The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 19

by Stephen Jones

  “What are you playing at?” asked Liza, impatiently.

  “I need something like a pencil. Only thinner . . .” he said. “Here we go.” And he took a thin paintbrush from the top of the desk, and pushed the brushless end into the lock, jiggled it and pushed some more.

  There was a muffled clunk as the key was pushed out, as it dropped from the lock onto the newspaper. Bod pulled the paper back under the door, now with the key sitting on it.

  Liza laughed, delighted. “That’s wit, young man,” she said. “That’s wisdom.”

  Bod put the key in the lock, turned it, and pushed open the storeroom door.

  There were two men on the floor, in the middle of the crowded antique shop. Furniture had indeed fallen; the place was a chaos of wrecked clocks and chairs, and in the midst of it the bulk of Tom Hustings lay, fallen on the smaller figure of Abanazer Bolger. Neither of them was moving.

  “Are they dead?” asked Bod.

  “No such luck,” said Liza.

  On the floor beside the men was a brooch of glittering silver; a crimson-orange-banded stone, held in place with claws and with snake-heads, and the expression on the snake-heads was one of triumph and avarice and satisfaction.

  Bod dropped the brooch into his pocket, where it sat beside the heavy glass paperweight, the paintbrush, and the little pot of paint.

  “Take this too,” said Liza.

  Bod looked at the black-edged card with the word JACK handwritten on one side. It disturbed him. There was something familiar about it, something that stirred old memories, something dangerous. “I don’t want it.”

  “You can’t leave it here with them,” said Liza. “They were going to use it to hurt you.”

  “I don’t want it,” said Bod. “It’s bad. Burn it.”

  “No!” Liza gasped. “Don’t do that. You mustn’t do that.”

  “Then I’ll give it to Silas,” said Bod. And he put the little card into an envelope, so he had to touch it as little as possible, and put the envelope into the inside pocket of his old gardening jacket, beside his heart.

  Two hundred miles away, the man Jack woke from his sleep, and sniffed the air. He walked downstairs.

  “What is it?” asked his grandmother, stirring the contents of a big iron pot on the stove. “What’s got into you now?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Something’s happening. Something . . . interesting.” And then he licked his lips. “Smells tasty,” he said. “Very tasty.”

  Lightning illuminated the cobbled street.

  Bod hurried through the rain through the old town, always heading up the hill toward the graveyard. The grey day had become an early night while he was inside the storeroom, and it came as no surprise to him when a familiar shadow swirled beneath the street lamps. Bod hesitated, and a flutter of night-black velvet resolved itself into a man-shape.

  Silas stood in front of him, arms folded. He strode forward, impatiently.

  “Well?” he said.

  Bod said, “I’m sorry, Silas.”

  “I’m disappointed in you, Bod,” Silas said, and he shook his head. “I’ve been looking for you since I woke. You have the smell of trouble all around you. And you know you’re not allowed to go out here, into the living world.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.” There was rain on the boy’s face, running down like tears.

  “First of all, we need to get you back to safety.” Silas reached down, and enfolded the living child inside his cloak, and Bod felt the ground fall away beneath him.

  “Silas,” he said.

  Silas did not answer.

  “I was a bit scared,” he said. “But I knew you’d come and get me if it got too bad. And Liza was there. She helped a lot.”

  “Liza?” Silas’s voice was sharp.

  “The witch. From the Potter’s Field.”

  “And you say she helped you?”

  “Yes. She especially helped me with my Fading. I think I can do it now.”

  Silas grunted. “You can tell me all about it when we’re home.” And Bod was quiet until they landed beside the church. They went inside, into the empty hall, as the rain redoubled, splashing up from the puddles that covered the ground.

  Bod produced the envelope containing the black-edged card. “Um,” he said. “I thought you should have this. Well, Liza did, really.”

  Silas looked at it. Then he opened it, removed the card, stared at it, turned it over, and read Abanazer Bolger’s pencilled note to himself, in tiny handwriting, explaining the precise manner of use of the card.

  “Tell me everything,” he said.

  Bod told him everything he could remember about the day. And at the end, Silas shook his head, slowly, thoughtfully.

  “Am I in trouble?” asked Bod.

  “Nobody Owens,” said Silas. “ You are indeed in trouble. However, I believe I shall leave it to your foster-parents to administer whatever discipline and reproach they believe to be needed. In the meantime, I need to deal with this.”

  The black-edged card vanished inside the velvet cloak, and then, in the manner of his kind, Silas was gone.

  Bod pulled the jacket up over his head, and clambered up the slippery paths to the top of the hill, to the Frobisher vault, and then he went down, and down, and still further down.

  He dropped the brooch beside the goblet and the knife.

  “Here you go,” he said. “All polished up. Looking pretty.”

  It comes back, said the Sleer, with satisfaction in its smoke-tendril voice. It always comes back.

  The night had been long, but it was almost dawn.

  Bod was walking, sleepily and a little gingerly, past the final resting place of Harrison Westwood, Baker of this Parish, and his wives Marion and Joan, to the Potter’s Field. Mr and Mrs Owens had died several hundred years before it had been decided that beating children was wrong, and Mr Owens had, regretfully, that night, done what he saw as his duty, and Bod’s bottom stung like anything. Still, the look of worry on Mrs Owens’ face had hurt Bod worse than any beating could have done.

  He reached the iron railings that bounded the Potter’s Field, and slipped between them.

  “Hullo?” he called. There was no answer. Not even an extra shadow in the hawthorn bush. “I hope I didn’t get you into trouble, too,” he said.

  Nothing.

  He had replaced the jeans in the gardener’s hut – he was more comfortable in just his grey winding sheet – but he had kept the jacket. He liked having the pockets.

  When he had gone to the shed to return the jeans, he had taken a small hand-scythe from the wall where it hung, and with it he attacked the nettle-patch in the potter’s field, sending the nettles flying, slashing and gutting them till there was nothing but stinging stubble on the ground.

  From his pocket he took the large glass paperweight, its insides a multitude of bright colours, along with the paint pot, and the paintbrush.

  He dipped the brush into the paint and carefully painted, in brown paint, on the surface of the paperweight, the letters

  EH

  and beneath them he wrote

  WE DON’T FORGET

  It was almost daylight. Bedtime, soon, and it would not be wise for him to be late to bed for some time to come.

  He put the paperweight down on the ground that had once been a nettle patch, placed it in the place that he estimated her head would have been, and, pausing only to look at his handiwork for a moment, he went through the railings and made his way, rather less gingerly, back up the hill.

  “Not bad,” said a pert voice from the Potter’s Field, behind him. “Not bad at all.”

  But when he turned to look, there was nobody there.

  JOEL KNIGHT

  Calico Black, Calico Blue

  JOEL KNIGHT WAS BORN in London in 1975, and started writing short fiction eighteen months ago. “Calico Black, Calico Blue” is his first published work, and he is currently compiling a collection of his short fiction.

  “The idea for
this story came, somewhat incongruously perhaps, while travelling past a construction site in North London,” reveals the author. “A building had been semi-demolished, though it was, as I recall, possible to see into several of the remaining rooms. It was, as viewed from top-to-bottom, almost precisely half a house.

  “There is, I find, something very evocative about ruins – particularly recent ones.”

  IT GAVE HIM A BIT of a fright when he saw it. Having had a particularly objectionable day at the office, and navigated his way up three flights of stairs due to the inactivity of the lift, it was, in all honesty, the last thing he had expected to see. It was rested against his front door at a slight angle due to the pile of the doormat: a child’s doll; not one of those modern things that cry and need their nappies changing, but a china doll, the kind he always thought of as being quintessential Victoriana. It was wearing a blue calico dress and tiny shoes with tinier buckles. Above painted rosy cheeks its eyes were black and dull. He picked the thing up and held it. There was something strange about the hair: it was very fine, and more akin to the strands of a cobweb than any imitation of a child’s head of hair. He brought the doll into the flat and left it on the table in the hall whilst he found pen and paper. With its legs dangling over the edge of the tabletop it did actually look remarkably realistic. He wondered to whom it belonged; obviously to a resident of the flats, or to a younger relative or visitor, as whoever had left it would had to have gained access to the building using the security code. He wrote a very brief message – CHILD’S DOLL FOUND. PLEASE CONTACT DAVID HARNECK. FLAT 12 – leaving his telephone number underneath. On his way to work the following morning, he pinned the note to the board in the entrance hall: the doll itself he had moved to the spare room.

  It was a woman’s voice. There was a trace of an accent that he could not place.

  “You have found my doll?”

  The telephone had been ringing as he entered the flat, and he stood in the hallway, slightly out of breath.

  “Yes. It was outside my front door,” he replied.

  “Thank you so much. I have been very worried.”

  “That’s quite alright.” He began attempting to manoeuvre himself out of his jacket, whilst balancing the handset between his shoulder and cheek. He was making rather a hash of it.

  “I hope she has not caused you any trouble?”

  “No, no trouble at all,” he replied.

  “I will come up for her. I live at number nine.”

  With no further word he heard a faint click, and then the line was dead. He replaced the handset, and disentangled himself from the jacket, consciously leaving his shoes on. He had barely got to the kitchen to fetch himself a glass of water when the doorbell rang, once, then twice. He moved quickly into the hallway – stubbing the front of his shoe in a bump in the carpet in the process – and opened the front door. There was a woman in the hallway. She was standing a few feet back from the actual doorway at a distance that betrayed possible reticence, apprehension or over-politeness. She showed no sign of exertion, in spite of the fact that, given the amount of time elapsed since the telephone call and the doorbell sounding, she would had to have moved very quickly indeed. Her hands were neatly folded in front of her: her hair very long and dark: her skin pale, and imbued with a slight translucent quality. She was wearing an evening dress that was more than a little ill fitting. She was regarding him with very large eyes. Then she spoke:

  “Mr David Harneck?”

  “Yes,” he replied.

  “I believe you have found something of mine,” she said.

  That accent again: that which he had heard on the phone. He stood looking at her for a few moments, feeling a little out of sorts.

  “You’ve come for the doll?” he said.

  “For the doll, yes,” she replied.

  There was something slightly haughty about her manner, and yet, there was more to it than that. Regal, may have been a more adequate, if potentially over-generous description.

  “Do you want to come in for a minute?” he said, instinctively.

  “Thank you, no,” came the response.

  There was something so final about the statement that he knew there was nothing to be done by way of dissuasion.

  “I have your doll here,” he said. “It’s in the spare room, I won’t be a moment.”

  He left her in the doorway and went to retrieve the doll. It was, of course, exactly as he had left it – on top of the bookcase, but faced down, to afford less opportunity for it falling. When he returned to the front door with the doll in one hand he observed that she had moved hardly a muscle. Her eyes glinted when she saw the doll, and in the light from the hallway it seemed her eyes had changed colour, although of this he could not be sure. Her expression – hitherto one of utter earnestness – brightened: the ghost of a smile played across her lips.

  “You are really most kind,” she said. “She is such a silly thing, quite – but what is the word – strong-willed, is, I think you say.”

  She took the doll from him and held it, as would a child. It was an odd gesture, and one that did not exactly become a woman in her early thirties, as he presumed her to be. He chose to make light of her utterance about the doll possessing a strong will.

  “She often wanders off then, does she?”

  “Oh, yes,” the woman replied. “She is full of mischief. I sometimes think she is not happy in our family.”

  To that, he had no response. The woman was obviously a little eccentric, and had carried too many traits – often endearing in a child – into her adult life that were best left behind or outgrown.

  “You are most kind,” she repeated. “Will you allow me to repay you for your kindness in some way?”

  “I can assure you that’s not necessary. It was nothing, really.’

  “Then, perhaps,” she said, “you would come to have a drink with me. I live at number nine. Not this evening, I’m afraid. I am busy this evening, for I have other guests, but shall we say tomorrow?”

  He hesitated for a moment, and then something made him acquiesce.

  “That would be very pleasant.”

  He held out his hand. She looked at it, and then turned. She still had the doll in her hand, dangling – though not limply – by her side.

  “Come at eight-thirty,” she said.

  He watched her go, his hand still extended, feeling really rather foolish.

  “What is your name?” he said.

  But then there was nothing but an empty corridor.

  The truth is that, throughout the afternoon of the following day, he seriously considered forgetting the whole thing. It would have appeared terribly impolite not to turn up having agreed to, but there had been something about the woman he had found a little disquieting. All that business with the doll had struck him as more than a bit peculiar: he could have quite done without it. And as for the evening dress, he assumed simply that she had been host to a soiree (she herself admitted that she was entertaining that evening.) But as he sat watching television a few hours after his encounter with her, it had occurred to him that number nine must have been one of the two flats – the other being number eight, by his reckoning – overlooked by his kitchen window. (The architecture of the apartment block was such that his flat formed an L-shape around one side of a central courtyard that only the ground floor flats had access to.) He had looked out of the kitchen window and observed that both flats – eight and nine – were in complete darkness. He thought no more about it at the time, but found it very difficult to get to sleep that night. Thoughts of the woman’s skin, and its curious pellucid quality troubled him. He also thought a great deal about what would possess a woman to don an evening dress only to sit around in a darkened flat: and what manner of activity might become such a situation.

  Upon leaving work he had all but made up his mind to stay in for the evening. That day was a Tuesday, and he was due to drive up to Manchester the following morning to attend a two-day conference. But someth
ing happened on the way home that made him change his mind. It was really rather strange. As he was driving down the Uxbridge Road just past the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout he happened to pass an accident, or the aftermath of an accident, to be more precise. A car had mounted the pavement and ploughed straight into a lamppost. The bonnet was shaped like a concertina and steam was rising from the engine. There was a crowd of people gathered around the car, and an ambulance was approaching – its sirens flashing – from the opposite direction in which he himself was travelling. He made to pull over, and as he did so, the crowd around the car parted and he caught a glimpse of something – for he was now moving slow enough to do so – that gave him a bit of a start. It was a pair of bare feet, very pale, sticking out from the underside of the car. The soles of the feet were directly facing him as he looked, and the whole tableau reminded him of the early Renaissance painting with the battle, the fallen soldier and the skewed perspective. The crowd was milling around gesticulating, and a slightly plump ambulance man was approaching wearing a livid yellow visibility jacket.

  He drove on, but found himself quite unable to forget what he had seen. It was not the first accident of its kind that he had been partial witness to: it was simply those feet. Why had the feet been bare? he kept asking himself. And to whom did they belong?

  He was still thinking about it when he got home: and indeed, it was only after he had changed out of his work clothes and put on something more casual – having showered and shaved also – that he was able to occupy himself with any other thought. It was at that point that he found himself halfway out of the door, with a bottle of wine (purchased three days earlier, and unopened in the interim) in one hand and his front door key in the other.

  He must have passed by the entrance to number nine countless times throughout his residence at the flats, but as he was now a visitor, it somehow afforded him a new perspective. There was no doormat, he observed, and the letterbox appeared to be slightly smaller than usual.