent fixed twenty years ago, Jer a couple of blocks down in the loft room of a long established squat. If you walked past late at night, you could see the glow of his three state-of-the-art home computers through the window, like some other-worldly glow.

  Seeing as he hadn’t held down a job since the original George Bush, you might ask how he managed to afford them.

  Don’t ask.

  And . . . when Old Man Hubert died, it was rather like that thing Dorothy Parker said when Calvin Coolidge – I think it was Calvin Coolidge – did the same. “How can they tell?”

  No one could remember when they had last seen him. He’d had his groceries delivered, and he’d never ventured out. He was almost like a mythic figure to most people on the street. He’d lived in the big house at the very end of Packwell, where the street met the hill, rose fo
r a few blocks, and then gave way to shabby-looking woods. Huge house. Old house. Cupolas and stuff. It was surrounded by an iron fence, and all the drapes were permanently closed.

  What did he do there?

  “He’s supposed to be a painter,” Ray the Bartender informed us one time.

  “No shit? He has opening nights and stuff?”

  Ray shrugged. “Never heard of any. Never seen anything by him. S’far as I know, he never even tries to sell his paintings. The word is he’s got inherited money.”

  I exchanged glances with Jer, but he just shook his head.

  “No way, dude,” he said once Ray had moved off. “I’m not into that art-stuff, but I respect all creators. In a way, I’m one myself. He’s old anyhow. We’ll leave it till he’s dead.”

  And now he was.

  One day, a hearse simply appeared at the end of the road, but with no limousines following it. A coffin was brought out, and loaded in, and then driven away. The front door was padlocked and the windows boarded up. No moving truck appeared.

  When I saw Jer that afternoon, his thumbs were pricking, like the witches in Macbeth. He was all keyed up. Then he looked down at my ankle, remembered that I’d twisted it last night – on a loose paving-slab, extremely drunk; he’d had to help me stagger home. And groaned.

  “Ah, what the hell?” he philosophized. “It’ll probably be months before some lawyer gets around to having the place emptied. We can be in and out as much as we like, take a little at a time. Like – shoplifting, you know? There must be God-knows-what in there.”

  He was off towards the house alone an hour after darkness fell. Sitting in front of my TV, feeling pretty sorry for myself, I could imagine him prying back the boards.

  An hour and a half after darkness fell, my phone went. It was Jer, on the cell phone he had bought from Ray a month back.

  “Man, you gotta get up here!”

  “What are you talking about, bro?”

  “Man, you gotta see this!”

  I felt myself go slightly red. “I’m a cripple, for chrissake! I can’t go doing B-and-E in my condition!”