Best New Horror 29

by Stephen Jones

  Though still sad at his death, I felt relieved that he had escaped something worse.

  My mood buoyed, I started for home as dawn peered across the built-up skyline. Yet something was different. The skyline I saw looked slightly out of skew, as if new buildings had risen during the night and others had been taken down. The silence remained, broken only by cautious footsteps echoing from unknown walls. Occasional strangers avoided each other’s glances. But there was now something else that I had never noticed before. In the silence that hung over the city, a terrible intelligence held its breath.

  As I reached home, I feared that the city had noticed me at last.

  RAMSEY CAMPBELL

  SPEAKING STILL

  RAMSEY CAMPBELL is described by The Oxford Companion to English Literature as “Britain’s most respected living horror writer”. He has been given more awards than any other writer in the field, including the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association, the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild, and the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2015 he was made an Honorary Fellow of Liverpool John Moores University for outstanding services to literature.

  Among his novels are The Face That Must Die, Incarnate, Midnight Sun, The Count of Eleven, Silent Children, The Darkest Part of the Woods, The Overnight, Secret Story, The Grin of the Dark, Thieving Fear, Creatures of the Pool, The Seven Days of Cain, Ghosts Know, The Kind Folk, Think Yourself Lucky and Thirteen Days by Sunset Beach. PS Publishing recently brought out his “Brichester Mythos” trilogy, consisting of The Searching Dead, Born to the Dark and The Way of the Worm.

  Needing Ghosts, The Last Revelation of Gla’aki, The Pretence and The Booking are novellas, and his collections include Waking Nightmares, Alone with the Horrors, Ghosts and Grisly Things, Told by the Dead, Just Behind You, Holes for Faces, Fearful Implications and By the Light of My Skull. The author’s non-fiction is collected as Ramsey Campbell, Probably, while Limericks of the Alarming and Phantasmal is a history of horror fiction in the form of fifty limericks. Campbell’s novels The Nameless and Pact of the Fathers have been filmed in Spain, where a film of The Influence is in production. He is the President of the Society of Fantastic Films and lives on Merseyside with his wife Jenny. His pleasures include classical music, good food and wine, and whatever’s in that pipe.

  “This tale arose from thoughts I had about recording calls on my iPhone,” says the author, “specifically the games I play with scammers. Sometimes I speak to them in an invented language, although our friends the Proberts witnessed one where I responded with maniacal laughter. It turns out that you need to download a recording app, which I’ve yet to do.

  “I think the embryo from which the tale developed was actually older, related to the answering machine on our landline, which preserved a call from an old friend after he’d died. What if such a call changed over time or somehow led to others? Fear of loss shaped this story too.”

  AS SOON AS I opened the door of the Hole Full of Toad I saw Daniel. I’d meant to be first at the pub and have a drink waiting for him, but he was seated near the bar with his back to me and talking on his phone. I was crossing the discoloured carpet between the stout old tables scarred by cigarettes at least a decade old when he noticed me. “Goodbye for now, my love,” he murmured and stood up, pocketing his phone. “You look ready for a drink.”

  It was our regular greeting, but I could tell he hoped I hadn’t overheard his other words. Embarrassment made me facetious. “What’s tonight’s tipple?”

  “Mummy’s Medicine,” he said and pointed at his tankard. “Not as urinary as it might appear.”

  “It’s what the doctor ordered, is it?”

  “It’s what this one prescribes.”

  Though we’d performed this routine in the past, it felt too deliberate now. “I’ll be the second opinion,” I said to bring it to an end.

  When he brought me a yeasty pint I found it palatable enough. We always tried the guest ale and then usually reverted to our favourite. Daniel took a manful gulp and wiped foam from his stubbly upper lip. He’d grown less plump over the last few months, but his skin was lagging behind, so that his roundish face reminded me of a balloon left over from a party, wrinkled but maintaining an unalterable wide-eyed smile that might have contained a mute plea. He kept up the smile as he said “Ask me the question, Bill.”

  “How have you been?”

  “I’d prefer to forget most of that if you don’t mind. I’ve seen colleagues lose patients, but that’s nothing like the same.” Daniel opened his eyes wider still, which looked like a bid to take more of a hold on the moment if not to drive back any moisture. “The job’s helping now,” he said, “but that wasn’t the question I thought you’d have.”

  “I’d better let you tell me what it ought to be.”

  “Weren’t you wondering who I was talking to when you came in?”

  “Honestly, Daniel, that’s none of my business. If you’ve found someone—”

  “You think I’d be involved with someone else so soon. Or do you think I already was?”

  “I’m sorry for presuming. I must have misheard.”

  “I don’t think so. Perhaps you missed the obvious.” As if taking pity on me Daniel said “I was talking to Dorothy, Bill.”

  I thought this was quite a distance from the obvious, but stopped my mouth with a drink. “No need to be confused,” Daniel said. “She’s still there. Would you like to hear?”

  “Please,” I said, though it didn’t feel much like an invitation.

  He took out his phone and opened an album to show me a photograph. “That’s the last I have of her. She wanted me to take it, so I did.”

  It had the skewed look of a hasty shot. His wife was sitting up in a hospital bed. She’d lost far more weight than Daniel and was virtually bald, but was matching if not besting the smile I imagined he’d given her. “I wasn’t talking to her there tonight, though,” Daniel said. “Bend your ear to this.” He brought up a list of calls received, and I leaned towards the phone as he retrieved one. “Don’t bother visiting me this afternoon,” Dorothy said. “They’ll be having a look. I expect I’ll be out of it this evening, so I may not be worth your journey then either.”

  I found I’d grown shy of meeting Daniel’s eyes, especially when he said “That’s the last I ever heard from her. I went in, and I didn’t leave her after that till the end.”

  “You did say.”

  “That isn’t all I’ve kept. I’m only glad I haven’t erased anything since last year.”

  The calls skimmed up the screen until he touched a listing with a moist forefinger. This time his wife was telling him which supermarket aisle she was in and which items he should find elsewhere in the store. “She sounds more like she used to, doesn’t she?” Daniel said.

  Her voice was far stronger and brisker than it had been in the call from the hospital. As I tried not to feel too saddened by his need to preserve every trace of her Daniel said “But that isn’t really her either.”

  It seemed unsafe to say more than “How is that, Daniel?”

  “She built herself up around the self she never quite got rid of. Sometimes I think the children we all used to be are lying in wait inside us, maybe hoping we won’t rouse them.” As he returned the phone to his pocket he said “Thank God she’s free of her mother at last.”

  “I thought her mother died years ago.”

  “Not in Dorothy’s mind,” Daniel said and shut his eyes so hard that he might have been trying to crush a memory. “Tell me an exciting tale of accountancy, Bill.”

  This was another of our old jokes that I hadn’t heard for weeks. I did my best to generate suspense from a call I’d made on a client’s behalf to the tax collector, and then I was glad to hear news from the medical world. When the pub shut we went in opposite directions, having established that we’d meet next week. I glanced back to see that Daniel had stopped ben
eath a streetlamp and taken out his phone, but I couldn’t tell whether he was speaking.

  My wife Jane was in bed and on the way to sleep. “How was your friend?” she said most of.

  “Missing Dorothy.”

  “Well, I should expect so. I hope you’ll miss me too.”

  I rather wished her sleepiness hadn’t let that slip out, though of course she only meant if she was first to go when the inevitable came, surely quite a few years hence. I’d managed to put all this out of my head by the time I joined her, and Daniel’s situation had gone too. I can’t say I thought about him much in the ensuing week, but when Monday came around I looked forward to catching up with him. Given his concern for all his patients, I was hoping a week’s work might have helped him.

  The pub was in sight when I saw him outside. Since he was talking on his phone, I wasn’t sure whether to hang back, especially since I couldn’t see his face. I compromised by making for the entrance, which he wasn’t far from, and heard him say “You’ll be all right, Dorothy. You’ve still got the right kind of strength.”

  As I tried to steal into the pub the door creaked. Daniel turned, belatedly hitching up his smile, and shoved the phone into his pocket. “Yes, I’m ready for a drink.”

  He dodged into the pub at once, so that I wondered if he meant to restrict the conversation we might have had. When I brought two pints of Hound’s Howl to the table, however, he was ready to talk. “Some of the doctors who are coming up,” he said, “you’d wonder if they need a doctor. There’s a call to reclassify schizophrenia as a spectrum instead of a disease.”

  “That isn’t your area, though.”

  “I know more than I’d like to about it.” He downed a cloudy mouthful as though to douse his fierceness. “I’m just glad they weren’t taking that approach,” he said, “when they diagnosed Dorothy’s mother.”

  “I didn’t know she had that problem, Daniel.”

  “Dorothy never wanted it discussed, even with friends. Her mother brought her up never to talk about her. Even I didn’t realise what was wrong till her mother couldn’t hide it any more.”

  “How recently was that?”

  “Too recently. For most of our marriage I didn’t know about Dorothy’s childhood.”

  So we hadn’t strayed so far from his preoccupation after all. “What was it like?” I said.

  “I’ll tell you just one thing I won’t forget. When Dorothy was little, before she was even at school…” This time his gulp of ale seemed intended to fortify him. “If she did anything her mother thought was bad, and there was no predicting what that might be next,” he said, “she’d be locked in her room with no light, and she’d be told that something worse than she could possibly imagine would come for her if she dared to put the light on.”

  I felt bound to ask “Did she?”

  “Not till years later, and do you know what the old, do you know what her mother did then? Took the bulb out of the socket and wouldn’t let her have one in her room.”

  I was running out of questions I wanted to ask. “How did all that affect Dorothy, do you think?”

  “She told me not at all by then. She said she challenged whatever she was meant to be scared of to show itself, and of course nothing did. She assured me that toughened her up and she was never afraid of anything her mother imagined again.”

  “More power to her.”

  “If it was true. I’m just afraid she kept it hidden deep down in herself.”

  “Daniel, please don’t take this the wrong way, but at least you needn’t worry any more.”

  I thought he’d opened his mouth to speak, but he gave himself a drink instead. His throat worked before he muttered “You didn’t meet her mother.”

  “And if I had…”

  “Call me fanciful, but whenever she came into a room you’d feel as if she’d turned it dark.”

  “I suppose you might when you knew what she’d done to your wife.”

  “I felt like that before I knew.” Daniel reinforced this with a stare that looked trapped by the memory. “And I think having her committed brought everything back,” he said, “even if Dorothy tried not to show it did.”

  “Surely she’d have been relieved that her mother was being taken care of.”

  “You’d hope so.” With more conviction than I thought was warranted he said “She kept telling Dorothy that if we had her shut away she’d make sure Dorothy was with her.”

  “But she wasn’t, so I should think—”

  “It was all she talked about when she was dying. She said she’d wait for Dorothy in the dark, and she’d be made of worms.”

  “That’s second childhood stuff, wouldn’t you agree? I hope your wife thought so.”

  Daniel’s tankard stopped short of his mouth. “Whose childhood, Bill?”

  “You know I meant her mother’s. I never knew Dorothy to be anything but strong.”

  As he took a drink I saw him ponder how to go on. “You caught what I was saying earlier.”

  “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop.”

  “I might have myself.” Even more like an apology he said “I wouldn’t ask this of anyone except a good friend.”

  With no idea where this was leading I could only say “Then you can ask me.”

  “Do you think Dorothy could hear me?”

  “When do you mean?”

  I was bracing myself to be told that he had her last moments in mind, and was nowhere near ready to hear him say “Now.”

  “We can’t know, can we?” In a bid to raise his spirits I said “In a way we’re keeping her alive by talking about her.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of you.” Though his smile winced in case he’d sounded rude, he carried on. “I mean when I’m speaking to her on the phone,” he said.

  I took all the care I could over answering. “You’d like to think so.”

  “Yes, but I’m asking what you think.”

  “I won’t say you’re wrong, Daniel.”

  “All right, Bill, you’re discharged. The ordeal’s over.” Humour deserted him as he said “I wonder what your wife would say. She’s the computer expert, after all.”

  I’d begun to wonder how potent our drinks were. “How did we get on to computers?”

  “They’ve been on my mind a good deal recently. I’m starting to believe they may have made a kind of afterlife.”

  “All the photos of Dorothy you’ll have, you mean.” When he didn’t respond I said “Her voice.”

  “That’s what I’ve kept, my wife in electronic form.”

  “And you still have all your memories of her.”

  “I don’t want you to think I’m being maudlin.” As I made to deny it he said “I just wonder how much of her that is.”

  “I’m afraid I’m not following.”

  “All of us are electronic where it counts, aren’t we? What they used to call the soul, that’s a mass of electronic impulses in the brain. Even if they didn’t have a place to go before, perhaps they have one now.”

  Though I might have liked to take a drink rather than speak I said “We’re still talking about computers.”

  “Yes, the Internet. That’s where everything we know is turned into electronic form. Perhaps I haven’t got it right, though,” Daniel said, and I was hoping rationality had overtaken him until he added “Perhaps it gives us access to a place that was already there.”

  I no longer knew how to respond. I was lingering over a mouthful of ale when Daniel said “I realise you aren’t going to accept it without proof.”

  “That would be a help.”

  He took out his phone at once. “There’s another message,” he said.

  He left a moist print on an entry in the list before turning the phone towards me. His wife’s voice sounded weaker or more distant than it previously had. “Are you there? You’re not there, are you? Don’t be—”

  I assumed she’d cut herself off by mistake, since I’d heard a trace of nervousness. “Was she asking you n
ot to be long?”

  “I hope that’s it, but that isn’t the point. That’s her most recent message, Bill.”

  “I thought you told me the one you played last week was.”

  “It was then,” Daniel said and showed me the phone. “As you see, now this is top of the list.”

  “But it hasn’t got a date.”

  “And don’t you wonder how that could happen?”

  When I had no explanation, though I might have pointed out that the caller was unnamed as well, he said “Would you mind asking your wife?”

  “I’ll call you when I have, shall I?”

  “No need for me to trouble you so much. Next time we meet will be fine.”

  I thought he was doing his best to put the issue out of his mind, despite forgetting to make his accountancy joke. Instead he told me at considerable length how medicine and surgery would soon be able to prolong life, though I couldn’t tell whether he regretted that the developments came too late for his wife or was glad that they hadn’t been there for her mother. I felt as though his monologue was postponing what he was anxious to say, and then I grasped that I mightn’t be the person he was desperate to address.

  We’d hardly parted outside the pub when I heard him on his phone. Either he wanted me to hear or no longer cared whether I did. “Dorothy, I’m sorry I missed your call. I don’t know when it was, because I didn’t hear it ring. I’ll keep an eye on the phone whenever I can, just in case. I know we’ll be together again soon, and then we’ll have all the time there is.”

  He sounded like someone I hardly knew—as unlike the self he presented to the world as he’d said his wife differed from hers. As I headed for home the call I’d heard made the autumn night feel as cold as black ice. Jane was asleep, having driven fifty miles to revive all the computers in a large office. When I caught up with her at breakfast I found I was anxious to learn “Do you know if there’s a reason why a missed call wouldn’t show a date?”

  “You can’t withhold those, only the number.”