The Best New Horror 5

by Ramsay Campbell

  I did, after all, drive east. A few miles from the village, the ground became tricky. I pushed on, often swerving one way or another on an immediate impulse. Progress was slow. Late in the afternoon, I had a sense that I would never make it anywhere near Zaouiet Reggane. Then all four tires sank into a trough of very fine sand. I got out. The Rover was in it up to the axles, with no chance at all that I could extricate it by myself. I reckoned I was between twenty and twenty-five miles east of Tindouf, which was a long one-day walk. I prepared to spend the night there. I would set off early and reach the village by nightfall. I would return the day after, with helpers, and we would haul my vehicle onto solid ground. They would laugh, I would pay, and later I’d drive to Marrakesh, perhaps catch up with Ulf, and that would be the end of it.

  I woke up in the middle of the night. Unable to get back to sleep, I pulled on my jacket and walked into the chilly darkness. I didn’t go far. When the dim outline of the Rover began to fade in my vision I stopped. This is what he saw, I realized.

  I was still fogged with sleepiness. I sat on my haunches, with my heels together and toes apart. It’s often rather bright in the Sahara at night, when the stars form a brilliant skyscape, but some high thin clouds now cast everything in shades of black. The Rover was an inky lump against the charcoal expanse of sand. This is what he saw.

  Without thinking, I took one of his crumpled cigarettes from my jacket and lit it. I didn’t inhale, but puffed at it, and the glowing red tip only seemed to emphasize the blackness around me. I imagined a shape stirring out there, mysterious and unknowable, secure in the anonymity of the night. I imagined it noticing me behind my tiny pinpoint of fire, fixing on me. As if I were the only stain on all that emptiness. And then I thought that maybe I had been wrong from the beginning.

  It was like looking deeply into your own eyes, and finding nothing there.

  TERRY LAMSLEY

  Two Returns

  TERRY LAMSLEY was born in the South of England but has “cheerfully misspent” most of his life in the North. He admits to falling in love with supernatural fiction at the age of six, “when my young mind was corrupted by reading American horror comics.” He has been writing, on and off, all his life, but has only recently concentrated on his fiction seriously.

  He published his first collection of supernatural tales, Under the Crust, in 1993. The book is set in his home town of Buxton, Derbyshire, and the surrounding Peak District, as is about half his fiction output to date. He is preparing another book of local stories, High Peaks of Fear, and a collection of “true” Buxton spook sightings and other odd occurrences. His Jamesian ghost stories have also appeared in Ghosts and Scholars 17 and The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII edited by Karl Edward Wagner.

  The author explains that the story which follows “. . . was inspired by standing on desperately gloomy, empty little local stations alone at night, and pub conversations with two friends who were writing a biography of the Victorian architect who designed many of Buxton’s best buildings. Their man, unlike mine, was an all-round good guy, however, and – as far as I know – never took to haunting.”

  AFTER CAREFULLY LOWERING his bags of Christmas shopping on to the platform Mr Rudge shook his wrist out of his overcoat to reveal his watch. Noting that he had a wait of nine minutes before his train was due to arrive, he looked about him for a seat. He had had an exhausting day, and the half mile walk just completed had left him limp and sweating under his thick winter clothes. When he had set out in the morning it had been a cold, bright day promising snow, and he had dressed for that. Later, misty rain had brought an evening of muggy warmth that seemed to draw the energy out of him. He longed for the short rest the train journey home would provide.

  He spotted a single bench at the end of the platform, lugged his bags over to it, and sat down.

  The position offered no protection from the weather, but the seat was wide and comfortable. He drew his head down into his coat collar, regretting that he had not brought a hat, and tried to lull himself into a cosy frame of mind. The persistent, almost invisible rain blowing into his face made this state impossible to achieve however, and he presently found himself gazing at the bricked-up windows, graffitied-over walls, and snaggle-tiled roof of the redundant ticket office and waiting room on the platform opposite him across the line.

  The whole station was lit by a few crude lamps of unbreakable glass set in tight metal cages about ten feet up the walls. These gave merely adequate illumination, and the quality of the light was garish and alarming, splashing the wet platforms with puddles and streams of orange, like sticky juice. There were no shadows, only intensities and absences of this golden glow, and drifting veils of drizzle, shining and fading, increased the illusion of insubstantiality adopted for the evening by the stolid, utilitarian railway buildings.

  Mr Rudge tried to remember the station as it had been years ago, before it had been all but closed down, but the details that had made it individual had been stripped away, leaving it as featureless as a child’s drawing of a barn.

  “The genius loci has deserted this place,” he mused, depressed by the dereliction and air of used-up emptiness.

  He was not surprised that there were no other people waiting with him for the train. The little town the station served had almost forgotten the existence of its rail link with Manchester, and few of the population would care to risk the long, dark, crumbling Station Approach Road on a winter evening. It would have been pleasant if there had been others with him to give the place a human presence, as long as they were the right sort of people, of course. Company was not always companionship.

  The last time he had been waiting on a lonely station at night he had been stranded with a couple who seemed to be holding each other up against a wall. He had turned his back on what he assumed was lovemaking, and dismissed them from his mind so successfully that, wandering up and down a few minutes later, he suddenly found himself face to face with them. They were both men, looked drunk or drugged, and were watching him with an intensity of greed that had scared him. They had made him feel his age, his vulnerability, and, foolishly, with his hand, the place above his heart where his wallet was buttoned into the inside pocket of his obviously expensive suit. Luckily his train had arrived seconds later, and saved him from the mugging he had been sure he was about to get.

  He looked at his watch again and was sorry to see that only four minutes had passed since he had last referred to it. He yawned. His neck was stiff, so he waggled it from side to side.

  As he did so, he caught a movement at the far end of the platform at the down-line end. A dark, rectangular shape opened out of a wall against the liquid light. It wavered, and faded away at once. He assumed a door had been swiftly opened and shut; or had it? Perhaps it had been opened all the way, flat against the wall. He squirmed round in his seat, took off his rain-misted glasses to wipe them, and screwed up his eyes to see as best he could.

  For some moments there was no further movement, and he was just replacing his spectacles onto his nose and settling back again, when he caught a glimpse of something, a single motion, down where he thought the door had opened. He could see more clearly now, and thought he must have been right about the door, as a shape like the top half of a human torso, the outline of a head, one shoulder, and part of the second, now protruded out of the wall, some three feet from the ground.

  The form was silhouetted against the light from a lamp situated immediately behind and above it. Because of the position of this light it was not possible to determine any features on the face of the individual, but he was sure that it was turned towards him, as he felt himself stared at.

  Or even glared at, he corrected himself uncomfortably, as he sensed that he was subject to a most intense scrutiny.

  “Why doesn’t the beggar move?” he thought, “and why is he standing like that, as though he were peering round from behind a tree?”

  He found himself staring back with his chin jutting out and his mouth gap
ing childishly open. He turned to look behind him to check that some other person had not silently joined him on the platform, and could therefore be the object of his distant observer’s attention, but the end of the platform was as empty as it had been when he had stepped onto it. It stretched away, quite desolate, into the murky dark.

  “Well, you’ll know me when you see me again,” he thought, aware that his own face was lit by a light some five feet ahead of him.

  Then, for what seemed a long time, but was probably less than a minute, the two of them watched each other.

  Mr Rudge was beginning to think that he had been mistaken, and that what he had taken for a head and shoulders was in fact some broken thing, part of a door that had blown open in the wind and become stuck, when the figure moved.

  It stepped out.

  It took one stride, quick and purposeful, giving him a glimpse of a pale face and shining black hair, then turned towards him and stood quite motionless again.

  Mr Rudge was convinced that he had been – identified.

  The figure was that of a tall man, above six foot. He stood with his legs apart, and seemed to have his arms folded across his chest. He wore, as far as Mr Rudge was able to make out, some kind of cape slung over his shoulders.

  Mr Rudge began to recall that the building from which the door had opened, and from which the figure had emerged, was the old, original part of the station. That section had long ago been vandalized and declared unsafe. It had been due for demolition, but enough local people and lovers of railway history had objected to this to save the basic structure. As a compromise, to preserve what was left, all the doors and windows had been bricked up. The building was sealed tight.

  Mr Rudge stood up and walked a little way down the platform towards the figure. He wanted to say something, if only to hear the sound of his own voice.

  When he did speak, he was surprised to hear himself say, in a high, almost pleading voice, “Is everything all right? Can I help you at all?”

  He stood and waited for some response. None came.

  The two of them stared at each other in static silence until a distant clanking rumble announced that the train Mr Rudge was waiting for was about to arrive. Behind the dark figure, the lights of the driver’s cabin swung round a curve in the line, and the little, toylike train began to slow down as it approached the platform.

  “Now I shall get a look at you,” muttered Mr Rudge, whose gaze had momentarily been diverted by the train.

  But the man, whoever he was, moved again.

  He stepped back against the wall and, as he did so, his arms and legs appeared to fold into him, like blades returning to the handle of a knife. Mr Rudge blinked, and the figure was gone. A shadow remained against the wall, fading in the light from the windows of the train.

  Mr Rudge snatched up his shopping bags and ran down the length of the station. When he got to the place where the figure had disappeared, something of the shadow still hung upon the wall. Sure enough, it suggested, in vague outline, the figure he had seen; but nothing stood near to cast such a shadow.

  He reached out to touch the darkness against the wall as, behind him, the doors of the train slid open, and a tiny quantity of passengers disembarked.

  The wall felt just as a wall should.

  Confused, Mr Rudge took a few steps backward. Close to him a peevish child complained to its parents, saying it was tired, and begging to be carried. Its father growled a “No.”

  Hardly able to take his eyes off the dark place on the wall, Mr Rudge backed towards the carriage closest to him, sidled through one of the doors, and tumbled into a seat.

  There was plenty of room on the train. He sank back, clutching his bags on his lap, and pressed his face against the grimy window to look out.

  He saw the back of someone – a late arrival, perhaps? – dashing for the carriage in front of his.

  He wondered if the doors had closed in time to shut whoever it was out.

  He hoped they had; but feared they had not.

  * * *

  Mr Rudge used the time the train took to haul itself up the long, steep incline towards Buxton to try to reconnect with normalcy, or was it reality?

  His bags of shopping had received a bashing as he had stumbled into the train. To occupy his mind, he checked the contents of each. The fact that one of the sparsely populated yet costly boxes of chocolates that he had purchased for his family was badly dented was no catastrophe, and he was much relieved to see that the two bottles of Laphroaig Malt, one of which was his present to himself, were undamaged. However, the plastic bag containing these items had begun to split. He stood up and began transferring its contents to the pockets of his overcoat. Not everything would fit, so he had to juggle some of the gifts from bag to bag.

  Doing this in his highly nervous state was perplexing. He put one bag in the aisle for a moment, satisfied that it was as full as he could get it, and at once kicked it over. Bending down to retrieve it, he became aware of eyes upon him. Not surprising, considering all the fuss he was making, but whose eyes were they?

  He turned his attention to the other occupants of the carriage.

  A few seats away a bloated, pink-faced man with wild corkscrews of yellow hair blinked slowly back at him from under drink-weighted lids. Beyond him sneered a small tribe of adolescents in outfits of cake-icing pinks and greens. One of them, hairless as a baby rat, made a gesture at him with his finger that the others at once copied. Its significance escaped Mr Rudge, who looked away at a figure close to them.

  All he could see of this passenger was his dark hair above the back of his seat. He was lolling against the window, and something about him, perhaps only the fact that he was obviously a tall man, made Mr Rudge uneasy. He tried to manoeuvre himself into a position from which he could get sight of the man’s reflection in the window, and must have made himself look absurd in doing so, as the teenagers began to laugh aloud at him. This caused the tall man to turn to see what the noise was about.

  The pasty, gaunt face that twisted towards him made Mr Rudge’s heart skip once, before he recognized it to be that of a man who he had seen about on the streets of Buxton for years. He nodded in embarrassed recognition, and hastily sat down again, satisfied that, if his fellow passengers were not the most attractive examples of humanity, they were at least that; human.

  With that thought, his mind returned to the consideration of what he had seen, or thought he had seen, back at the station. Somewhere inside him was an urge to walk into the next carriage, perhaps under the pretext of searching for the toilet, just to reassure himself about who might be travelling there, but it was an urge he found he was easily able to resist. Instead, he turned his attention to what he would do when he got to Buxton, assuming that whoever it was who may have got on with him happened to be heading for the same destination.

  Being a methodical man, Mr Rudge began to devise a stratagem, in case such a situation should arise.

  He decided he would be first off the train at Buxton Station. To put his mind at rest he would wait on the platform until all the other passengers had disembarked, and he was satisfied that the train was empty. Then, although it was less than a ten minute walk to his flat, he would ring for a taxi to take him home.

  When the train was half a mile from Buxton Mr Rudge rose up, with his bags and his bulging pockets, and placed himself at the centre of the sliding doors. He was somewhat shamefaced about his fears by now, but determined to proceed with his plan. Nevertheless, as the train drew to a halt, he was nervous; his teeth were dry, and his tongue tasted of iron.

  He pressed through the doors the instant they opened.

  As his feet touched the platform, out of the corner of his eye, he noticed that the doors of the carriage in front of him were still moving apart. He planned to stand by the station’s only exit, and made towards it as, behind him, other passengers tumbled out into the damp night air.

  When he had almost reached the exit a long shape strode past him ve
ry quickly. Like a shadow in the lights of a moving car, it rose and fell in one smooth, swift motion, and passed out of sight through the exit door.

  Baffled at that moment, Mr Rudge forgot his plan. He hurried after the figure.

  He passed into the waiting room where a guard lurked, intending to collect tickets. The man was staring out into the car-park at the front of the station, looking uneasy, dismayed.

  Mr Rudge knew that he could have passed through without showing his ticket, and was tempted to do so, but a lifetime of orderly conduct could not be denied. This transaction took precious seconds. As he left the station he saw a figure moving away beyond the road outside, on the far side of the pedestrian crossing.

  The crossing light was red. He waited while cars slid by on the slick velvet tarmac, and jabbed at the button to get the green man walking.

  He noticed that it was raining harder. His glasses were mottled with large drops, warping his vision.

  To his right, squatting on its hill, the vast citadel that was the Palace Hotel hunched its padded shoulders against the wind and blinked down at the town through dozens of lighted windows. Ahead of him and to his left, a lumination which had no single source hung low over Spring Gardens, the main shopping centre, open late that night for the pre-Christmas rush. Hundreds of spots of light from the outer residential districts encircled him on the hills that surround the town. Previously he had found this sight a comfort; it had pleased him to be part of a small community that could be taken in with one circular gaze; but tonight he felt somehow engulfed by it all. He felt that he had walked into something inexplicable, and that he had no alternative but to go in deeper.