Best New Horror 29

by Stephen Jones

  Having satisfied myself that the amount of marks I had made were sufficient, I returned to the door, and slowly opened it wider, ensuring that I made as little noise as possible.

  The corridor was deserted and stretched out ahead of me in both directions. I decided to turn right, though I had no idea whether this would lead me deeper into the complex or out towards its edge. There were no crazily angled shadows on the walls, an absence which seemed to me to be significant, though I could not say why.

  I wheeled myself along for several minutes, passing locked cells. No sounds came from within them, so I imagined they were either empty or else occupied by the silent. If the force running the complex felt it necessary to remove limbs then it was entirely possible that tongues, too, might be extracted.

  The unaccustomed exertion took its toll on my body and I had to pause in order to recuperate. My arms ached and my breathing was laboured. While I sat there, marooned in the labyrinth, I caught the noise of the trains passing—their dim rumble muffled; and thus reaching me from further off in the distance than from my own cell. I therefore deduced I had travelled deeper into the complex.

  And then I detected another sound, not mechanical but, rather, insect-like. Long, drawn-out and chitinous in nature. It went on and on, rising and falling in tone. I continued to sit there. Should I seek out the source or avoid it altogether? There was no guarantee that I would not be putting myself in danger by satisfying my curiosity.

  However, while I was debating the point in my own mind, I felt someone take hold of the back of my wheelchair and shove me forwards. An orderly had crept up behind me unawares, probably just exiting from one of the cells I had passed. I had not heard his footfalls and turned back and down to see he was wearing rubber-soled, white canvas shoes. My head still twisted back, I glanced up at his face. It was a mask of benign indifference.

  He ignored all of my attempts to impede our progress towards the source of the disturbance; my cries of protests, reasoning, apologies and even put me in a headlock when I tried physically to resist by clambering out of the wheelchair.

  Had I, then, been observed all along? Had my cell door been left ajar not through oversight but on purpose? I could reach no other conclusion. It seemed important to them to impress upon me the fact that each punishment they inflicted upon me was a direct consequence of exercising my own free will. They were not, in and of themselves, directly to blame.

  The noise like insects massing grew even louder and the orderly wheeled me through a series of double doors, straight into the heart of the commotion.

  I was in a former library of vast proportions. It was circular in design, the interior architecture baroque, and built across four open-plan floors. The place was in total chaos. Columns of high, carved wooden shelves and antique bookcases had either been denuded of their contents or else overturned and left in a state of wreckage. Most of the books had been stripped of their essence; innumerable torn pages littered the floors and the remains had been tossed down into the central well at the core of the structure. Scattered amidst the library were hordes of mutilated inmates each dressed, as I was, in a grey smock. They were the source of the chitinous noise. It rose and fell in unison as they worked, pulling volumes from the shelves and tearing them to pieces. Some lacked hands for the task and used their teeth.

  All of them had been blinded—eyes extracted at the root with the surrounding skin sewn back.

  Black holes gaped sightlessly—abominable flowers in the stark blue-white electric glare.

  The orderly bent down to my right ear and whispered into it, ever so softly, some lines of doggerel.

  the fear of masks removed

  as black lightning illumines

  new quests for nothing

  the amnesiac thoughts

  of dying brains

  repeated but forgotten

  I thought, then, he might reach for my eyes in order to pluck them out with his long bony fingers, but instead he turned me around and wheeled me along the winding length of corridors back to my cell.

  I noticed that the shadows had returned.

  On the bed was another note for me. It read:

  You left too many marks.

  The next time I awoke I found they had severed my left hand.

  Throughout the same day the familiar orderly began ferrying piles of books into my cell. He brought them in cardboard boxes, dumped the contents on the floor and then returned with more. This went on for the several hours. While he was absent I arranged them into free-standing columns as best I could whilst sat amongst them and with only one hand now remaining to me. I did not take much note of their actual contents or titles although I was aware that they were a mixture of old and new volumes, paperbacks and hardbacks, and all rather battered (although not torn apart). I did note, however, since the fact was so remarkable, they were all written under the same byline: Dr. Prozess.

  I also neglected to keep up with my record of the trains passing while I was engaged in this new activity. I was immediately tormented by the question of what exactly constituted the appropriate response to this fresh development concerning the arrival of all these books.

  Was I meant to read them or destroy them?

  Even doing neither might be interpreted as an act of sedition.

  I opened one at random. The first words I encountered were:

  You are not to read this book.

  I closed it and picked up another. This time the first words were:

  Forget about this book.

  I decided to open just one more and no others. The words my gaze fell upon were:

  You are the book.

  Then they turned on the speakers again and I couldn’t hear the trains at all.

  The next thing I was aware of was being wheeled along the corridors. I knew I had greatly offended the rules of the complex this time and that I was at last going to meet Dr. Prozess face-to-face. What revelations he had in store for me would be more interesting than the mediocre threat of removing my right hand or my eyes. Perhaps it would be necessary to slice into my brain, so that only the parts that registered the appropriately infinite degree of pain and terror would be left intact. The drooling sutures criss-crossing my shaven skull told me that they had probably already monkeyed around with my memory.

  They were taking me outside of the complex. We passed several signs with arrows pointing the way to the exit. I tried to ignore the gleefully dancing insectoid shadows upon the walls.

  At last there was a familiar set of titanic metal doors up ahead. On their inside was scrawled the legend:

  Exit and Prozess

  Then I saw the outside world for myself.

  A television-sky receiving a broadcast of a close-up of the deaths-head moon. Brilliant, dazzling blacks and whites, combining and recombining; maddening in its intensity; a heaven of unendurably nightmarish static. Sublunary shadows stretched in all directions over a landscape of hills and vales, criss-crossed by motorway flyovers and surface level railway lines. Endless automated freight trains, all riven by rust and corrosion, rumbled along the tracks, back and forth, while huge self-driving lorries, caked in soot, their combustion engines groaning, rolled arduously above them. And in between the railway lines and the roads, there was a dull grey carpet of motion, a countryside of refuse and ashes teeming with a sea of deformed locusts pock-mocked by the reductionism of lunar fever, things that might once—before the strange revelations of Dr. Prozess that is—have been human beings.

  I covered my eyes, but my skin tingled and then began to peel as the seeping corrosion of inevitable futurity worked its backward effect upon me.

  After being taken back to my cell, the overhead light had been turned off for good and I was left to stew forever in total darkness. The speakers were left on continuously, at full volume, and I slipped in and out of consciousness; unable to think coherently due to chronic sleep deprivation. My existence became an indistinguishable monotony of exhaustion and of horror.

  Oth
er parts of my body were removed on a weekly basis; even certain internal organs.

  Eventually, I ceased to notice the noise from the speakers. I tried to detect the noise of the trains but the depthless silence was as absolute as the darkness.

  Then, one time, an incalculable period later, I dreamt I had a visitor.

  The door to my cell was unlocked. Another inmate from elsewhere in the complex was wheeled inside but I could not hear what he said, having no ears.

  Instead I sniffed the air, located a strangely familiar scent and hauled my rotten, mutilated carcass towards its source, trying desperately to communi-cate my misery.

  I could see nothing through the hollow craters where my eyes should have been.

  I found the footless legs of my visitor, clambered up onto its lap and held it in an embrace, desperate for any human contact, and managed to gargle out the words “ereh fo tuo em teg” from the back of my throat.

  But they swiftly took my visitor away.

  Now they have finally loaded me onto one of the trains whose destination is nowhere, along with all the others of my ilk from the complex—we who had brought this fate upon ourselves.

  And thus, of necessity, to be utterly forgotten, as futurity must redact the past.

  FELICE PICANO

  AFTER SUNSET, IN THE SECOND DRAWING ROOM GARDEN

  FELICE PICANO’s stories have appeared in scores of magazines and anthologies, including the horror anthologies New Terrors #1 edited by Ramsey Campbell and Scare Care edited by Graham Masterton.

  A much-translated novelist, he recently published several award-winning memoirs such as True Stories and Nights at Rizzoli. Newer collections of his stories include Tales from a Distant Planet and Twelve O’Clock Tales. His tell-all Hollywood novel, Justify My Sins, and the collection Three Strange Stories will both be published in 2019.

  “I’ve lived at the West Hollywood/Beverly Hills city lines near the Sunset Strip for over a decade,” says Picano, “and bicycled and walked the surrounding streets for years, alone and with friends.

  “We always remarked upon a particular house that appeared to be all but closed. So, we were surprised when we discovered it had been inhabited by a woman who’d lived in it for nine decades, since it was built.

  “The sale of the place was newsworthy. But we wondered about how she’d lived there. And with whom.”

  WE’D KNOWN THE house for years, naturally, as both of us lived nearby just on the other side of the Doheny Drive city-line. As a kid, who’d grown up in the Norma Triangle, I had pals who lived on the opposite side of its long, straight, tree-shaded street and I’d bicycled past it too many times to recall. Once we’d settled into our first condo, as adults, we’d stroll past it many a weekend afternoon, or take a long way home on purpose, to detour past it, after a particularly pleasant Sunday brunch a few blocks away that we didn’t wish to end quite yet.

  There was nothing extraordinary about the good-sized, two-storey Mediterranean-style house built when that eastern part of Beverly Hills was still new. Nothing, of course, for the single, quite extraordinary thing: it had never been up for sale. The house remained in the hands of the Bellamys, who’d commissioned it and erected it way back in 1922 and had lived in it ever since.

  That was a rarity, and the news about it being sold was extraordinary enough that it was written up in the L.A. Times as well as in our three local papers—we’re a very civic community here. That was when the world learned the story of Frances Lodge Bellamy. She’d lived there—alone save for servants—until the age of ninety-seven, having moved into the house at the age of nine, along with her parents and two older sisters, when the family relocated from Milwaukee to what was still the “Golden West” of California. Frances slept in her childhood bedroom in the house, up a flight of stairs on the second floor, until a few years ago, when she’d weakened; so a bedroom was set up for her downstairs, in what was known as the second drawing room.

  That bed was still in the house when we managed to get in to look. We’d seen the FOR SALE sign while passing by that Sunday after brunch at our usual place, and we knew we had to act immediately. So, we’d stood in front and phoned the number on the sign. A half-hour later we were inside.

  “I’d just put up the sign,” the realtor, said, when we called. “Not ten minutes before you called. I was on my way back home, to Trousdale Estates.”

  “We live nearby and know the house since we were children,” Ashleigh said. “Please, please, please, come back and let us have a look. I don’t know what I’ll do if I can’t at least look at it. I’ve been dying to for so many years.”

  “Young as we are, we can afford it,” I then added. “I’m contracted to write a minimum of twelve one-hour shows for a new TCM series in the coming six months. It’s so locked-in that I will be paid whether they air the episodes or not.”

  Jazmina agreed to return, so we were under the front porch trellis hung with “Anima Mea” bougainvillea and huge grape-like pouches of lilac. In fact, we were spread out on the built-in concrete bench, with Ash’s legs up on my lap, so that we felt almost at home by the time Jazmina arrived.

  “Oh, my god, you’re huge!” the realtor said to Ashleigh. “When are you due?”

  “Yesterday! That’s why we need a big house. We’re in a one-and-den flat. I’m having twins.”

  “This place has two masters, two other bedrooms upstairs and a servant’s room downstairs. Plus the temporary bedroom that was set up for the owner on the first floor,” Jazmina added, unlocking the front door for us. “Although most people would probably want to use that as an office, since it’s right off the breakfast room and it has its own private garden. The old construction plans I looked at call it the second drawing room.” She made a sweet face at us, and we all smiled at the old-timiness.

  Jazmina told us the house was not quite emptied out because the only heir, some child of a nephew, told her to leave it for the new owners. Jazmina said that what had gone unspoken during that call was the fact that the relative was sure she’d do well enough just with the house sale.

  The cute entry’s double doors led to a good-sized foyer and sweeping staircase up, along with a discreet elevator to the second floor that Ash would find handy. The surprise was the second drawing room at the rear of the house with its own separate garden. It had the smallest of the four fireplaces on the first floor (there were two more upstairs) and the only inside-to-outside French doors, which Jazmina needed my help opening. Not because they were stuck, but because once the frilly curtains and heavy curtains also were drawn aside and the glass doors unlocked, there was another set of security all-wooden doors over those: kind of like hurricane windows at the shore.

  Once all of that was open, the deep spring, intense odour of jasmine, verbena and pseudo-orange blossom filled the room. From where Ashleigh plunked herself down in an overstuffed-looking little chair, she pointed out a dozen rose bushes, three colours of hibiscus, gardenias, tall ginger, bird of paradise and even frilly white- and red-hybrid canna lilies.

  “Her cousin told me this was Frances’ favourite room in the house,’ Jazmina said. “He said that it held special memories for her and that Frances told her the room was almost alive.”

  “I’ll collapse and die and never give birth to twins,” Ash said, “unless I can live in this house and stay in this room.”

  Yes, pregnancy made her over-dramatise. And no, I’d still not gotten used to it. But Jazmina smiled. “Like I said, it just came on the market. I told one other person about it. But I think they’ll find it too big. So,” she said, looking at me, “Noah? Ashleigh, why don’t we go into the kitchen and why don’t see if we can’t come up with some figures we can live with?”

  A month-and-a-half later, the second bedroom was a nursery and the one adjoining that was an au pair’s room. I liked the library, but it was just a little too formal for a home office for me, so I took the upstairs second master’s suite, which had a good-sized dressing room that I could use
for all my CDs, and my files, and what Ash called “all your other stuff that you absolutely refuse to give up.” She kept the second drawing room on the first floor for her own, a den-slash-home office.

  Which meant, essentially, that she moved a lovely Queen Anne period knockoff desk in there, along with a matching chair. Whenever she was free, she’d read and write in there. Ash and I had met at a film script “summer boot camp”—a four week jag with twenty-five other twenty-somethings in the fire-prone hills above Montecito. She had worked with me on the stories of the TCM series, and so she was on the payroll too. Luckily, she gave birth at the beginning of the TV actor’s hiatus, before production of the second six programmes could begin shooting. Ash was as invested in the series as much I was and she was totally ready—at least at home-ready with an infant nearby—when we began shooting again.

  That hiatus had allowed us to settle into the house and figure out where to put our furniture, what of Frances Bellamy’s to keep, and what could go on consignment-sale in L.A. or down in Palm Springs (where they loved ’30s to ’50s stuff even more than in Silver Lake).

  By the next hiatus we had modernised a great deal. My brother Ty and his husband Carl own and operate Up to U, with a fifty-foot long showroom on Beverly Blvd. where CAA used to have offices. Together they redid our new downstairs, room by room, keeping it “eclectic but somehow new”, painting the brick fireplaces “cantaloupe and cream, fawn and okapi.” Ash and I referred to the rooms as the “Soda Shop Parlour” and the “Zoological Dining Room”. Upstairs they re-did my office too, in colours they called “masculine—you know”. Ty told me—“concrete, putty, sienna and spruce,” which I told him sounded like ’90s blue-collar folkies.