Dark Terrors 6 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology]

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  There were none.

  The eyes were dead, of course.

  But otherwise he looked almost human.

  He took a bottle from his desk drawer and swallowed a bitter mouthful of neat gin, the raw alcohol rushing to his stomach, lightening his head. Then he settled himself behind the desk and placed the military cap on his head, the shiny black brim shading the empty eyes. The soul driven from behind them. By the things he’d seen. By the things he’d done.

  His mother - or somebody else’s? He couldn’t remember. Like the babies. Like the crucified women. Like the gouged eyes and the torn-out tongues and the screaming and the blood.

  Why did he do it?

  He knew why.

  Not for a cause. Not because he liked it. But because he needed it to survive. To keep his own pain at bay.

  Only the pain could relieve the pain.

  Briefly, he checked at the tools of his trade, arranged neatly on the iron rack. The electric probes, the bastinado, the flaying knife, the pliers for ripping out nails, tearing teeth from gum. He touched each piece of equipment lovingly and a strange calm settled over him, a relief that soon it would be over, for now, at least. The pain transferred, to other nerve-endings, other flesh.

  Outside in the corridor he could hear the mutterings of the guards, see through the frosted glass of the door the huddled shapes of today’s suspects, their trousers already wet with the anticipation of what they could not avoid.

  Their fate.

  And his.

  Placing his perfectly manicured hands palms down on the desktop, he took three deep breaths to calm the last vestiges of terror in his heart.

  He was the pain and the pain was him.

  But he was safe.

  For today, at least.

  ‘Bring in the first prisoner,’ he barked.

  Samantha Lee’s output is as diverse as it is prolific, covering as it does fact, fiction, horror, fantasy, articles, novels, self-development and exercise books, short stories, literary criticism, TV and movie screenplays and poetry. Her numerous short stories have been featured on radio and television as well as in magazines and award-winning anthologies such as Fantasy Tales and Shadows. Of her fourteen books to date, the last three, Amy, The Bogle and The Belltower are part of Scholastic’s bestselling Young Adult imprint Point Horror Unleashed. She is currently working on a sword & sorcery screenplay and collaborating on a graphic novel with comics illustrator and movie art director Paul Bateman. ‘The idea for this story came during a film workshop given by Rutger Hauer at the Edinburgh Festival. He was explaining that the way to play a drank is not to fall about but, au contraire, to try to walk straight. That’s what drunks do. They’re attempting to look sober. And the most effective way to play a villain is as someone quite rational. Because nobody thinks he’s a bad guy. This gave me pause. And a whole new take on his masterly portrayal of the killer android in Blade Runner. He thinks he’s the hero. As does Hannibal Lecter, a civilised, educated intellectual with the teensiest flaw in his character which he justifies by only “eating the rude”. The most frightening thing about evil is that it can always justify itself and that, in the case of the majority of serial killers at least, it cloaks itself in the most mundane kind of normality. There but for the grace of God goes your next-door neighbour.’

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  The Cure

  TONY RICHARDS

  I thought it was her, the woman who opened the door. She was old enough, and looked right, in her flowing, floral-print clothes, with her white hair in a bun and her small, golden-rimmed spectacles. And the way she looked me up and down …

  Her pale blue eyes seemed to take in everything at once: the crow’s-feet creases of pain around my eyes and mouth. And die way that the radiation and the chemotherapy had robbed me - at thirty-two - of nearly all my hair. The fact that I no longer properly filled out my own clothes.

  Her gaze lingered on my own eyes for longer than was polite. Perhaps taking in the awful fear that I saw every morning in the mirror.

  I had just six weeks. If that.

  Neither of us was saying anything, right at the moment. So I broke the impasse with a hasty, ‘Madame Celeste?’

  She gave a small, tight smile. Shook her head. And answered, ‘I am her translator and assistant. Please come through. The fee is fifty pounds.’

  Just an ordinary little maisonette in a quiet suburb. Just a handbill I’d had thrust between my barely willing fingers on the street. Madame Celeste, faith-healer. Thousands of satisfied clients. Will cure all ills.

  Silly. No, amend that - quite ridiculous. But when you’re thirty-two and you have just six weeks left… if that… you’ll try anything.

  She was younger than I was, which took me aback. In her mid-twenties, and slender, and quite pretty. Sitting on a breakfast stool in a perfectly ordinary fitted kitchen-diner, dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt and swinging her bare feet. Of what nationality? It was impossible to tell. Dark, certainly. But she could have been Latin-American, or from the Indian subcontinent, Turkish, Kurdish, or even a gypsy. Strange, how we try to pigeonhole people the moment we see them. And even stranger, these days, just how difficult that is. Human beings do not fit into neat categories quite as simply as they used to.

  She glanced up at me - her irises were deep black. Flashed me a very white … and reassuring? … smile. Then turned her attention to her assistant. They ducked heads together and conversed in whispers. It was obviously a foreign tongue, but one that I could not make out. I felt nervous and awkward, so I looked around the room.

  There was not so much as a small crucifix. What had I been expecting?

  More than this. More than laminated surfaces and tiles and a waffle-maker.

  A faith-healer? Of what faith?

  ‘Do you have the money?’ the assistant asked, bringing my head back round.

  They were both looking at me now.

  I handed it over.

  ‘Please step forward, within reach. She has to touch you.’

  Didn’t they want me to tell them what was wrong? The cancer that had started in my liver and then spread like …

  Like …?

  Like nothing else in the world spreads. No similes. No metaphors. The worst word in the English language has to be ‘malignant’.

  I took an awkward three steps, still feeling perfectly ridiculous. Sweat was running down my upper lip. I almost flinched when Madame Celeste reached out, suddenly remembering stories about healers in South America who plunged their hands into their patients and pulled tumours out. All that she did, though, was brush her palm across my stomach. Then her arm withdrew, she looked away.

  The smile on her assistant’s face grew slightly broader. And she informed me, ‘You’re done.’

  Before the diagnosis I’d have thrown a fit. Except, before the diagnosis, I’d have thrown away the handbill, thought of anyone who kept it and visited ‘Madame Celeste’ as a feeble-minded dunce.

  I’d not only try anything by now, though. I’d accept anything, as well. I didn’t let out so much as a grunt at being cheated, since what difference did it make. They could keep the fifty. I just turned around and went home.

  There was no pain at all over the next few days. By the end of the week, I realised that I had gained a little weight again, and some of my hair was coming back. And the fear in the eyes was not as terrible as it had been before. As though my eyes knew something that the rest of me did not.

  X-rays and an MRI confirmed it.

  ‘It’s complete remission!’ the consultant beamed, as though he’d had something to do with it. ‘You must be extremely pleased.’

  Did he specialise in understatement?

  I went to my favourite bar and drank a lot, then realised I had someone to thank.

  It was still a perfectly ordinary maisonette. Still a perfectly ordinary kitchen-diner. She was with another client, though she didn’t seem to mind me standing there and watching.

  I was sure I recognised
him, from the hospital. A very old man in a wheelchair, with his equally old wife. Even being seated seemed a hardship to him. He was almost doubled over, his face twisted up with pain and effort. His breathing was wheezy and uneven. And how long did this one have? Not even my original six weeks, I imagined.

  His wife’s face was completely blank, as though she had already lost him.

  The five notes were handed over. Madame Celeste did the exact same thing, except her palm went slightly higher up this time.

  The wife obviously wanted to say something, protest, when she realised it was over. Then she noticed me, standing there by the door. And there must have been something in my expression. She simply turned the chair around, wich some difficulty, and went on her way.

  Madame Celeste and her assistant smiled at me, and then conferred, the same way they had last time.

  ‘Is there something else wrong?’ I was asked.

  ‘I just… I had to …’

  ‘Yes - we know.’

  ‘If there’s any way that I can …’

  ‘It was a service that you paid for. Madame Celeste does not expect any gifts, gratuities, or thanks.’

  ‘How can I not thank her?’ I came back, rather astonished.

  But all the assistant did was glance at her wristwatch.

  ‘If you’ll excuse us, we have another client due in a few minutes. We’re extremely busy here, you know.’

  I began to notice it over the next couple of weeks. I was busy as all hell myself, having returned to my office job. But the adverts and the handbills and the cards pushed through my letter box began to impinge on my consciousness, at last. Dozens of them, in the classified section of the local paper. Dozens more, letting you know of their presence by means of cards in newsagents’ windows, even in phone boxes next to BUSTY BLONDE 18 YEAR OLD SEEKS FUN. Madame Celeste was far from alone.

  Dozens?

  There were thousands like her, just in my neck of the woods. God knew how many thousand right across the country. And I began thinking to myself, there’s a whole new religion going on here.

  Either that, or a very old one.

  Life never quite returns to normal after something like I’d been through. You can do the same things as you used to, go to the same places, entertain yourself in the same ways. But there’s always a brittle feeling to everything, a jaggedness that was never there before. You feel very slightly manic, deep down, and that is not pleasant. But considering the alternative …

  It was now five and a half weeks since I’d visited Madame Celeste. In a few more days, I realised - and I smiled - I’d have been no more of this world. My sentence had been commuted. The phone had rung, and it had been the Governor on the other end. That felt good. My inner mania faded slightly.

  I was due one final check-up at out-patients. I was walking from the bus stop to the hospital, a sunny day. I reached the gates.

  There was the old man I’d seen in the kitchen-diner.

  He was no longer in his wheelchair. He was standing perfectly upright, and seemed to have gained several pounds. His face was not so withered. It was still screwed up with pain, though.

  He was crying uncontrollably, his shoulder against the gate post.

  I went up to him, astonished. Asked, ‘Are you all right?’

  His tear-filled eyes came a slit open, and he peered at me, not seeming to recognise me at all. His mouth moved. A sound came out, but he was so choked up with crying it was just that.

  So he tried again. One word. Was it ‘horrible’?

  His eyelids screwed up tightly, and remained like that this time.

  ‘Do you need any help? Where’s your wife?’

  But all he did was shake his head, and then start crying even harder, quite forgetting I was there.

  He was senile, I decided. Madame Celeste had been able to get him out of his chair, but curing his mind was beyond her.

  I went on my way.

  Six weeks exactly. I woke up. Another sunny day. Chinks of golden light pouring through my curtains.

  Some of them were touching me. My left hand and shoulder. My bare chest.

  I’d come wide awake but, oddly, I couldn’t seem to feel them. Couldn’t detect any warmth. The rays of sunlight looked … peculiar. They’d never appeared oppressive before. Never made me want to shy away.

  I didn’t seem to be breathing properly. Felt quite choked. As though the air was full of heavy dust.

  Oh God, what was wrong now? I pulled on a robe, went down and made some breakfast.

  The milk smelled sour, so I threw it out. But the coffee smelled sour too. And tasted of nothing.

  The toast and butter seemed to have the consistency of sponge and axle-grease.

  Was I coming down with the flu?

  I switched on the radio. The music jarred my ears. I turned it off.

  My breathing was still laboured.

  Everything I tried to eat tasted of nothing. The same with drink. I couldn’t listen to music at all. Sunlight left me, in every sense, cold. I watched my favourite sitcom that evening, and didn’t laugh.

  I woke up the next morning and my breathing was still laboured.

  Flowers I passed by had no smell. Even young women on the tube into work aroused no interest in me.

  The flu? Or even ME? Or a side-effect of the chemo? I went to my GP. Who could find nothing.

  Then it started dawning on me. Had the cancer come back?

  My consultant saw me again quickly enough, as concerned as I was. But I was still clear.

  ‘You came very close to dying,’ he told me. ‘Sometimes there can be quite a strong psychological backlash.’

  He suggested I give Prozac a try.

  I tried it for a while. It did absolutely nothing. Then I threw the tablets away and tried getting very drunk instead.

  It was all the badness of inebria, with none of the good. My head swam and I felt sick and I finally was, very messily, but with none of the loose happiness that usually precedes that, none of the unfettered joy or false invulnerability.

  I’d never tried drugs. No, correct that, I had. Prozac. Why should anything bought on a street corner work any better?

  What was the solution here? There had to be a cure for this.

  I had trouble getting to sleep, and I loathed waking up because it was always the same.

  My breathing? It was as though I were trying to breathe underground. As though I had been buried and …

  And it had started six weeks after seeing Madame Celeste. Possibly on the exact day I had been supposed to—

  Stop that! Stop that utter nonsense! You’re a rational human being, and if you’re actually going to start entertaining notions of some price to be paid, some Faustian hocus-pocus …!

  But then I remembered what the old man had said, leaning against the gate post, half-drowning in his own tears. What he might have said.

  ‘Horrible.’

  It had just been bad, to start with. Just like feeling … out of sorts. But as one day overtook the next.. .

  It wasn’t that it got worse. It just simply didn’t change.

  How long now? A fortnight?

  I hadn’t smiled. I hadn’t tasted anything, felt anything, even taken a good deep clean breath. Everything seemed bled of colour. Even during the chemo, I’d had nothing quite like that. Maybe I was going mad.

  Was there anything that I could find enjoyment in?

  I realised there might be. But even that realisation didn’t make me crack a smile.

  I’d been badly ill, quite visibly so. And so it had been a while.

  There was this girl at work, though, who’d seemed interested in me in the past. I took her to a bar that evening, made no secret of the fact that I was trying to get her drunk.

  I was not good company, and was aware of that. But maybe she took the darkness of my mood as something dangerous and exciting.

  Whatever, we were back at her place just as the sun set.

  And it wasn’t that I couldn’
t. All the reflexes were still in place. It was that… it made me feel nothing.

  Nothing except envy. Her head was thrown back, her eyelids half-closed in that fluttery way, her lips wet and parted. She was making little groans.

  I was still trying to draw a proper breath, as I had been doing for two weeks now.

  I simply stopped, halfway through it. Rolled off the bed and started pulling my clothes back on.

  She was awfully drunk. She swore at me. Said something about it being a little late to find out I was gay.

  Something hit the door, thrown hard, as I went through it.

  How did that make me feel? Guess.

  I had to make my way on foot, without a map, and so it took more than two hours before I found the maisonette again. Most of the windows around me were dark, up and down the ordinary street. Including hers.

  I banged on the door until the older woman answered.

  She was in a nightrobe, her hair askew, and looked alarmed to see me.

  ‘What did she do to me?’ I yelled.

  ‘Would you please keep your voice down. Do you know what time it is?’

  ‘What did that bitch do to me?’

  ‘Exactly what you wanted.’

  ‘What I—?’

  ‘You had six weeks left. You wanted to go beyond that. So you have.’

  ‘So I…’

  ‘Not as you were before, though. Still alive or not, your time is up.’

  And, for the first time since that awful morning, my mouth formed a smile. But it was suspicion and wryness only, no humour at all.

  ‘What are you telling me? That she is Mephistopheles, and she saved my life, and now she’s got my soul or something?’

  The woman’s head gave a tiny shake. ‘No, precisely the opposite. Quite a while ago, your kind made a deal with my employer. An agreement, if you will. A covenant. You would live in this place for a period of time, worship her, and try to avoid evil. After that, you’d be looked after for the whole rest of eternity. But it’s not simply that you do not believe in that these days. It’s … you don’t even want it. You just want to stay here. Whatever it takes. Whosoever offers it.