Best New Horror 29

by Stephen Jones

  It seemed to span no longer than a blink, but when Candice was once more aware of herself she discovered she was seated against the mirrored wall of the elevator car, skirt pulled up across her doughy thighs, a foot-long run in her hosiery. She shook her head and rolled onto her scuffed knees, fearful someone might summon the elevator and see her there, dishevelled. She trembled as she reached up and took hold of the railing.

  Had she pressed the button for the top floor in her stupor? She must have, as it was lit dull orange, but she had no memory of doing so. Something wrong was happening, something that brought her to the edge of hysteria, but she managed to tamp it down, convinced herself there was an explanation, if only she had time to work it out. Breathing slowly helped, and when she felt calm enough to function again, the first thing she tried to do was step off the elevator. But the closing doors prevented that, and with a short buzz the car lurched into ascent; it would not be stopped no matter how many times she hit other buttons. It headed towards the top floor where the botanical garden waited.

  The doors opened on the unoccupied garden. The lights were turned to a dim low, the giant thermal windows making up the polygonal dome brushed with a layer of frosted ice, refracting the rising sun’s light. Each window became a haloed fractal, and the odd angles sent curious shadows down the aisles of closed flowers, petals folded gently inside, pistils turned downwards. The potted vegetation edged towards her impossibly, though it might have simply been those shadows cast by the overhead sun against towering skyscrapers. The atmosphere was filled with restrained potential—every inch of the garden asleep, its dream seeping outwards in a hazed umbra. Candice worried she might be asleep as well, her limbs slowed by the weight of the fragrant air as she lifted them to stab at the fifteenth-floor button. But it did not light up. She was trapped in the too-sweet miasma of the waking garden. It would not be denied.

  She stepped out and was immediately confronted with the cloying odour; she closed her eyes, inhaled deeply, a rush of nostalgia flooding her senses. Instantly, she was transported to her childhood in the park, lying by the small creek, listening to wind blow through the grass. She could still taste the tang of it. But the resurrected memory was not as peaceful as before. The leaves were skeletal from insectan mandibles, the creek bubbled viscous foam, the wind carried with it something rotten. She felt a presence there in her waking dream, something that loomed over her, a shadow heavy enough to pin her. She shook her head but it took all her strength to do so, the waves of dislocation like stagnant water. She shook and shook and shook, flailing to be free, and when she finally managed to wake herself she did so with a gasp, sucking in air to refill her suffocated lungs. Yet as she remained bent, struggling for breath, the sensation of a looming presence intensified. Candice cleared her throat, fearful of what she had to do. “Hello? Is there someone here?” Her wavering voice echoed on the buzzing glass, and the sound discomforted her. Something strange was occurring. She withdrew into the dim aisles. “Please say something.”

  But no one spoke. Another rustle. Like a bird amongst branches. Candice spun but saw only plants. Honeysuckle. Cotoneaster. Dark Beauty toad lilies. The plants lining the aisle all were absolutely still, and yet Candice felt cold, as though they were deliberately still. The flowers…there was no other way to explain it: They were watching her. Coaxing her. Whispering to her. She pulled her blouse closer to her chest and retreated another step.

  She travelled the aisles one by one as though confined to her daydream. Movements dragged, reactions delayed, and when she struggled to cohere her muddled thoughts and make sense of the puzzle, it proved impossible. There was something about the garden that she could resist when seated a few floors beneath, but in its presence cast too strong a spell.

  Part of her hoped she wasn’t alone. She kept looking around, searching for Ben Stanley amongst the empty benches and closed flowers. But why should he be there? Other than the fact that he simply belonged there, belonged in a way Candice did not. His beard, his height—he seemed a part of the landscape, another tree in the forest, the swirls in his hair and beard repeated in the swirls of garden branches and vines. It was Candice that was the interloper, stumbling over roots she could not see, scratched by wisp-thin branches. But in her haze she felt unquestionably welcomed; the garden’s arms were open, ready to embrace her.

  Under the arch strange shadows moved, and though it could easily have been a reflection on the glass beyond, Candice wondered. It seemed so alien, so different from any world she had ever known, ever imagined. She took a step closer and the images moved, unfolded, opened to reveal more of themselves. She felt light-headed but continued down the aisle, breathing heavier as she got closer. The heat of the garden had risen with the sun, and beads of sweat formed on her forehead. Candice’s body vibrated gently with every step she took towards the archway shaded from the morning sun. It was a tickle at the base of her neck which became a warm river flowing downwards along the channel of her spine. The slow hazy world took on a different appearance, one where her eyesight was heightened, showing her each pattern of budding petal, each dew-covered thorn on those plants surrounding her. And the vibrations continued as she entered that dark aisle. They washed over her neck; numbed her arms, her chest; sped her heart. They flowed downwards until they met the warmth from her back, a spiralling eddy between her legs. She bit down on her lip, bent over and gasped. Her mind flooded with images of Ben Stanley, now twenty feet tall, reaching out and enveloping her in his massive arms, his face the landscape of the desert, his eyes the expanse of the sea. He reached down and plucked her from where she stood and she screamed as the sky turned vibrant and everything exploded outwards in streaks of crimson flame. Stars and suns lit her vision, colours streaming over her eyes, an eternal cascade bathing her, invading her, transforming her. It continued for aeons, and yet ended too quickly, abandoning Candice to the dull realities of the physical world. The botanical garden faded back into view, one unfurled flower at a time, and she stumbled upon entering it once more. The archway before her filtered the light from the rising sun, burned clean of any shadows that had once gathered there. Nothing seemed amiss about it any longer. She heard behind her distant voices shouting something, but whatever words they spoke were transient in her decaying memory.

  Ms. Flask was unimpressed. The financial reports due on her desk before her weekly teleconference had not appeared, and for the first time since assuming her position she was forced to make excuses to the board. It made her appear weak, incapable of running her team, and that she could not abide. It was enough that they snickered about her weight, called her names, but until that moment they could never have claimed her incompetent. It would not do. Not at all.

  Candice had been missing for three days, and in that time no one knew where she had gone. True, she was hardly irreplaceable—Ms. Flask would have done so immediately if possible. But Candice had been there long enough that only she understood how to extract the numbers Ms. Flask needed. The reporting of those quotas was perhaps more important than those quotas themselves, and ever-dependable Candice was key. Except she was not quite so “ever-dependable” any longer, and that was a problem too large to solve over the telephone. She had to be made an example of.

  Ms. Flask stormed through the office towards Candice’s cubicle, quietly enjoying the terror that spun around her as she cut a swath through the office. The newest employees rattled in their seats, the rest kept their heads down and feigned work, too afraid to look at her. When she faced down Candice, it would be with the power collected from their aggregate fear.

  But Candice was not as Ms. Flask expected. The woman sat at her desk on the telephone, and offered no more than a half-smile in her manager’s direction. Ms. Flask was impotent with rage as she watched Candice’s brightly painted nails clicking on the desk, but all she could do was wordlessly broadcast her irritation. Yet Candice’s smile never faltered. When she finally hung up, Ms. Flask’s power felt strangely flattened. It was a foreign
sensation and one she did not care for.

  “Ms. Lourdes, where have you been?”

  “I took some personal days. All the forms have been sent to HR.”

  Ms. Flask made a mental note to verify that when she returned to her desk, and to ensure no errors were committed filling out those forms. “That may be, but you had reports due this morning that never arrived.”

  “That’s weird,” Candice said, her brow furrowed unconvincingly. She checked her watch, then pushed her loose hair behind her ear. “I came in early today to catch up on everything.”

  “Well, I received nothing.”

  Candice shrugged. “Would you like me to send them again?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Ms. Flask remained in the doorway, staring as the unperturbed Candice lazily checked her watch. Everything about the woman was wrong, and it was far more disconcerting than the missing reports. Ms. Flask could not put her finger on why, but it made her uncomfortable.

  “Do you have somewhere else you have to be, Ms. Lourdes?”

  Candice laughed incredulously at Ms. Flask. She laughed like sparking steel, then crossed her smooth bare legs.

  “Not yet,” Candice said, and touched her tongue to her lips.

  ALISON MOORE

  THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE

  ALISON MOORE’s short fiction has been included in Best British Short Stories and Best British Horror, broadcast on BBC Radio, and collected in The Pre-War House and Other Stories.

  Her first novel, The Lighthouse, was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Awards, winning the McKitterick Prize. Both The Lighthouse and her second novel, He Wants, were “Observer Books of the Year”. Reviews of her third novel, Death and the Seaside, referred to her as the “Talented creator of a new English grotesque” (Isabel Berwick, The Financial Times) and as “One of the most gifted and interesting writers of weird fiction in Britain today” (Nina Allan, The Spider’s House). Her fourth novel, Missing, was published in 2018, along with her first book for children, Sunny and the Ghosts, to be followed by Sunny and the Hotel Splendid.

  She lives in a village on the Leicestershire-Nottinghamshire border with her husband and son, and is an honorary lecturer in the School of English at the University of Nottingham.

  “I am indebted to a series of sluggish pigeons seen on the road between my house and the local B&Q hardware store,” reveals the author. “When I got to the B&Q car park I made some notes, and on the way home I stopped to write a bit more. I got back with the whole story sketched out, and some sealant.”

  ON THE DAY of the protest, Glenda decided to drive out to the retail park to buy weedkiller. She was just setting out, getting into third gear, when a pigeon dawdling in the road caused her to brake hard. The pigeon seemed oblivious, even when Glenda’s two-tonne car was virtually on top of it. Perhaps the car actually was on top of it, because having stopped dead, Glenda could not see the pigeon anywhere. She was just about to get out to look beneath her wheels when she saw the pigeon wandering to the side of the road. She watched its strangely sluggish progress, and then drove on, towards the edge of the village.

  The garden was really Dougie’s responsibility, but work was taking it out of him these days. On his day off, he just lay on the sofa, with the cat asleep on top of him, or sometimes the cat fell asleep on the carpet or in the lengthening grass, wherever it happened to be. Dougie himself did not really sleep, he just lay there, with no energy for Glenda, or for his projects: at the far end of the overgrown garden, a half-dug pond had been abandoned; and the second-hand furniture that he had bought to spruce up was gathering dust in the spare room. The last piece he had done was the little table on which their telephone stood: he had spent weeks sanding and then staining and varnishing it, although Glenda hated it, the darkness of its wood, and its rickety, skeletal legs.

  She had just got onto a faster stretch of road leading out of the village when another pigeon staggered out in front of her car, not even flinching away from the vehicle as she skimmed past. She wondered what was wrong with these pigeons; they were like zombies.

  It was not just Dougie; it seemed to be everyone who worked at that factory. They had all lost their pep. No one in the village liked the factory, although the men needed the jobs; it employed hundreds of them. It was an ugly, stony-faced building, ruining what had been a nice stretch of riverside, at a spot where the locals used to swim—some still did, but not many. The women had been worrying about the factory’s emissions, about what exactly was going into the air. Sometimes the smoke that went into the clouds looked yellow. And was anything going into the river, anything that should not be? Dougie used to fish there, but he did not do that anymore. And there was that terrible smell, which had to be coming from the factory.

  At the bend, where the road turned away from the river, there was a pigeon, flattened against the tarmac. Its grey wings were splayed around its crushed body. Its underbelly was turned up to face the sky, to face the wheels of the oncoming traffic. These pigeons reminded Glenda of the summer outbreak of flying ants, which did not fly off at the flap of a hand as houseflies did; or they reminded her of the houseflies themselves, the listlessness that came over them at the end of the summer, leaving them too slow to avoid the swatter. But she had never before noticed the phenomenon in birds or other creatures.

  Glenda had written the council a letter, which the other women had signed. The letter asked questions about those emissions; it suggested that the factory might be affecting the health of the workers; it requested a thorough investigation and the suspension of operations pending the results. The men had not signed the letter. The letter had been forwarded to a secretary who would liaise with the relevant committee; it was then, after somebody’s holiday, to be discussed at a forthcoming meeting. Not having heard anything for a while, Glenda had left messages on a council answerphone. In the meantime, the women were going to go on a protest march. “We never used to take things lying down,” Glenda had said to the women. “When we were students, we used to march.” They used to go down to London, on coaches; they had marched through the capital in their thousands, to force things to change. “We should,” the women had said in response. “We should do that.” Since then, they had been meeting every Wednesday morning at Fiona’s house. Fiona had provided refreshments while they made placards, nailing boards to wooden sticks and painting slogans on them—WE WANT ANSWERS!—slogans that they would shout as they marched. They had photocopied flyers to put through people’s letterboxes. They had notified the local paper.

  Glenda glanced at the dashboard clock. It was almost noon; they were due to meet to start the protest at one o’clock. They would march down Union Street to the river, right down to the factory. They would stand outside that grim building and stamp their feet and shout, make some noise. Someone would have to respond; something would have to be done.

  She pulled into the car park of the Do-It-Yourself store, disturbing a couple of birds, which flapped up into the air and flew away. She parked near the entrance and went inside the store. As she entered the gardening section, she recognised a neighbour who was standing looking at the lawnmowers. Glenda said hello. She could not think of her neighbour’s name. The woman continued to stare at a lawnmower, and Glenda thought that she had not heard her, but then the woman said, “I’ve been here for hours. I just can’t decide.”

  “Are you coming on the protest?” asked Glenda.

  “I just can’t decide,” said the woman.

  Glenda turned away and picked up a spray-gun bottle of ready-to-use weedkiller. She took it over to the till, where the cashier was sharing a joke with a man who had bought paint in a shade called “Nursery”. The colour looked putrid to Glenda. The man turned away and the cashier looked at Glenda and said, “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” said Glenda, lifting her free hand and touching her face. “It’s just a rash.” She handed over the weedkiller and the cashier scanned it. Glenda looked at the si
lver and copper in her purse. She could not be bothered to count out the coins. She handed over a note and waited for her change, and then stood struggling with the zip of her purse. She took her weedkiller and moved towards the exit, aware of the cashier watching her as she walked away.

  She strapped the weedkiller into the passenger seat, as if it were a child. She did not want it sliding around, busting open, weedkiller going everywhere. She drove home slowly, carefully.

  It was after one o’clock when she returned to the outskirts of the village, where she found Fiona sitting on the kerb, with a placard on the pavement beside her. Glenda came to a stop and wound down her window. She said to Fiona, “Have they gone already?”

  Fiona raised her eyes. “Who?”

  “The other women,” said Glenda. “Have they started the march?”

  “No one else has turned up,” said Fiona.

  “Oh,” said Glenda. “Well, I have to take the car home, then I’m going to walk back down here and join you. Even if it’s just the two of us, we can still march down to the factory. We can still make some noise.” She drove home, passing a car that was so badly parked it looked as if it had just been abandoned mid-manoeuvre, and stopping to move a child’s bike that had been left lying across the road. She backed her car into a kerbside space and took the weedkiller inside. She put on some sunscreen and checked her appearance in the mirror. She was wearing the olive-green eyeliner that Dougie had once said brought alive her copper-coloured eyes, but now she wondered if it was just making her look a bit ill. She put down some food for the cat. By the time she got back down to the corner with her placard, Fiona was no longer there. Glenda thought about going to the factory anyway, on her own, but she did not really think she had the energy.