The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 17

by Stephen Jones

  “Do they know how she died?” It seemed so unreal, to be having this conversation. It wasn’t like this in books, this floating, shocky sensation.

  “They said there were marks on her neck. But she hadn’t been – you know.”

  “That means strangling,” Katya said in a very small voice.

  He glanced at her askance. “Or a bite.”

  Katya let go of his arm and stared. “A bite? From what?”

  He didn’t answer. They gaped at one another for a few moments, then Julian turned, abruptly, and began walking slowly down the hill.

  The police called Katya once they had reached a tea shop. It was full of Goths and old ladies, mutually ignoring one another save for a few occasional remarks about the rain. Katya made Julian eat a scone. When her phone rang, she nearly dropped it.

  They wanted her to come in as soon as she could.

  “I can’t come back with you,” Julian said, staring mutinously out of the window. “I just can’t cope with it.”

  “But I don’t want to go on my own,” Katya faltered. “And I waited for you.”

  “Well, sorry, but I can’t handle it, okay?”

  Angry and scared, she rang Damian and he said he would meet her at the station. He was waiting when she got there.

  Katya had always thought that it would be rather cool to be questioned by the police, or involved in a murder, but now that it was happening it seemed merely prosaic, upsetting, and at the same time, strange. The room where they questioned her was dingy and smelled of damp dog. The policewoman was kind, not much older than Katya herself, and she took a painstakingly long time to write down the statement. There was no sense that Katya might be a suspect. They just wanted some details, that was all. Then she was allowed to go. She and Damian traipsed back up the hill to the guesthouse and sat in the lounge, drinking endless cups of tea. Katya had brought mint tea bags, since she did not like black tea, and the thin heat of it revived her a little.

  That evening, she found herself determined to have a good time. She tried not to think about Lily. It was a horrible thing, but some small secret voice inside her told her that Lily was hard to miss.

  They met up with the others at the Herring Catch. It wasn’t so busy this early in the evening, and they managed to get a window seat. Katya looked out across the expanse of the harbour. The lights from the high streets of the town glittered across the water, fracturing darkness. She thought she glimpsed something moving, out there toward the harbour mouth, and frowning, she craned her neck to see, but it was gone. Perhaps it had been a fishing boat, though she found it hard to believe that anyone would set out on a night like this.

  All the talk was about Lily and how she had managed to choose the most appropriate day of the year to die, really. It was Hallowe’en, after all; Samhain, when the dead come back from the other world and the veil between the realms lies thin.

  “It’s what she would have wanted,” Damian said, in wide-eyed earnest.

  “Too right,” Amy remarked, sourly. “A great big melodrama.”

  “That’s not very kind,” Damian protested.

  “No, but it’s true.” Amy glared around her. “Isn’t it?” No one said anything.

  The sudden tension, on top of the other events of the day, made Katya uncomfortable.

  “Won’t be a moment,” she muttered, and rose from the table. “Where’s the ladies?”

  “It’s out the back,” Amy said, still glaring. Katya made her way through the back door of the pub and found herself in a courtyard: three bare brick walls and a fourth containing a half-open door. Through it, she glimpsed the black waters of the harbour. And again, there was movement across the water: something gliding. Something big. Katya frowned, trying to make sense of it. She could not help but think of bats. She realised that she was shivering: it was freezing, out here in the courtyard. She wrapped her lace-and-velvet arms around herself and sought refuge in the lavatory, lit by a single bulb.

  She was trying to coax some water out of the tap when there was a scream from the courtyard. After a frozen moment, she gathered her wits and rushed outside. A girl was crouching in the middle of the courtyard, clutching her throat.

  “God!” Katya rushed to her side. The girl was clearly one of the other participants of Goth Weekend, judging from the clothes. “Are you all right?”

  “No.” The girl was crying. Her hands were sticky with blood. “Something bit me.”

  Katya helped her to her feet and together they stumbled inside. The landlady took one look and phoned what Katya assumed to be a local doctor, then took charge of the injured girl. Katya made her way back to her seat. The floating sense of unreality was back. Everyone was staring.

  “What happened?” Amy was shocked out of her bad temper. She put an arm around Katya and guided her into her seat.

  “Something bit her,” Katya said, in an unsteady echo. “In the neck.”

  No one said anything. Then, as though a collective decision had been discussed and made, everyone reached for their coats and bags and left the pub.

  “Look, I’ll see you back up the hill,” Bram said.

  “Yeah, okay. Thanks.” She had no intention of protesting.

  That night, she lay staring sleeplessly into the darkness. She though of vampires, real ones, ones in which, she realised, she did not believe. The Goth scene was no more than role-play, a veneer of dark glamour over the banality of everyday life. But what if some people had started taking it too seriously? She knew that such things happened: there were lifestyle vampires in the States, blood drinkers, people who’d had their teeth filed into fangs. She had never met one. She wondered whether Lily had. And thinking back, the person who had told her about the lifestyle vampires had been Julian . . .

  The thunderous knock on the door brought her bolt upright in bed, heart pounding.

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s me.”

  Warily, Katya opened the door to see Julian standing in the hallway. He looked dishevelled, wide-eyed. He said, “She’s going to rise.”

  “What?”

  “Lily. She’s going to rise.” He made an impatient gesture. “She was bitten last night, and tonight, it’s Samhain. She’s coming back. I know it.”

  “Julian, I don’t think—”

  But he was off, running down the stairs of the guesthouse. Katya hovered in the doorway, wanting desperately to go back to bed. She heard the bang of the front door. But in the end, she could not just leave him. She pulled her clothes over her satin nightdress and followed.

  The town was very dark and very quiet. Julian was nowhere to be seen, but as Katya reached the gate, she glimpsed him running along the edge of the cliff in the direction of the whale’s jawbone. She thought: God, if he throws himself off . . . She might not like Julian much, but it was an awful thought. It was still raining, a thin cold drizzle, and the grass must be as slippery as ice.

  “Julian! Wait!”

  He did not look back. Katya charged across the road. The rain was getting heavier and a wind was rising, whipping salt into her face. There was a concrete path running along the cliff and she ran down it, spitting wet hair from her mouth. She could hear the crash and boil of the waves against the rocks. Ahead, she saw Julian stumble.

  “Wait!” she cried again.

  He struggled to his feet and ran on, but when he reached the whale’s jawbone, he doubled up, leaning with one hand on the white, spined arch. Katya could feel a cramp of her own, a tight stitch across her gut. The rain was driving in hard and she could barely see the edge of the cliff, now. She slowed and paused, terrified of falling. Above Julian’s head, at the joint of the whalebone arch, there was a kind of sparkle of darkness, something that moved and twisted in the air.

  “Julian?”

  She hurried forward, as quickly as she dared. It came again, darting and swift, and there were more of them now. She reached the top of the cliff. The jawbone towered above her. She saw straight through it, into a churning m
ass of spray. But the cliff was high, she should not be able to see the sea – yet there were huge silver forms gleaming within it, leaping, hurtling upward in a blur of scales and teeth. There was an amoebic twist of the edge of the shoal and Julian was gone, falling back without a sound into the wall of water beyond the jawbone. A glistening shape sprang from the shoal to hang in the air before Katya’s face. She looked into a cold, gleaming eye, alight with gestalt intelligence. The mouth of the great fish opened in a slow gasp to reveal razor teeth, then closed once more. With a flick of its tail it was gone, back into the mass, and the shoal shot through the jawbone and streamed down into the town. In wonder, she watched it go. When it hit the harbour it dispersed; she saw silver flickers in the streets, hunting.

  At Samhain, the dead return, she thought, but there is nothing to say which dead, nor which part of the natural world, ravaged and over-plundered, might turn tail on its predators on this one unnatural night of the year. She ran all the way back to the guesthouse and pulled the bedcovers over her head like a child.

  In the morning, it was sunny and cold. There was no sign of rain. She dressed in her only pair of jeans, and a red sweater. Avoiding questions from the landlady, she paid her bill with a cheque. This time, she signed it Katy.

  CHINA MIÉVILLE,

  EMMA BIRCHAM AND

  MAX SCHAEFER

  The Ball Room

  CHINA MIÉVILLE WAS BORN in Norwich and moved very quickly to London. He has degrees in Social Anthropology and International Relations, and a Ph.D. in the philosophy of International Law.

  With influences that include M. John Harrison, Gene Wolfe, Dambudzo Marechera and H. P. Lovecraft, his first novel was King Rat in 1998, followed by the Arthur C. Clarke Award and British Fantasy Award-winning Perdido Street Station, the British Fantasy Award-winning The Scar and the Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning Iron Council.

  Miéville’s novella The Tain appeared from PS Publishing, his short fiction is collected in Looking for Jake, and his first non-fiction book is Between Equal Rights, a study of International Law.

  Emma Bircham is fabulous, but a bit tired. She lives in London as well. Max Schaefer was born in London in 1974 and has been intending to do something ever since.

  “None of us had ever collaborated on stories before,” explain the authors, “but this time it happened very naturally. After a thankless day shopping, one of us came up with the idea, pointing out how creepy certain areas of certain superstores are, another struggled to turn it into a story, and the third fixed it.”

  I’M NOT EMPLOYED BY THE STORE. They don’t pay my wages. I’m with a security firm, but we’ve had a contract here for a long time, and I’ve been here for most of it. This is where I know people. I’ve been a guard in other places – still am, occasionally, on short notice – and until recently I would have said this was the best place I’d been. It’s nice to work somewhere people are happy to go. Until recently, if anyone asked me what I did for a living, I’d just tell them I worked for the store.

  It’s on the outskirts of town, a huge metal warehouse. Full of a hundred little fake rooms, with a single path running through them, and all the furniture we sell made up and laid out so you can see how it should look. Then the same products, disassembled, packed flat and stacked high in the warehouse for people to buy. They’re cheap.

  Mostly I know I’m just there for show. I wander around in my uniform, hands behind my back, making people feel safe, making the merchandise feel protected. It’s not really the kind of stuff you can shoplift. I almost never have to intervene.

  The last time I did was in the ball room.

  On weekends this place is just crazy. So full it’s hard to walk: all couples and young families. We try to make things easier for people. We have a cheap café and free parking, and most important of all we have a crèche. It’s at the top of the stairs when you first come in. And right next to it, opening out from it, is the ball room.

  The walls of the ball room are almost all glass, so people in the store can look inside. All the shoppers love watching the children: there are always people outside, staring in with big dumb smiles. I keep an eye on the ones that don’t look like parents.

  It’s not very big, the ball room. Just an annexe really. It’s been here for years. There’s a climbing frame all knotted up around itself, and a net made of rope to catch you, and a Wendy house, and pictures on the walls. And it’s full of colour. The whole room is two feet deep in shiny plastic balls.

  When the children fall, the balls cushion them. The balls come up to their waists, so they wade through the room like people in a flood. The children scoop up the balls and splash them all over each other. They’re about the size of tennis balls, hollow and light so they can’t hurt. They make little pudda-thudda noises bouncing off the walls and the kids’ heads, making them laugh.

  I don’t know why they laugh so hard. I don’t know what it is about the balls that makes it so much better than a normal playroom, but they love it in there. Only six of them are allowed at a time, and they queue up for ages to get in. They get twenty minutes inside. You can see they’d give anything to stay longer. Sometimes, when it’s time to go, they howl, and the friends they’ve made cry too, at the sight of them leaving.

  I was on my break, reading, when I was called to the ball room.

  I could hear shouting and crying from around the corner, and as I turned it I saw a crowd of people outside the big window. A man was clutching his son and yelling at the childcare assistant and the store manager. The little boy was about five, only just old enough to go in. He was clinging to his dad’s trouser leg, sobbing.

  The assistant, Sandra, was trying not to cry. She’s only nineteen herself.

  The man was shouting that she couldn’t do her bloody job, that there were way too many kids in the place and they were completely out of control. He was very worked up and he was gesticulating exaggeratedly, like in a silent movie. If his son hadn’t anchored his leg he would have been pacing around.

  The manager was trying to hold her ground without being confrontational. I moved in behind her, in case it got nasty, but she was calming the man down. She’s good at her job.

  “Sir, as I said, we emptied the room as soon as your son was hurt, and we’ve had words with the other children . . .”

  “You don’t even know which one did it. If you’d been keeping an eye on them, which I imagine is your bloody job, then you might be a bit less . . . sodding ineffectual.”

  That seemed to bring him to a halt and he quieted down down, finally, as did his son, who was looking up at him with a confused kind of respect.

  The manager told him how sorry she was, and offered his son an ice-cream. Things were easing down, but as I started to leave I saw Sandra crying. The man looked a bit guilty and tried to apologise to her, but she was too upset to respond.

  The boy had been playing behind the climbing frame, in the corner by the Wendy house, Sandra told me later. He was burrowing down into the balls till he was totally covered, the way some children like to. Sandra kept an eye on the boy but she could see the balls bouncing as he moved, so she knew he was okay. Until he came lurching up, screaming.

  The store is full of children. The little ones, the toddlers, spend their time in the main crèche. The older ones, eight or nine or ten, they normally walk around the store with their parents, choosing their own bedclothes or curtains, or a little desk with drawers or whatever. But if they’re in between, they come back for the ball room.

  They’re so funny, moving over the climbing frame, concentrating hard. Laughing all the time. They make each other cry, of course, but usually they stop in seconds. It always gets me how they do that: bawling, then suddenly getting distracted and running off happily.

  Sometimes they play in groups, but it seems like there’s always one who’s alone. Quite content, pouring balls onto balls, dropping them through the holes of the climbing frame, dipping into them like a duck. Happy but playing alone.


  Sandra left. It was nearly two weeks after that argument, but she was still upset. I couldn’t believe it. I started talking to her about it, and I could see her fill up again. I was trying to say that the man had been out of line, that it wasn’t her fault, but she wouldn’t listen.

  “It wasn’t him,” she said. “You don’t understand. I can’t be in there any more.”

  I felt sorry for her, but she was overreacting. It was out of all proportion. She told me that since the day that little boy got upset, she couldn’t relax in the ball room at all. She kept trying to watch all the children at once, all the time. She became obsessed with double-checking the numbers.

  “It always seems like there’s too many,” she said. “I count them and there’s six, and I count them again and there’s six, but it always seems there’s too many.”

  Maybe she could have asked to stay on and only done duty in the main crèche, managing name tags, checking the kids in and out, changing the tapes in the video, but she didn’t even want to do that. The children loved that ball room. They went on and on about it, she said. They would never have stopped badgering her to be let in.

  They’re little kids, and sometimes they have accidents. When that happens, someone has to shovel all the balls aside to clean the floor, then dunk the balls themselves in water with a bit of bleach.

  This was a bad time for that. Almost every day, some kid or other seemed to pee themselves. We kept having to empty the room to sort out little puddles.

  “I had every bloody one of them over playing with me, every second, just so we’d have no problems,” one of the nursery carers told me. “Then after they left . . . you could smell it. Right by the bloody Wendy house, where I’d have sworn none of the little buggers had got to.”

  His name was Matthew. He left a month after Sandra. I was amazed. I mean, you can see how much they love the children, people like them. Even having to wipe up dribble and sick and all that. Seeing them go was proof of what a tough job it was. Matthew looked really sick by the time he quit, really grey.