Best New Horror 29

by Stephen Jones

  Dylan crossed the yard. He was soaked to the skin. His shoes were slathered with mud. As his brother climbed the deck stairs, Will was able to see that Dylan’s eyes were glassy, were fey.

  “Where were you?” he asked. Dylan pressed past him. His passage through the house left earthen footprints on the carpet. Stopping in the living room, Dylan began to peel away his dripping clothes. They plopped onto the floor. Stripped, Dylan shuffled down the hall towards the bathroom. Will heard the door click shut, then the telltale sound of running water.

  He waited until after Dylan finished showering and had returned to the living room, dressed in socks and a terrycloth robe. He towelled his hair absentmindedly, staring at the wet stains on the carpet.

  “I hung your clothes on the rack downstairs,” Will explained “and I tried to wash off the footprints as best I could. Mind telling me where you were all night?”

  Dylan’s mouth hitched into an unsettling half-smile. “What, you taking over for Mom now that you’re back?”

  “I’m not back. And I’m not resurrecting Mom. I’m just worried about you.”

  “There’s nothing to worry about, truly nothing.” Dylan chortled weirdly.

  “Julie called your cell just before you came in.”

  These words choked off Dylan’s meandering laughter. They also drained the blood from his face.

  “What?”

  Nonplussed, Will reached for Dylan’s cell phone and displayed it, like the bearer of proof in some grand epistemology. “Looks like she left you a voicemail.”

  With a quaking hand Dylan slid the phone free. He had noticeable difficulty manipulating the keypad, but eventually he held the phone to his ear.

  From where he stood, Will could just discern the mousy rasps of a voice.

  Dylan’s arm dropped. His phone clunked against the floor.

  “What is it?” asked Will frantically, “what’d she say?” He scooped up Dylan’s dropped phone and slid it into the pocket of his trousers.

  Wordlessly, Dylan advanced to the master bedroom. Will followed, spitting out a string of brief and frantic questions, none of which were answered.

  Now dressed, Dylan stepped back into the hall. He was breathing heavily. “We have to return it,” was all he said before charging downstairs.

  He resurfaced bearing the iron casket. Will wrested on his shoes and tried to keep pace with his brother, who was already unlatching the gate at the rear of the yard. The creek was positively roaring as Will struggled to stay at Dylan’s heels. The rain was intensifying, portending another storm.

  “Where are we going?” he asked.

  “Not far,” Dylan replied. “I’ll put it back. I’ll make it right.”

  Together they traipsed the back of Baintree Common. In boyhood Will had played endlessly along these leafy banks, both with friends and with his brother. Though the housing complex had not appreciably changed over the years, its present aura felt threatening.

  “Here it is!” declared Dylan. “Help me with the fence.”

  “Whose house is this?” Will rasped as he gripped one of the fence boards. He watched his brother reverentially slip the woven coffin through the gap and then painfully wriggle himself through. He followed. It was obvious that quizzing Dylan was futile.

  The backyard of this home was far better maintained than that of his boyhood home. Will halted when he saw Dylan approach the sliding glass door. He waited to see who would answer his brother’s rapping.

  But Dylan did not knock; instead he set the casket down on the lawn and yanked at the door, throwing his weight into the task until the lock gave.

  Aghast, Will began to feel as though he was watching a movie rather than living the experience. He saw his brother calmly take up the casket and slip past the ruined door. Panicked that he might be spotted, Will found himself following.

  The strange house was immaculate in both upkeep and solitude. Standing in the kitchen, staring at the stainless steel appliances and the polished floor, caused Will to ache for his mother.

  Dylan was noisily moving through the lower chambers. Will rushed to the descending stairwell. Once there he made note of a trio of framed photographs that hung on the main landing. Wedding photos, enlarged and richly coloured. The groom was a stout man with a crew-cut hairstyle and slender glasses balanced on a slightly bent nose. The bride was blonde and rather pretty.

  Will’s hand felt for the stair’s railing. He gripped it and forced himself to breathe.

  The bride in the photographs was Julie.

  Will hissed his brother’s name, for his throat allowed for nothing louder.

  “I think it came from here,” Dylan called back. “Come see.”

  Will’s every step was reticent. His heart was thudding loudly. His saliva tasted of metal.

  The chamber in which Dylan stood was scarcely broader than a storage closet. An old-fashioned laundry tub stood against a wall of cinderblocks with yellowing mortar. A cold draft lifted tufts of cobwebs from the grey brickwork. They lapped at the air like spectral tongues. The tiny room was uncharacter-istically neglected and decayed compared to the rest of the house.

  “Look!” cried Dylan. He pressed the chisel forwards so that his brother might inspect it. The chisel’s blade was caked with bluish wax. “This is what they used to sculpt it! And look down there!” Dylan pointed to the concrete floor, which had been stained barn-red. The paint was bubbled and peeling. Moving nearer, Will smelled flowers and something like old potatoes. There was a drain grille set into the floor. “I’ll bet you they just lifted this grate and sent that thing downstream towards our house. Listen! You can hear the current through the grate. I watched this house all night from the banks, just waiting for them to leave for work. I knew it must have come from them. I knew it!”

  “From who?” Will managed. “Dylan, whose house is this?” He lifted his hand. “Up there. Up there I saw…” He swallowed. “What happened to Julie?”

  Dylan was already crouching down to pry the grill from its nest. He looked up at his brother. His expression was one of shock. “There is no Julie,” he said, as though it was the dullest of facts. “I made her up.”

  “But her pictures…upstairs there are…”

  “I know. I copied all her photos from her social media account. Her real name is Chantal. She and her husband have lived in Baintree for a few years now. I’ve never met her, I just like the way she looks, so I made her my wife.”

  Will shook his head. “But there are all those photos of the two of you on your profile,” he protested. “And with other people as well.”

  “Photoshop. None of those people exist. The names of all my friends on social media? They’re all fake accounts that I created. In fact, you’re the only real person out of any of my online friends. The others are just stolen pictures and fake names.”

  Will bent over. It was as if his brother’s revelation had struck him in the solar plexus. “Why?” he whispered. “Why, Dylan?”

  “It wasn’t supposed to go this far. I never thought you’d actually come, even if I did post news about my wife leaving me. You probably shouldn’t be here.”

  “Neither of us should be here! Not in this house! Now let’s go. This is crazy. Let’s go home. We’ll talk about it there, not here.”

  “Not until I see if this is how they sent it down river. Help me lift this grate up.”

  Will was stock-still. A revelation had caused him to seize up. It took a great deal of willpower just to bring his hand to his pocket and free his brother’s cell phone.

  “What is it?” Dylan spat.

  “She called you…Julie called you. You heard her voice. Let me hear her message. Dylan? I want to hear that message.”

  When his brother refused to yield from jimmying the grate in the floor, Will began frantically thumbing and scrolling about Dylan’s phone.

  “What are you doing?” Dylan shouted. He stood and lunged for the phone. The grate slipped from his fingers and clanged down viciousl
y upon its frame. Before Dylan was able to yank the phone away Will had managed to bring up “Julie’s” number from the call history. He pressed the DIAL icon. A purling noise leaked through the phone’s speaker.

  A beat later this noise was usurped by a hideous buzzing that seemed to be emanating from inside the iron coffin.

  The brothers were paralysed. They stared into one another’s fear-widened eyes. Neither of them could bring themselves to face the buzzing casket. Again and again the phone rang. Even after Will dashed his brother’s device against that decaying red floor and saw it splinter, the casket continued to hum.

  Dylan advanced to the casket. Its lid hit the floor noisily.

  The bluish thing was wriggling. Dylan took up the homeowner’s chisel and began to tear the thing to pieces.

  “No!” screamed Will, though he was unsure exactly why. Rushing up alongside his brother, he peered over the rim, with its arcane etchings, and looked at the pristine mutilation. The livid wax curled back in ugly whitish rinds and rained down in clumps as Dylan continued to slash and twist and gouge. Though merely an effigy, its autopsy made Will’s stomach flip. He watched the torso part and smear as his brother fished out the vibrating phone, which went still and silent the instant it was freed from its host.

  Now it was Will who was wrestling free the floor grate. Dylan simply shuffled past him. Though he averted his eyes from the carnage, Will dutifully collected phone, carcass and casket, dropping each in turn into the pipe. He heard them splash when they struck the watery base that churned somewhere below.

  He then ran as he had never run before. Outside the rain flailed and swept like great shapeless wings. Will wended the length of the raging creek, his feet puncturing the sucking clay that seemed to be slipping into the creek moment by moment.

  His relief at spotting Dylan up ahead was immense. He shouted his brother’s name. The maelstrom swirled his voice into its cacophony, muzzling it. Dylan was leisurely sauntering along the bank, whereas he was running full measure. He could not close the gap between them. Time and again he cried out for Dylan but received not even a backwards glance.

  His frustration and fear ascending, Will took up a rock and hurled it at his brother’s back. But before the stone could strike him, Dylan veered dramatically to his left.

  The gate to their backyard was still hanging open by the time Will reached it. He passed through and made his way towards the back deck.

  He was stunned by the sight of figures, just barely visible through the glass doors, milling about the dining room. A peek into the kitchen window, which was veiled by Mother’s handmade curtains, revealed similarly obscure shapes shifting, gesturing, talking. Some of the figures were familiar to Will, having seen their likenesses on Dylan’s social media page. Though the pattern of the lace curtains seemed to pixelate their faces.

  The din of this unbidden gathering was audible even through the storm. The wan afternoon reduced the house’s interior to a cave, but Will guessed that Dylan’s guests numbered in the dozens. He scaled the steps of the deck. He wanted very much to see his brother.

  Moving to the glass door, Will suddenly stumbled. He looked down to see Dylan’s shoes sitting tidily side-by-side. The downpour had already rinsed away much of the river mud. Will reached down to collect the shoes but discovered that they had been nailed to the wooden deck. The spikes that pinioned them were chunky and black, akin to the ones that pinioned the effigy to its casket.

  The glass door slid back and the susurrus instantly quieted.

  Something mewled from the recesses of the house, something that sounded pained.

  One of the figures stepped into the half-light and reached a flickering, blurry hand through the open doorway.

  Will attempted to flee but found that he, too, had been rooted.

  SIMON STRANTZAS

  THE FLOWER UNFOLDS

  SIMON STRANTZAS is the author of the collections Nothing is Everything, Burnt Black Suns, Nightingale Songs, Cold to the Touch and Beneath the Surface, as well as the editor of the anthology Aickman’s Heirs, a finalist for both the World Fantasy and British Fantasy Awards, and the winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. He has also edited Shadows Edge and was the guest editor of the third volume of The Year’s Best Weird Fiction.

  His writing has been reprinted in Best Horror of the Year, Year’s Best Weird Fiction and Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, and appeared in publications such as Cemetery Dance, PostScripts and Nightmare. His short story, ‘Pinholes in Black Muslin’, was a finalist for the British Fantasy Award, and his collection, Burnt Black Suns, a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award. He lives with his wife in Toronto, Canada.

  This is his seventh appearance in the Best New Horror series.

  “I wrote this story in an attempt to return to the ‘strange stories’ I’d written more often earlier in my career, back before I found myself side-tracked by the growing ‘weird’ movement and its more overt Lovecraftian influences.

  “This story takes its inspiration from the experiences my mother shared with me about her days working deep in the city, combined with my own experiences doing much the same in an albeit different sort of job. Woven through this is a touch of Robert Aickman’s sense of mystery and sensuality, and the end result I think is a story that touches on a lot of the anxieties we feel as we find ourselves increasingly distanced from nature and from those primal urges that drive us.”

  CANDICE KNEW TWO unassailable facts. The first was she looked every day of her forty-five years; the second was she was stuck at her job forever. Some days were bearable, when the rest of the office staff, all fresh from college and eager, forgot she existed in her tiny cubicle near the rear exit, and she was able to fall into her head while her hands automatically did their work. But the rest of her time was a struggle to avoid dealing with any of them. Each had the same look when they saw her—pity, irritation, a hint of disgust. They did not want her around, and though they did nothing about it, the message was quite clear: she was not like them; she was not one of them; she would never be welcomed by them. If there was any salve at all, it was that few would last beyond the first four weeks, and fewer still beyond the first twelve. By the end of the year, they would be replaced by an entirely new group while she remained a permanent fixture at the back of the office.

  At least the elevator was close to her. Sometimes she heard its drone as it crawled up and down Simpson Tower, delivering loads of people to and from their offices. From her desk she heard every gear jump and cable slip. The elevator sometimes ground, sometimes squeaked, and always shuddered and hummed, but it was a reminder that everything moved, everyone went places, and she could too. It was as easy as pressing a button. Sometimes imagining going made it easier to stay.

  When her telephone rang, Candice jumped, unprepared for the sound. The small LED on its face reflected a series of zeroes in an aborted effort to display the caller’s number. Instead, all Candice knew was it came from inside the network.

  “Candice Lourdes. May I help you?”

  “I need you in my office,” said Ms. Flask.

  Candice’s knees wobbled as she stood. They had started complaining only a few months before, but it had taken her some time to realise it was not because they were injured, but because they were no longer young. It caused her to shuffle slightly down the corridor, and though the effect would subside in fewer than two minutes, it was long enough that the front office staff had a chance to watch her pass. Most simply ignored her, treated her as invisible, and as difficult as that was to bear, it was better than the alternative, which was a series of scowls. She felt her appearance wordlessly judged: her hair was too flat, they’d whisper, too oily; she didn’t wear enough make-up, or fashionable clothes; her nose was too crooked, her jaw too square…She had never been more than average, but she had once been able to coast on her youth. Those days had regrettably passed her by, and the woman that remained felt defeated and disappointed whenever the subject of someone else’s glare. Sh
e did her best to skirt the bank of cubicles and remain invisible, but it was hopeless.

  She knocked on Ms. Flask’s door and entered. Her manager sat behind a large oak desk, the only piece of permanent furniture in the office. Her ear was to her telephone’s receiver, and she motioned for Candice to sit. Flask’s face was red and alive with complicated political manoeuvring.

  Candice waited patiently. Flask’s desk was covered in baubles and photos of her and her overweight husband, their overweight children. Candice could not stop herself from staring. The family was on a trip somewhere warm, though each was dressed in long sleeves and a hat. Sand was trapped between the folds of her youngest’s arms. When Flask addressed her, hand cupping the end of the telephone receiver, Candice tried to react as though she’d seen nothing, as though there weren’t any photographs at all.

  “I need you to bring these forms up to seventeen. Silvia needs them for payroll.” Flask uncovered the receiver and spoke angrily into it. “You tell him he better unless he’s looking for a big change.” It took too long for Candice to intuit she’d been dismissed. She stood and picked up the stack of pages. Flask scribbled furiously on her legal pad, then paused before unleashing a tirade of profanity upon whomever was unlucky enough to be at the other end of the line.

  Candice slunk through the glass doors at the front of the office. The receptionist didn’t bother lifting her head as she passed. Candice did her best to put it out of her mind as she walked across to the elevator and pressed the call button, pleased to be the only one waiting. The glass between her and the office acted as an impenetrable barrier, and having passed its threshold she felt somewhat better. Any break from the deadening office atmosphere, if only for the time it took to deliver files to another floor, was heartening and helped replenish her reserves.

  There was the normal hum and clanking of metal as she waited, and when the elevator arrived and the doors parted Candice’s heart skipped. The car was empty. She exhaled the breath she’d been holding and stepped inside.