The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 19

by Stephen Jones

  “At first I had in mind something in the tradition of M. R. James, but by the time I’d finished the first draft of the story it had gone to places I hadn’t originally envisaged, not least the imaginary northern city in which it is set.

  “In the past I’ve often been drawn to rural settings, however, the fun I had wandering the city in this tale has led to a couple of subsequent and longer stories in similar environments, which I hope will appear one day.”

  PROFFIT’S ARMS FIRMLY ENCIRCLED the bulky contents of the black plastic bag for the whole of the journey across the city. The driver had been visibly curious, but had refrained from questioning him. That suited Proffit, preoccupied as he was with his own internal dialogue, in which he argued with himself that this latest purchase was a good deal and not a dud. More than that, it seemed a portent of a better future. Not that the present is all that bad, he thought as the driver slowed and prepared to double park briefly.

  The house was one of a row of Victorian buildings facing the park. Ironwork and window mouldings were testament to a prosperous past. Now, if anyone could be bothered, the brickwork needed pointing, and the window frames several fresh coats of paint. Litter choked basement railings.

  Dashes of curtain colour, plantless plant-pots and space-filling ornaments were all that distinguished Proffit’s building from its neighbours, on one side three floors of dentists and on the other a firm of insurance brokers behind smeared windows. Beneath a sparse wig of aerials Proffit’s ersatz family peeped at him from the windows of his rooms on the third floor.

  Proffit pushed open the cab door and placed the bag carefully on the pavement, before getting out himself. Having spent enough that afternoon without parting with more, Proffit fed the exact fare into the cabby’s hand. The cab screamed off at speed, the driver making a point, Proffit supposed, unless he were anxious to reacquaint himself with the city’s busier thoroughfares, whose clamour, heard from this enclave, was a seditious murmur.

  Inside the house Proffit was only mildly out of breath by the time he’d reached the top of the stairwell, the item being more awkward than heavy to carry. Entering his flat, he was presented with the problem of where to place the thing amongst his growing collection. In the living room alone every spare surface was lumpy with china and ceramics, a broken Ormolu clock, an ivory chess set, a pile of 1970s box games. Only the walnut coffee table before the second-hand sofa was clear.

  The black polythene covered the great roundness like silk. Proffit unknotted the chicken-neck twist of plastic and a whispering crackle welcomed his delving hands. With care, he lifted out the globe and transferred it reverently to the table. He switched on the ceiling light, and the reflected room thrust out over the road. The globe’s ghost twin hovered, a dark moon over the park opposite.

  Hitherto, the thrill of finding, the bargaining and the moment of possession had been succeeded by an anticlimactic slump in his mood. Not this time.

  The globe was clasped at its poles by a plain brass meridian half-ring. Spinning it produced a frail, but strangely eager, squeal, as of something surprised at its own resurrection.

  This wasn’t Earth, far, perhaps literally far, from it. Bass-relief mountain ranges crossed oceans of red that faintly stained Proffit’s fingers where he’d touched. To most of the surface, black oil paint had been applied with a palette knife, in a scale-like effect; Proffit had no idea what physical feature this represented. Zephyrs presided, three or four in each hemisphere; thin rather than plump, their sexlessness assured by discreetly raised bony thighs. They had ashen curls, and cruel teardrop eyes. Cheeks were puffed out roundly in their haggard faces, and from their pursed lips issued burst-pillow effects of crimson feathers. Their fists terminated in black talons.

  The woman had asked for twenty pounds in the squashed confines of Cuttings Curios. Fifteen, returned Proffit, with a shrug that said, Doing you a favour love – I mean – look at it. And she had looked, her upper lip pulled fastidiously out of true. She’d capitulated to Proffit’s offer, cast a cloud of black plastic in his direction, and as good as stood back. People were funny, Proffit reflected.

  He stretched. Half a day trawling the charity shops and market stalls had left him pleasurably fatigued. He was hungry though, and for more than the dry and curling morsels in the fridge. Food; he resented the way it spirited away his limited funds, then itself. Objects remained. Even so, his stomach protested, aloud.

  Three streets away the basement restaurant bore the weight of a dozen perpetually darkened floors. Proffit told the waiter not to stint on peppers and chillies; without them food tasted of nothing to him. Afterwards he went to the video store and hired a war film.

  Back in his flat, whenever Proffit had to avert his eyes from the screen, they met the blood-red deserts of the globe. Worst of all was the soldier dealing out his intestines, like a magician casting forth cloth sausages from a top hat. Something like this just might have interested Proffit’s charges, when blackboard battles never had.

  The film over, Proffit reached for the globe and pushed along its horizontal axis. Shades of blacks, browns and reds smeared, then blurred and seemed to rise off the surface in an effect like encompassing dirty cloud. An arbitrary god, Proffit stopped its whirl. A bit of investigating might unearth a value, failing that he’d make one up; experts did it all the time. Proffit yawned off any other bright ideas. Bed first. Should I attend for work in the morning ? The option was no longer available to him, but surveying his narrow kingdom, from the wide throne that was his threadbare sofa, it still gave him pleasure to answer in the negative.

  Not a traveller he. Never a hankering to set foot on the foreign fields he’d chalked too many times onto a blackboard. Not a flyer either. Madness to be in this miles high tube. But flying troubles him now at a basement level. More immediate is the likelihood that one of the passengers in the front rows of the plane is going to turn and see him, pyjama-ed and prone in the brass-framed bed at the rear.

  Proffit minimizes himself beneath the covers as the hostess stops just beyond where his feet make twin-peaks of the blanket. “We’ll arrive shortly,” she says. Her voice has a slight buzz as if it were a discreet tone in the ambient sound of the engine. She’s a star he cannot name. She glows like sun-washed terracotta, “’kay,” he says meekly, snuggling, arranging the flies of his pyjama bottoms as he knows he’ll have leave the refuge of his bed soon.

  In the porthole, the stars are so close he can see flames. He corrects himself: they aren’t stars, they’re planets on fire. Noticing a sensation of inexorable turning, he looks out of the round window to his right.

  The black blind is pulled most of the way down, its lower edge bowed in a curve. Only it’s not a blind, it’s the southern pole of the Earth. He hadn’t realized they’d gone so high. The Earth is massive, the plane a hollow pin in comparison, and he a pinprick of blood inside it.

  No sense of motion now. The circumference of the black disc is out of sight. It’s a target seeking its arrow. He’d never have guessed the Earth’s shadowed side could be this dark.

  There’s a change in the note of the engine. A sick, floating sensation inside Proffit.

  A clunking beneath him – landing gear? Not long after, a jolt and rattle as of colossal crates. A sense of motion again, fast but gradually decelerating.

  All the lights are out in the cityscape, at the edge of what Proffit assumes is the vast apron of an airport. If landing lights of other runways exist they are comprehensively concealed by multitudes.

  The plane has stopped. Voices make thunder against which are lightning solo cries of triumph and anguish. Proffit notices pools of elegantly licking flame. A body rolls, clothed in fire; some think kicking will douse it. To others, the plane offers a distraction. They crush forward. They have upraised pikes and spears-a forest of them. Proffit is dismayed at the horde surrounding the plane. There is a tattered banner marked by a huge black blot.

  Despite the peril presented, the door has been opened.
The passengers are impassively filing out. “Come on,” the hostess calls to him, a tease in her voice. Then she is gone. The lights in the cabin go out, a prompt that he is to follow. Paint firelight from outside suffuses the interior

  He’ll stay here, that’s what he’ll do. Responding to his thoughts, the door shuts, subduing the massed voices. But what now? Proffit fingers his blanket as if the stitching encodes an escape-plan.

  The plane is an oven building heat.

  A toddler begins to wail. Wait a second, the child isn’t outside in the maelstrom of violence – it’s in here. It must have been left behind, either by accident of design. Whatever the reason, the toddler’s harsh thin wailing isn’t fearful. Proffit ponders nervously. The child hasn’t the years to have accumulated such hate and aggression. Proffit thinks any object might serve as a focus for that savage crying.

  He wishes he were outside.

  Against the diminishing pattern of headrests, a flaw appears, low in the aisle. An audible intake of breath isn’t Proffit’s. A vagueness due to the haze of smoke, but there is no mistaking the little, wizened face beneath the mop of hair. It takes another breath, and another. It’s not hyperventilating – or playing the Big Bad Wolf. Another breath and its cheeks bulge. Proffit screams helplessly, his face masked by his hands against the heat, the brightness . . .

  He was half out of bed in the tight embrace of his twisted duvet, his own cry in his ears. His own bed, no sign of a brass frame. A big rectangle replaced the tiny porthole. A good thing dream fires didn’t scorch or blind.

  Shouts outside – an inadequate re-enactment of that wild populace.

  The carpet was cool, dry land against Proffit’s feet. The dream was floating off satisfactorily on an inner sea.

  Down in the street a brawl. A youth was puzzled by the blood on his fingers. Two others grappled, their trainered feet doing complex dance-steps over glass shards. Another beckoned with upturned waggling fingers for anyone, just anyone to . . . Another hung ape-like from the park gates; with the bottle in his free hand he toasted the world. Ancient schoolyard scraps played around the action. Not intending to resume his peacemaking role now, Proffit shoved down the sash window on the few inches it had been open. A scratching remained.

  He couldn’t pinpoint its source with any certainty, but a hollowness in the sound was suggestive of an enclosed space. A rodent in the walls meant a pest problem shared by other residents, in which case they could band together and find the elusive landlord and insist he remedy the problem. Listening carefully, Proffit scowlingly realized the problem was his alone.

  He padded out of the bedroom, hesitated a moment on the threshold of the living room. He went in.

  He orbited the globe until he’d satisfied himself the scratching came from the inner surface and not the outer. Those scales of black paint were reminiscent of roofs, vastly out of scale in terms of the dimensions of the planet depicted, but maybe representative of an endless city, swirling around every space not occupied by mountain and desert.

  The scratching had stopped; he couldn’t help but think his soundless presence had brought this about. He disrupted the outer-space silence with his breaths and considered the matter.

  Anything sealed live inside the globe, deliberately or not, perhaps at the time of its fashioning, should have died long since. But what if an insect, or grub, had mindlessly, and to its cost, chewed its way in – or found some pre-existing and overlooked chink? And then grown to a size preventing its egress from the point of entrance, or via any other minuscule exit? Perhaps the recent scratching had been a final paroxysm of effort to escape its paper and card prison, culminating in its death?

  Proffit waited; moments later, hearing nothing more from the globe, he returned to his bedroom. He mulled over whether to leave the door ajar, so to hear the scratching should it recommence, or close it to block out that very eventuality. He closed it, against the possibility of the scratching thing escaping and making its presence known to him face to face with bites or stings.

  A pattering daylight awoke him. He went into the living room. Nothing within the tapestry of rain sounds. The inhabitant of the globe must be dead, or in a similar dormant state. He pressed his ear against the globe; it felt like cold hard earth. Blood pumping in his inner ear imitated a pounding furnace at a planet’s core. He tapped lightly with a knuckle. Nothing responded. A dead planet.

  The clutter of furniture and collectibles rekindled the crazed multitudes in his dream. Getting rid, selling with any luck, would clear the flat – as well as his head. He’d start with the globe, but it had to be far less of a mystery first.

  The city’s wet streets oppressed, from bowed doorsteps, basement railings and gurgling drains, to the high peaks and sagging valleys of the upper world of slate roofing. The rain fizzed on his face, formed tears. Windows, opaque with rain, were blind to his passing, as were huddle-rushing fellow pedestrians.

  Proffit splashed through growing puddles, dodged through the white fog pumped from cars. Blotches and veins glowed darkly in brick and stone. He passed the sooty prison-house of Grundy Secondary Modern; its railings, like the raised spears in his dream, dared him to return.

  Where the road crossed the canal he viewed the rear of the terrace, reflected in the slick black length pitted with rain. In that murky compressed perspective was the back of number seven. Esther and he had listened morosely on many a night to the rats scuttling at the water’s edge. He guessed she still did. Unable to think of a pretext for visiting now, Proffit moved on.

  The streets deepened beneath the piled-high architecture of the powers running the city. Old stone was gnawed and dark-stained by rain. High up, cloud mingled with mock-battlements and limp flags. Down below, Proffit felt of no more worth than the ones darkly housed in doorways, and as vulnerable while he was out here.

  The city library was a temporary escape from the city. Today was the first time in a while that Proffit was here with a purpose, other than seeking shelter from Harrowby’s current two-note weather system; cloudy, cloudy with rain.

  The reference department was a series of slant-ceilinged groins in the roof of the building. The Compendium of Maps and Globes and several similar works contained nothing resembling Proffit’s globe. He waylaid an employee who’d fined him with relish on numerous occasions in the lending department below. She disappeared into a staff enclave behind the enquiry desk and returned with a pile of small periodicals.

  Charts! the title proclaimed with enthusiasm, The Journal of Maps and Atlases. In the flyleaf of the topmost copy was a list of minor deities, each accompanied by a photograph and the attribute with which he or she held sway in that particular domain of cartography. The economically named Humphrey Humphries was one such; his face and high forehead poked through a halter of neatly trimmed white hair. The “Historical maps” editor was accessible to ordinary mortals via an electronic mail address, which Proffit took down.

  Home again, Proffit cranked up the assemblage that was his computer. His e-mail account hadn’t lapsed despite two or three months of neglect. He entered the address, the subject (bizarre globe inquiry), then struggled to convey the appearance of the globe in words. He was on surer ground with the zephyrs, describing them as “mean-looking infants”, “bags of bones with jazz trumpeters’ cheeks”. No name or maker’s mark on the globe, and his other “extensive researches” had proved fruitless. Any other lines of inquiry would be gratefully received. Proffit thanked Humphries in anticipation and signed off.

  Glad to put the matter aside, Proffit restlessly thumbed the TV remote. Mayhem on various scales; bombs in hotter climes, a soap opera family bickered, a cat and dog fought in primary colours. The globe at the corner of his eye was like a persistent fault in his vision

  Light had shrivelled to nothing over the park when he returned to his computer. He hadn’t expected a reply so soon, but was unduly frustrated as his negative expectation was confirmed.

  Prawn crisps, a whisky nightcap then bed.
No dreams please, he asked of the silence.

  Either the baby crying next door or the scratching from the living room awoke him – perhaps both. Shouts now, a male voice – angry. A door slammed. The scratching was louder, as if to be heard over the competing noise, or even drawing sustenance from it.

  So the thing inside the globe survived; a big beetle perhaps? Proffit got out of bed and went into the living room.

  The globe looked like solid rock rather than segments of stiff paper (“gores” as he’d learned from his limited studies) covering a sphere of air. Light from the bedroom swathed the western hemisphere in sunshine. The scratching was more pronounced, eager, as if the occupant of the globe were invigorated by Proffit’s presence, rather than cowed to the listening silence of the night before.

  Next door a glass smashed amidst the shouts of the parents. What were their names? All smiles on the stairs, in the laundry room. The baby ceased suddenly to cry. The adult voices were accusatory. A door shut them away; noisy toys put away for the night. Scratch, scratch.

  It’s getting through, Proffit thought, stepping back. A tiny movement in a join between gores. The end of something sharp protruded minutely, in time with the scratches. No beetle this. Bits of paint and paper fluttered to the floor. Proffit wasn’t going to wait for the creature inside to discover him.

  He opened the front door of his flat. Back in the living room he warily picked up the globe. Leaving the flat he wondered if the globe were heavier now than when he’d carried it from the shop. Near the stairwell was a small back window. Proffit worked quickly. The talon, for he was convinced that was what it was, had sliced a slit between gores. A bird? That conjecture alone was enough to have him flinching from a desperate flourish of wings. He was a planet himself the way the core of him thudded. The window swung outward from hinges running along the top. Not wasting another second he squeezed the globe through the gap.