Best New Horror 29

by Stephen Jones

  “Your heart, my love,” says the dead bride, “shall ever be mine.”

  And with that there is a great sigh as from many mouths. Adolphus ceases to move, his eyes glaze over. The girl in the tomb does not answer when Isobel calls, and she can no longer sense any presence other than her own. The chorus of brides falls to the flagstones, become dust even as Isobel watches. She is meticulous, though, ensuring they will have somewhere to rest, and brushes their final remains into the crypt. It falls on Adolphus and his final bride like confetti for the dead. Isobel, feeling bereft that she cannot say goodbye to her sisters, whispers farewell and hopes they will hear it somewhere, then locates the switch to close the lid of the tomb, and then the second one that puts the floor back in place. When she is done it looks as if nothing ever happened here.

  Isobel rises. There are weapons to be had in the house, sabres and stilettos that hang on walls for display, but will be just as fine used for their true purpose. She will spill all the blood to be found, she will put them to the sword and then set fire to the hangings in the bedrooms, the parlours, the grand hall. She will burn the place utterly to the ground.

  No full graduate of St. Dymphna’s could do better, she is certain. She’ll not return to the Misses Meyrick, though she might write to them from time to time as she crosses another Wollstonecraft off her list. Isobel will not hunt Hepsibah Ballantyne, for she was merely doing her job, and the poison used on Isobel was not intended for her. Oh, she’ll find the coffin-maker, employ her for her own ends—it’s a fool who wastes a good poisons woman—but first of all she’ll put a good scare into Hepsibah Ballantyne just for fun. She might even keep the gems on her canines long enough to give Ballantyne a glittering, terrifying smile.

  Isobel takes one last look at the chapel, finds she cannot distinguish the joins where the floor might open up again if she were to press the right parts of the frieze carved into the altar. And she understands, then, the only thing that will truly haunt her as she goes upon her way: that she did not ask the dead bride, the one who came before her, for her name.

  DANNY RHODES

  BORDER COUNTRY

  DANNY RHODES’ short stories have appeared in publications on both sides of the Atlantic, including Black Static magazine in the UK and Cemetery Dance magazine in America. He says that seeing his work in these publications and now, at last, in Best New Horror, signals the fulfilment of an ambition stretching across almost two decades.

  Rhodes is the author of three contemporary novels—Asboville (2006), Soldier Boy (2009) and FAN (2014)—and he is currently working on a collection of horror tales and a horror novel. He is a member of the Horror Writers Association, and a mentor on the HWA’s Mentor Program.

  “‘Border Country’ was inspired by a camping trip to Wenlock Edge in Shropshire,” explains the author. “If you have children, you’ll know how it feels when, at any given moment, a child does something that makes you realise they are growing up.

  “One night on the trip my son, who still likes to have the landing light on at home when he goes to bed, roused himself from sleep and set off for the campsite toilet alone. He simply picked up the torch and off he went. I lay there for a few seconds, contemplating this event, then jumped from the bed and followed him. But I didn’t want to break the spell. I kept my distance and waited halfway down the slope for him to return, which he duly did. The story, of course, relays a different turn of events.

  “Some of my short horror fiction barely contains any horror at all. With ‘Border Country’ I set myself a challenge to write something genuinely frightening. As with all of my short work, however, I wanted to retain ambiguity. M.R. James states it best in his essay ‘Some Remarks on Ghost Stories’: ‘Reticence conduces to effect, blatancy ruins’.”

  THE ROAD TO the campsite was steep and dark. Rob dabbed his foot on the brake pedal. With good reason. Halfway down the hill he passed a gouged trunk, crushed vegetation, a wilted garland of flowers. Amongst all of this was a fading photograph in a plastic wallet.

  A shrine to a crash victim.

  Rob glanced at the mirror. Max was sleeping. That was good. The shrine wasn’t something he wanted his son to see. He’d ask questions. Rob would be forced to supply answers. The thought of it turned his skin cold.

  Rob spotted the crudely daubed sign for the campsite further down the hill. He turned the car on to a rutted farm track and nodded to himself. He was looking for an old-fashioned site where he could spend some quality time with his boy. Ridge Farm would do fine. It was situated on the edge of an escarpment, a thick blanket of trees above it, a rural patchwork of woodland, field and furrow below. Beyond everything were the bleak and wild mountains of the border country.

  The farmhouse was tucked away at the bottom of the track. Rob stopped the car in front of a metal gate. He climbed out and stood for a moment, looking over the gate at the working innards of the place, at a dilapidated barn, a rusting grain silo, a battered tractor. Pieces of old farm machinery were scattered amongst weeds that had pushed their way through cracks in the concrete. An ageing dog padded across the yard, stopped to sniff in his direction, dropped its head and then moved unsteadily away.

  Rob pushed open a rickety wooden side gate and followed the path behind the small wash-house. The pamphlet laden with spelling errors he’d received in the post suggested the wash-house contained two showers and two toilets. There was an outdoor sink next to it for washing dishes. That was all. Rob didn’t care. He wasn’t into the big sites with their abundance of facilities and distractions. Sarah would have disagreed, wanted somewhere more suited to Max, but Sarah wasn’t here.

  There was a door at the back of the farmhouse. Rob pressed the button for the doorbell. A muted buzz sounded beyond the door. He thought he heard a drawn-out sigh, certainly heard a chair being scraped back, footsteps on linoleum. The door half-opened and a weary looking woman appeared.

  “Hello,” he said. “I’m booked in for the weekend.”

  “Taylor,” said the woman. It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes,” said Rob.

  “You’re the last,” she said. “We’re very quiet. Choose any pitch. There’s cooked breakfast if you want it. Five pounds each. If you want to fish that’s five pounds too.”

  Rob handed over his cash. The woman took it without ceremony.

  “Thanks then,” said Rob. “The weather looks…”

  But the woman was already forcing the door closed.

  Rob smiled wryly to himself and turned around. A malnourished cat hopped onto the wall in front of him. It had something in its mouth. A vole perhaps. Rob saw the limp tail, the dangling head, the vacant stare of death. He peered beyond the cat in the direction of the camping field where the escarpment had been sculpted into a series of flat steps. On each of these steps was a pitch for a tent. Only one of the pitches was occupied. He shrugged. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t here to socialise with strangers. Just his boy.

  When he got back to the car, Max was peering out of the window. He looked confused. Rob smiled at him and Max smiled back. For the briefest second Rob saw the teenager his son would become and once again he wondered where the eight years had gone, what had happened to his marriage. He thought about how his life had changed since the day his son first came into the world, the things he’d learned about himself, the things he and Sarah had learned about each other.

  Harsh truths.

  Later, after the two of them had eaten, Rob left Max in the tent and wandered down to the wash-house. He went to the toilet, stood at the outside sink looking up towards the campsite and the darkening wood beyond. In the purple twilight the trees seemed closer to the site than before, as if they were encroaching down the hill, shoot by shoot, stem by stem.

  The bellow of a cow snatched Rob’s thoughts away. He turned, skirted the farmhouse, located the open-sided cattle barn. The woman was in amongst the cattle, ankle-deep in straw, trying to separate an individual cow from the rest. She was struggling. As Rob watched,
the cow buffeted her. She fell, yelped, clambered back to her feet and started scolding the cow as though it were a child.

  “How dare you? How dare you?”

  She shouted the same question over and over, kicking the cow in anger, beating at its body with a plastic bucket. It might have been comical but it wasn’t.

  “Stupid bitch,” the woman shouted. “You stupid, stupid bitch.”

  Rob drew back out of sight, embarrassed. He felt his shoulders knot as he ducked into the shower block and flicked on the light. A moth flitted around the exposed bulb and a large black spider withdrew into a funnel-shaped web. The shower basin was covered in grime. When he turned the shower on, a sad trickle of water ran from the nozzle. He turned the shower off again, washed himself from the sink instead. The woods, he noticed, were just a shapeless black mass now, with no defined edge at all.

  Max was playing a game on his phone when Rob got back to the tent.

  “Did your mum pack you a book?” asked Rob.

  “I think so,” said Max.

  “Ten minutes reading before lights out,” said Rob.

  Max switched off his phone and took out his reading book. Rob watched him. He was a good boy. He’d handled all of the stuff Rob and Sarah had thrown at him and come out all right, a role model for both of them.

  “What are you reading?” asked Rob.

  “The Iron Man,” said Max.

  Rob smiled.

  “I read that when I was a boy,” he said. “It’s a great book.”

  “It’s okay,” said Max. “I hope he finds his ear.”

  Night fell. Rob sat at the entrance to the tent. Oddly, he thought about Sarah more when he was with Max, about what might have been. But it was too late for all of that. When he looked back at his boy he saw he was already sleeping. He moved to sit by the fire pit, took out a beer and sat looking up at the canopy of stars, occasionally hearing the murmur of conversation from the other tent, the rustle of a sleeping bag, the whisper of a turning page. When the light in the tent was extinguished and the sounds along with it, Rob stared out towards the blinking lights of the border country, the remote cottages and the red pinprick signal of a phone mast at the top of a distant hill.

  Now and then, a sheep bleated in the darkness.

  The sun was bright the next morning. Rob carried their gear down to the nearest fishing pond, located a promising swim and set up the rods. He was surprised at Max’s patience. He’d expected him to be reeling in and casting out every thirty seconds, the way little boys were somehow modelled, but Max seemed more than happy to wait things out. He sat upright and still, his eyes focussed on his float.

  “You’re quiet,” said Rob.

  Max shrugged.

  He wondered if Max was missing his mum. He decided not to enquire. He wanted to hug his son, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. The same reticence had hampered his relationship with Sarah, before all of the other stuff. It didn’t matter. He told himself to concentrate on the moment, live in the present, focus on the day ahead, and the fish in the pond.

  But there were no fish.

  After two hours of inaction, Rob led Max through the farmyard in the direction of the farther ponds. As they passed the farmhouse he thought he saw the woman in the front window, a furtive movement behind the yellowing net curtains, but she didn’t appear.

  The old dog shifted in its kennel and exhaled.

  “The dog looks sick,” said Max.

  Rob nodded.

  “Keep away from it,” he said, taking Max’s hand. “Dogs that are suffering can be unpredictable.”

  The ponds at the lowest end of the farm were choked with algae, unmanaged, desperate for attention. The fishing swims were clogged with weed. When Rob stepped on to one of the wooden platforms it almost collapsed beneath him.

  “Let’s give up with the fishing,” said Rob. “We’ll do something else instead.”

  Wandering up the hill towards the tent, Rob thought about the woman and the incident with the cow. He thought about the old dog too, barely clinging to life. He pictured a world in which he owned the farm, imagined healthily stocked ponds, a bustling campsite, a shop selling organic produce. He pictured Sarah’s scornful face. Would he make a better job of it than this? Would he truly?

  Back at the tent he took out the model glider he’d bought for the trip. For a while Max seemed to be into it, but then he returned to his phone. Rob felt a tinge of disappointment, recalling flying gliders with his own father, but conceivably the time they’d spent was no different, fleeting minutes elongated and rose-tinted by the passing years. His father had been absent a lot, much like he was absent from Max’s life, though the circumstances were different and his parents had somehow stayed together.

  Everything repeated itself. Wasn’t that what they said? Sons became their fathers? He hoped for Max’s sake it wasn’t the case.

  A girl strode up the steep slope. She was dressed for the outdoors in a fleece and walking boots. Rob noticed her lean calf muscles, the control and grace of her movement. He nodded hello. To his surprise, she wandered over to him.

  “Hi,” she said. “I’m Claire.”

  “Rob,” he said. “Rob and Max.” He gestured towards the set of feet sticking out of the tent flap.

  “Father and son time?” she asked.

  “Something like that,” he said.

  “How is it?” she asked. She gestured towards the surrounding farm.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s all I was looking for.”

  Did she glance towards his left hand? Check to see if he was wearing a ring? He casually turned his hand in her direction, just to make it obvious he wasn’t.

  “We use this site quite a bit,” said the girl. “Though we’re thinking this might be the last time.”

  We.

  “It’s going to ruin,” she whispered. “The son died a year ago. Fell into the slurry pit. It was just the two of them, so she’s on her own now. I don’t think she’s coping. I think she’s unwell.”

  “I noticed the showers,” he said.

  The girl nodded. “It feels different now,” she said. “Like we’re a burden.”

  He thought about the previous evening, the door closing in his face. A bearded man emerged from the tent further up the slope. The girl looked in his direction.

  “This is Rob and Max,” she shouted.

  Rob raised a hand in greeting but the bearded man remained at a distance.

  “That’s Kristian,” she said. “My fiancé. We’re hiking the border in sections. He wants to get going.”

  “Right,” said Rob. “We’re off out too.” He waved a leaflet at her. The Witch Cave.

  “Ah, the local legend,” she said. “It’s good fun. You’ll enjoy it.”

  He shrugged. “More for the boy,” he said.

  The girl wandered up the slope and disappeared into her tent. Rob heard the sound of agitated voices, felt the familiar anxiety. He thought about Sarah. Things were better how they were. Better like this. For all three of them.

  He looked down at the leaflet. The artist had done a good job of portraying the witch, an old crone, necessarily ugly. He remembered the witch in Snow White, his mother having to take him out of the cinema because he was scared. He folded the leaflet into his pocket.

  He called out to Max.

  “I’m going to order breakfast for tomorrow. Then we’re off to the cave.”

  He was thinking about the witch as he knocked on the farmhouse door. And Hansel and Gretel. He was thinking about that story too. Old crones. Lonely souls ripe for persecution.

  The woman appeared.

  “I’d like to order two breakfasts for the morning if possible. One for me and one for my son.”

  Did the woman recoil a touch when he said the word ‘son’? As if it were a forbidden word?

  She wrote his order down on a post-it note all the same, wrote ‘beans’ as ‘beens’. He wondered if she’d ever gone to school.

  She could
obviously read though. There was a newspaper on the table behind her. The headline read: TRIBUTES FOR 19-YEAR-OLD KILLED IN ACCIDENT.

  “I saw the shrine,” he said. “At the top of the hill.”

  The woman shook her head. “This was just two days ago,” she said, gesturing towards the paper. “Teenagers. They drive too fast. Accidents happen. People die.”

  He nodded. He realised she was closing the door on him again. It scraped on the linoleum as he stepped out of the way.

  “We’re off to the witch cave,” he said, but she didn’t seem to hear him.

  Rob drove out of the campsite. He passed the couple. They were on foot, the guy ten yards ahead of the girl. The girl waved at Rob and he waved back.

  In another life…he thought.

  He followed the lane down the hill to the bend at the bottom. Sure enough, there was a second shrine amongst the scarred tree trunks. The flowers were fresh, the hand-written tributes still decipherable if a person wanted to read them.

  Though there had not been any rain since they arrived, the lane was damp. He wondered if it was perpetually dismal under the trees, one of those places that never saw sunlight. There was moss growing on the boulders. He spotted some red and white toadstools in the dead wood of a fallen tree. He thought about the local legend. If ever there was a place for one to propagate, this was it. He felt for the leaflet in his back pocket, then grabbed the steering wheel again with his free hand. For a moment he’d felt the car getting away from him.

  Something shifted in the trees off to his right.