The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 19

by Stephen Jones

  “Now, turn,” ordered Keith. “The others.”

  Jamie wheeled about. Susan was on her knees, with her arms held out, fingers wide. Scotch Snowman and Explorer Snowman loomed over her, melt-water raining from their arms and chests and faces – the trapped corpses showing through. Susan was running out of charge, though. A slug of blood crawled out of her nose. Angry weals rose around her fingernails.

  This time, it was like blinking. He zapped the tartan cap and the solar topee to fragments, and the snowmen were downed. Susan swooned, and Keith was there to catch her, wrapping her in his cloak, wiping away the blood, squeezing her fingers. She woke up, and he kissed her like someone who’d known her longer and better than few hours.

  “Excuse me,” said Gene, “but I nearly had an icicle through my heart.”

  Keith looked at her and asked brusquely “you all right?”

  Gené eased her bloody jacket out of the way. Her scrape was already healing.

  “Seem to be,” she admitted.

  “Good, now help Shade with the last of them. It’s the most dangerous.”

  Gené saluted.

  “Sue,” whispered Keith.

  “Do I know you?” she asked, frankly irritated. He let her go, and stood up, stiffly. In his cloak, he looked like the commander of a victorious Roman legion. Jamie didn’t know where the kid had got it from.

  Bugs had either legged it or melted into the ground.

  Jamie had purple vision. It was like night-sight, but in the daytime. With the Fang of Night, he could think faster. He didn’t feel the cold. He could take anyone, any day of the week. He could only imagine what he would sound like if he used this onstage.

  Keith plucked the jewel from his grasp, holding it between thumb and forefinger as if it were radioactive, then magicked it away with a conjurer’s flourish.

  “You of all people should know to treat those things carefully,” said Keith.

  For an instant, Jamie wanted to batter the kid’s face and take back the jewel. Then, he understood. Use it, but don’t let it get its hooks in you. Dad had said that all the time.

  “So, which Keith is this?” said Gene, tugging on the kid’s wrist-tag. “What school do you go to?”

  “School? There hasn’t been any school since the Spiders came. Good job too. They don’t teach you anything useful. You have to learn survival, and resistance, on the job.”

  This Keith had a firmer jaw, healed-over scars, and a steady, manly, confident gaze. People snapped in line when he spoke and threw themselves under trains if there was a tactical advantage in it.

  “He told us about this before we met you,” Gené explained. “Some other Keith lives on an Earth overrun by arachnoid aliens. He’s a guerrilla leader. He also plays opening bat for Somerset and has three girlfriends. Opinion is split as to whether it’s a viable alternate timeline or some sort of Dungeons and Dragons wish-fulfilment fantasy. At the moment, I don’t really care.”

  She kissed Keith on the mouth. He took it as if it were his right, and then started struggling.

  “What happened?” he asked, shaking free of Gene. “Who was here?”

  Gené let the familiar – the original? – Keith go, and edged away from him. He still looked confused. The other Keith had been useful in a pinch, but Jamie couldn’t say he missed him.

  IX

  Putting Professor Cleaver to sleep hadn’t brought back the summer, but did shut him up – which was a relief.

  Richard looked through the heavily-frosted window. There was proper snow, now. Precipitation. It dropped like the gentle rain from Heaven, fluttering down picturesquely before being caught in erratic, spiralling winds and dashed hither and yon. The Cold’s sphere of influence scraped the upper atmosphere, where it found clouds to freeze.

  According to Catriona, the white blanket was gaining pace, spreading across the moors and fields. Soon, the perimeter of exclusion would be breached. So far, three villages had been evacuated on a flimsy cover story. When the Cold gripped fair-sized towns like Yeovil and Sedgwater, the domesticated feline would be well and truly liberated from the portable container.

  Cleaver snorted in his sleep, honking through his broken nose. Not content with tying the Professor to a swivel chair, Leech had shoved a sock in his mouth and bound a scarf around his jaws. Richard loosened the gag, so he wouldn’t asphyxiate on bri-nylon and his own false teeth.

  Leech shot him a pitiful look. He was picking through Clever Dick’s papers.

  “The man couldn’t maintain an orderly file if his soul depended on it,” he said, in exasperation. “From now on, every scientist or researcher who works for me gets shadowed by two form-fillers and a pen-pusher. What’s the use of results if you can’t find them?”

  “He wasn’t working for you,” said Richard.

  “Oh yes he was,” insisted Leech. “He drew his pay-packet and he signed his contract. Derek Leech International owns his results. If this Cold creature is real, then we own her. The Comet has exclusive rights to her story. I could put her in a zoo, hunt her for sport, license her image for T-shirts, or dissect her crystal by crystal to advance the progress of science and be entirely within my legal rights.”

  “Tell her that.”

  Leech turned a page and found something. “I just might,” he said.

  He tore out a sheaf of papers covered in neat little diagrams. Richard thought it might be some form of cipher, then recognized the hexagonal designs as snow crystals. Under each was a scrawl – mirror-written words, not in English.

  “Backwards in Latin,” mused Leech. “Paranoid little boffin, wouldn’t you say? This is Cleaver’s Rosetta Stone. Not many words, no subtleties, no syntax at all. But he received instructions. He made and used his Box. He broke the Zero Barrier, and violated the laws of physics.”

  “All because he could grow snowflakes?”

  “Yes, and now I own the process. There might not be applications yet, but things get smaller. Transistorization won’t stop at the visible. Imagine: trademarked weather, logos on bacteria, microscopic art, micro-miniaturized assassins . . .”

  “Let’s ensure the future of mankind on the planet before you start pestering the patent office, shall we?”

  Leech bit down, grinding his teeth hard. Richard thought something had snapped in his mouth.

  “You should watch that,” he advised.

  Leech smiled, showing even, white, perfect gnashers. Richard suspected he had rows of them, eternally renewed – like a shark.

  All rooms have ghosts. Acts and feelings and ideas all have residue, sometimes with a half-life of centuries. Richard took his gauntlets off and began to touch things, feeling for the most recent impressions. His fingertips were so numb that the cold shocks were welcome. His sensitivity was more attuned to living people than dead objects, but he could usually read something if he focused. He scraped a brown stain on the wall, and had a hideous flash: Cleaver, with a knife, smiling; a red-haired man in a white coat, gouting from an open throat.

  “What is it?” Leech asked.

  Richard forced himself to disconnect from the murder. “The staff,” he said. “I saw what happened before they were snowmen.”

  “Where are they, by the way?” asked Leech.

  “Wandered off. Didn’t seem to be the sorts to listen to reason. I doubt if you can negotiate with them.”

  The memory flashes floated in his mind, like neon after-images. He blinked, and they began to dispel. Cleaver had made four sacrifices to the Cold. McKendrick, Kellett, Bakhtinin, Pouncey.

  “Were the staff dead before or after they got snow-coated?” asked Leech.

  “Does it matter?”

  “If the Professor killed them to give the Cold raw material to make cat’s paws, they were just unused machines when she got them. If they were alive when the Cold wrapped them up, she might have interfaced with minds other than Clever Dick’s.”

  Richard didn’t approve of Leech’s use of “interfaced” as a verb-form, but saw whe
re he was going.

  “He killed them first,” he confirmed. Leech didn’t ask him how he knew. “They aren’t even zombies. The dead people are more like armatures. The only traces of personality they have . . .”

  “The hats.”

  “. . . were imposed by Professor Cleaver. I think he was trying to be funny. He’s not very good at humour. Few solipsists are.”

  Richard proceeded to the remains of the Box. The Cold had come through this doorway. He doubted it could be used to send her back, even if it were repaired. Banishing was never as easy as conjuring. Sometimes performing a ritual backwards worked, but not in a language with six planes of symmetry. You would always get hexagonal palindromes.

  Pressing his palm to a frost patch on the surface of a workbench, he felt the slight bite of the crystals, the pull on skin as he took his hand away. He didn’t sense an entity, not even the life he would feel if he put his naked hand against the bark of a giant redwood. Yet the Cold was here.

  “When the Cold broke through the Zero Barrier,” said Leech, “the Professor’s Box blew up. After that, he couldn’t make his little tiny ice sculptures, but they still talked. She turned the others into snowmen, but spared him. How could he make her understand he was a sympathizer?”

  Richard thought about that. “He persuaded the Cold he was her High Priest,” he said. “And she let him live . . . for a while.”

  “Cleaver said the Cold was an intelligent form of life,” said Leech. “He did not say she was clever. Imagine: you’re utterly unique, near-omnipotent and have endured millennia upon millennia. You wake up and the only person who talks to you – the only person you have ever talked to – is Clever Dick Cleaver. What does that give you?”

  “A grossly distorted picture of the world?”

  “Exactly. Perhaps it’s time our Cold Lady heard another voice.”

  “Voices,” said Richard, firmly.

  “Yes, of course,” said Leech, not meaning it.

  Derek Leech was excited, fathoming possibilities, figuring out angles. Letting the Great Enchanter cut a separate deal with the Cold would be a terrible idea. He was entirely too good at negotiating contracts.

  “Now,” Leech thought out loud, “how did he talk with her?”

  Richard remembered the snow angels. He wandered out of the laboratory. Not caring to maintain Cleaver’s obsessive little paths, he waded through snow. It drifted over his ankles. From the cafeteria doorway, he looked again at the three angels. They had reminded him of semaphore signals.

  “This is how,” he said.

  Leech had tagged along with him. He saw it at once too.

  “See the feet,” said Leech. “Not heel-marks, but toe-marks. When kids make snow angels, they lie on their backs. Cleaver lies on his front. You can see where his face fits, like a mould for a mask.”

  A muffled screech sounded. Back in the laboratory, the Professor was awake.

  Richard stepped into the room and knelt by an angel, touching the negative impression of Cleaver’s face. He felt nothing. If this had been the connection, it was dead now. The Cold had moved on.

  He would have to try outside.

  “Leech,” he said, “get on your back-pack blower and ring Catriona again. We have to tell her what we’re doing, in case it doesn’t work. No sense in the next lot making the same mistakes . . .”

  A chill rolled down the corridor.

  The doorway was empty. Richard saw a white tangle on the floor. Leech’s parka. And another further away. His leggings.

  Richard’s stomach turned over. He was feeling things now.

  “Leech!” he shouted.

  Only the Professor responded, rattling his chair and yelling around his gag.

  Richard jogged down the corridor, past more of Leech’s discarded arctic gear. He turned a corner. The main doors were open. One flapped in the blizzard.

  He made it to the doors and took the full force of the wind in his face.

  Leech – in a lightweight salmon suit – had walked a few yards away from the building. He stood in the middle of whirling snow, casually undoing his wide orange knit tie.

  One of the snowmen was back. It was Bee-Alice, swollen to mammoth size, twelve or fourteen feet tall, body-bulbs bulging as if pregnant with a litter of snow-babies. Queen Bee-Alice stood over Leech like a Hollywood pagan idol, greedy for human sacrifice.

  It should be a summer evening. Daylight lasting past ten o’clock. Plagues of midges and supper in the garden. A welcome cool after another punishingly blazing drought day. Any sunlight was blocked by the Cold, and premature gloom – not even honest night – had fallen.

  Leech popped his cat’s-eye cufflinks and began unbuttoning his chocolate-brown ruffle shirt. He exposed his almost-hairless chest, clenching his jaws firmly to keep from chattering. He wasn’t quite human, but Richard had known that.

  This was not going to happen on Richard’s watch. Bad enough that the Cold’s wake-up call had come from an embittered lunatic whose emotional age was arrested at eleven. If her next suitor were Derek Leech, the death by freezing of all life on Earth might seem a happier outcome.

  Richard tried to stride towards Leech, but wind held him back. He forced himself, inch by inch, out into the open, struggling against pellets of ice to take the few crucial steps.

  Queen Bee-Alice creaked, head turning like the world before the BBC-TV news. The novelty bumblebees bounced over her, a crown or a halo. She had giant, wrecking-ball fists. Sharon Kellett, junior meteorologist. Two years out of a polytechnic, with a boyfriend in the Navy and a plan to be national weather girl on the television station Derek Leech wanted to start up. She was among the first casualties of the Winter War. Dead, but not yet fallen. Richard ached at the life lost.

  Leech shucked his snug-at-the-crotch, flappy-at-the-ankles trousers. He wore mint-green Y-fronts with electric blue piping.

  Richard got to the Great Enchanter and crooked an arm around his neck.

  “I won’t let you do this,” he shouted in his ear.

  “You don’t understand, Jeperson,” he shouted back. At this volume, attempted sincerity sounded just like whining. “I have to. For the greater good. I’m willing to sacrifice my – or anyone’s – life to end this.”

  Richard was taken aback, then laughed.

  “Nice try, Derek,” he said. “But it won’t wash.”

  “It won’t, will it?” replied Leech, laughing too.

  “Not on your nellie.”

  “I still have to go through with this, though. You understand, Jeperson? I can’t pass up the opportunity!”

  Leech twisted as if greased in Richard’s grip, and shot a tight, knuckled fist into his stomach. Even through layers of protective gear, Richard felt the pile-driver blow. He lost his hold on Leech and the Great Enchanter followed the sucker-punch with a solid right to the jaw, a kick to the knee, and another to the goolies. Richard went down, and took an extra kick – for luck – in his side.

  “ ‘You ream now, Grasshopper,’” said Leech, fingers pulling the corners of his eyes, “ ‘not to charrenge master of ancient and noble art of dirty fighting!’ ”

  Leech couldn’t help gloating. Stripped to his underpants, whipped by sleet, skin scaled by gooseflesh, his expression was a mask of ugly victory. His exultant, grin showed at least 168 teeth. Was this the Great Enchanter’s true face?

  “Really think you can make a deal with the Cold?”

  Leech wagged his finger. “You’re not getting me like that, Grasshopper. I’m no Clever Dick. I’m not going to explain my wicked plan and give you a chance to get in the way. I’m just going to do what I’m going to do.”

  Richard had a lump in his fist, an ice-chunk embedded with frozen gravel. His eyes held Leech’s gaze, but his hand was busy with the chunk, which he rolled in the snow.

  “You didn’t go to public school, did you, Derek?”

  “No, why?”

  “You might have missed a trick.”

  Richard sat up and, w
ith practised accuracy, threw the heavy-cored snowball at Leech’s forehead. The collision made a satisfying sound. Richard’s heart surged with immature glee and he recalled earlier victories: as an untried Third Form bowler, smashing the centre-stump and putting out the astonished Captain of the First Eleven; on an autumn playground, wielding a horse chestnut fresh from the branch to split the vinegar-hardened champion conker of the odious Weems-Deverell II.

  A third eye of blood opened above Leech’s raised brows. His regular eyes showed white and he collapsed, stunned. He lay, twitching, on the snow.

  Queen Bee-Alice made no move. Richard hoped she was impartial.

  Unable to leave even Derek Leech to freeze, Richard picked him up in a fireman’s lift and tossed him inside the building – slamming the doors after him. He didn’t know how much time he had before Leech’s wits crept back.

  He took off his furs. Cold bit, deeper with each layer removed. He went further than Leech, and eventually stood naked in the blizzard. Everything that could shrivel, turn blue or catch frost did so. When the shivering stopped, when sub-zero (if not sub-absolute zero) windblast seemed slightly warm, he recognized the beginnings of hypothermia. There was no more pain, just a faint pricking all over his body. Snow packed his ears and deafened him. He was calm, light-headed. Flashes popped in his vision, as the cold did something to his optic nerves he didn’t want to think about. He shut his eyes, not needing the distraction. There were still flashes, but easier to ignore.

  He knelt before Queen Bee-Alice. Some feeling came from his shins as they sank into the snow – like mild acid, burning gently to the bone. His extremities were far distant countries, sending only the occasional report, always bad news. Cleaver had lain face down, but indoors – with no snowfall. Richard lay back, face up, flakes landing on his cheeks and forehead, knowing his whole body was gradually being covered by layer after layer. His hands were swollen and useless. With his arms he shovelled snow over himself. Snow didn’t melt on his skin – any body warmth was gone. He fought the urge to sit up and struggle free, and he fought the disorienting effects that came with a lowering of the temperature of his brain. He was buried quickly, as the Cold made a special effort to clump around him, form a drift, smooth over the bump, swallow him.