The Best new Horror 4

by Stephen Jones

  “That’s all right, then,” and he left us, striding away over the crackling gravel to the farm out-buildings.

  “I don’t think I should’ve come,” I said, but Rupert was already taking me past the frozen bushes to the back door.

  He went ahead of me, and the instant the door opened his mother gave a little cry and called out “Who’s there?” as if we were burglars. Even when Rupert told her it was just the two of us she kept peering over his shoulder to make sure exactly who was following him out of the shadows.

  “It’s only me,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said, and some of the alarm went out of her eyes, but the worry remained. “David Maxey. What are you doing here?”

  This time even Rupert could tell I wasn’t being given a very warm welcome, and he was embarrassed. “He’s hungry,” he said.

  “But you never said you were bringing anyone.” She was quite bitchy with him. “You never told me.”

  I butted in. “I’m sorry, Mrs Granger,” I said, and wished more strongly than ever to be somewhere else. “It’s Rupert’s fault. He wants me to go skating.”

  “Skating?” The idea seemed to confuse her.

  “Mother.” Rupert went close to her. “You know you don’t like me to go skating on my own—so that’s why I brought him. Two together are quite safe.”

  She was looking from one to the other of us, and I said, “If she cracks she bears, if she bends she breaks.” It was something they said about the ice in the fens, where everybody was a skater and knew about such things. “It’s very thick now, Mrs Granger, and it’ll never bend an inch.”

  She didn’t answer. Instead, she turned to the dresser and took down plates to set a new place for me. “I’m afraid there’s not much,” she said.

  I’d always liked Rupert’s mother. She’d never seemed as if she belonged out here, miles from anywhere, with no neighbours. It was partly the way she dressed I suppose, as if she was ready to leave the farm behind at that instant and take us both up to town for a good time. But now there wasn’t a trace of make-up on her face, and the shadows around her eyes were genuine.

  “I’ll get the skates,” said Rupert. “They’re in the garage.”

  I didn’t want him to leave me, but I made the best of it by trying to help his mother. There wasn’t as much on the table as I was used to when I went there, and she apologized. “I haven’t been able to get out to the shops in this weather,” she said. It wasn’t true; there hadn’t been enough snow to make the roads dangerous, and I knew she had her own car.

  “This is fine, Mrs Granger,” I said. “I can hardly eat a thing.”

  At any other time she would have seen through the lie and laughed; now she just turned towards me, her face full of anxiety, and said, “Are you sure? Are you really sure?”

  I’d always thought that, as mothers go, she was rather pretty, and I was so shocked at how pale and lined her face had become that I found I had no words, and I was very relieved when Rupert returned with the fen runners for me. The little skates, which were like the blades of table knives set in blocks of wood, were those he’d started with when he was younger. The boots were tight, but I managed to squeeze my feet into them.

  Dusk was beginning to fall by the time we’d eaten and left the house. Mrs Granger stood at the door with her hands clenched in front of her as if she had to struggle not to reach out and hold us back.

  “The ice is rock hard, Mrs Granger,” I said, making a new attempt to stop her worrying. “We couldn’t go through it even if we tried.”

  “Don’t,” she said, “please don’t say things like that.” She looked around the yard. “Rupert, why don’t you get your father to go with you?”

  But Rupert was already walking away and his father, who had not joined us at tea, was nowhere to be seen.

  I’d always known that the farmhouse was lonely, but I’d never realized just how isolated it really was until I caught up with Rupert on the road outside. In summer, green trees and bushes and tall grass crowded around the house and disguised its loneliness, but now the curtains of leaves had been stripped away, and the flat fields, the black furrows ridged with white, stretched away like the bare boards of an empty house.

  “Cold,” I said, and the blades of the skates that swung in our hands rattled like chattering teeth.

  The proper road petered out just beyond the farmhouse and became a track that only tractors could use. There were no hedges out here, only ditches with thin crusts of ice where the water had seeped away beneath. I would have stopped to throw stones through the ice sheets except that Rupert was hurrying ahead, intent on getting somewhere—even though there seemed to be no place better than any other out here.

  “It’s getting dark early,” he said. “It’s all this cloud. You won’t be able to see it soon.”

  “See what?” I asked, but he had run on as if he didn’t want to answer.

  We came to a gate across the track and beyond it a low bank stretched away to left and right like the rampart of an ancient fort. On the other side lay the waterway, except that now it was an iceway, reaching in a dead straight line to the black horizon.

  “When there’s a moon,” said Rupert, “you can skate out of sight.”

  Our voices were so small in the vast space that I doubt if they reached the far bank of the wide channel, not that there was anybody in the whole of creation to hear us. An ice age had made the world a waste land, and we were alone in it.

  “Where are you taking me?” I asked, because I’d guessed by now that he had something more than skating on his mind.

  “Hurry up and get those runners on,” he said, and he had laced up his Norwegians and was crabbing down the bank almost before I’d started. I heard his long blades strike the ice as I still struggled with my laces. “Wait for me,” I called, because he was already gliding out from the bank.

  “Hurry up. It’s getting dark.”

  He was out in the middle of the channel when I reached the edge, caught the tip of one skate in a tussock of frozen grass and stumbled forward. I was sure I was going to get a wet foot in the seepage that is always at the margin, but my blades ran through the grass on solid ice. It was as hard as a marble floor from bank to bank. There was no risk of falling through; none at all—but Rupert was leading me on to a danger that was much worse.

  We skated, sawing the air with our arms and feeling it bite back at our cheeks and noses, but he, riding high on blades twice the length of mine, easily outpaced me, and I was so far behind that there must have been a hundred metres of ice between us when I saw him circling, waiting for me to catch up.

  I was a breathless plodder following a racehorse, and I had lost patience with him so I deliberately dawdled, bending low from time to time, merely letting myself slide slowly along. It must have been infuriating for him, but he gave no sign of it, and continued to cut his slow circles as I drifted closer.

  “We don’t need a moon,” I called. “You can still see for miles.” The scatter of snow had made the banks white enough to catch all the thin light that came from the sky and we stood out like dark birds gliding low over frozen fields. But what food would birds find out here? What could they peck at? I was soon to find out.

  “I’m flying!” I cried, and I leant forward and spread my arms wide. He had stopped and was waiting for me, and I wondered if I could reach him without pushing again, so I allowed myself to glide.

  I was looking down, watching the little blades of the fen runners barely rocking as they skimmed forward, and I realized how smooth the ice was. It was a glassy pavement, polished, without cracks or blemishes, and it came as a shock to see that it was so clear I was actually looking through it. Even in this light I could see into the dark water below, where I knew the long weeds trailed in summer, and I gazed down into a giddy blackness.

  My glide had been so successful that I was laughing as my skates came to rest almost at Rupert’s feet, and I was just about to raise my head when I caught a glimpse o
f something beneath the ice. At first I thought it was a twist of weed, and I stooped to look closer. The shape became clear, and in that instant it reached inside me with a sick coldness that held me fixed to the spot. And then, horrified, not wanting to touch the ice anywhere near what I had seen, I eased myself backwards, still crouching, and stood up.

  It was only then that I raised my eyes to Rupert.

  There was a bridge behind him, in the distance. It was a single span where the track from the farm crossed the channel, and I remember it because it made a black shadow on a level with his shoulders and he seemed for an instant to have enormous arms that stretched from bank to bank. At that awful moment even he terrified me, and I was beginning to draw further back, when he spoke.

  “So you can see it, too.” The words were like frost on his lips.

  I nodded. I saw it clearly. There was a drowned man under the ice.

  I could see the folds of his trousers and a shoe twisted at an awkward angle. The sleeves of his jacket were rigid, but his fingers seemed to lie at ease in the ice, resting, as plump and white as the flesh of a plucked chicken. His head was turned away from us, so all we saw was hair and one ear.

  I said something, but I can’t remember what. All I knew was that we had to go for help even if it was too late—we had to let someone know. That object locked beneath us had to be freed. Words came from me, but Rupert did nothing. He stood quite still.

  “Look again,” he said.

  I turned my eyes to the ice between us but I must have drifted too far back because now I could see nothing. I edged forward. The ice was black, and empty. I cast around, stooping to peer closer, but nothing showed itself.

  “Where is it?” I said. The hideous thought came to my mind that a current still flowed under the ice and that the man was rolling slowly beneath our feet. “Where is it now?” I was beginning to panic, taking timid steps on my skates away from the spot as if the ice were about to open and take me down to join the corpse in its frozen coffin. “Where?” I said. “Where?”

  “It’s still there.” His voice was so flat and calm it made me jerk my head up. “It’s my uncle,” he said.

  He skated slowly forward. The extra height of his Norwegians made him tower over me, and once again I was afraid of him. His uncle! He had seen his uncle dead under the ice, and now he was gliding towards me without a sign of grief or even surprise on his face. I was backing clumsily away when he came level with me, and a thin smile appeared on his lips.

  “You’re not thinking of skating backwards all the way home, are you?” he said.

  The fact that he could say something so ordinary, and smile as he spoke, jolted me out of my panic. I even managed to shrug. “How can it be your uncle?” I began . . . and then I remembered. It all came flooding back to me, and at the same instant I knew why his mother was so haggard and his father so silent. The tragedy that had slipped from my mind was still strong within them.

  “Oh,” I said feebly, “your uncle.”

  And then my stomach turned over yet again, for his uncle had been dead many months, drowned out here in the fens.

  “That was where it happened,” Rupert said. “Last summer.”

  I was ashamed of myself for having forgotten, and for a moment this blotted everything else from my mind. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have remembered.”

  “I was there when he was found.” He began to move away. “That’s how I know who it is in the ice.”

  So there really was a body there . . . but he was talking nonsense to say it was his uncle. “It can’t be,” I said. “It’s just some old clothes.”

  “With fingers?”

  “Well, it’s another body.” I didn’t want to admit it. “Someone else. We’ve got to tell somebody. We’ve got to.”

  He said nothing. He moved away and I went with him. Our skates were silent and we drifted like ghosts through the bitter dusk. I twisted my head to look behind.

  “There’s nothing to see,” he said. “Even if you go back you won’t find it. It’s gone.”

  “How do you know?”

  He turned a gaunt face towards me, and once again he smiled. “Do you think I haven’t tried?”

  “But I saw it. If I can see it, so can somebody else. Have you tried to show anybody?”

  Suddenly, as though we were racing, he lowered his head and stretched his legs in long, sweeping strokes that left me behind. I did not catch up with him until we reached the place where we had left our shoes. He was already crouching on the bank unlacing his boots. “Too late to go any further,” he said. “Too dark.”

  We had just seen something impossible to explain, and that was all he had to say.

  “It was a ghost,” I said, “wasn’t it?” And when that had no effect on him, I added, “Or a shadow or something. Some sort of cracks and bubbles in the ice. The light might just catch them at times.” He remained silent, but I wasn’t going to leave it there. “You ought to tell somebody about it,” I said. “Why not your mother?”

  “She’s got too much on her mind.” He concentrated on his laces for a while, and then, speaking so low I could hardly hear him, he said, “She liked my uncle. She liked him a lot.”

  “Well, you’ve got to speak to your father—you’ve got to tell him.”

  “I can’t.” He shook his head without looking up. “I can’t.” His fingers ceased fumbling with his laces but his head remained bowed, and after a while I saw his shoulders tremble and I realized he was crying.

  We were side by side in the frozen grass and Rupert had bent his head to his knees and was sobbing like a little child. I had never seen him in tears; and now that it had happened, I did not know what to do. I began unfastening my own skates, waiting until his sobbing subsided, trying to think of something to say, and failing. His grief was too deep for me to reach. Then, suddenly, he raised his head and was once again speaking clearly.

  “He hated him,” he said. “My father hated him. They used to be friends and then he hated him.”

  “But they were brothers.”

  “What difference does that make?” His voice was harsh. “He liked my mother! My uncle liked my mother, didn’t he? A lot. Too much. I heard him say so, didn’t I?”

  He spat the words at me so fiercely I had to face up to him. “I don’t know what you heard,” I said.

  “I heard everything!” He sucked in his cheeks and glared at me as though I was the most detestable creature on earth. “My father said he’d kill him if he didn’t go away. Kill him!” He stooped forward suddenly and hauled off his skates. “Now you can go home,” he said. “Get lost!”

  Neither of us said another word. I climbed the bank alone and got to his house ahead of him. I could see his mother and father through the kitchen window, but I didn’t go in. I was in a hurry to get away from that place, so I found my bike and left.

  The freeze got worse. Rupert and I saw each other at school and were still friends, but we never once mentioned what had happened. His outburst seemed to have shut the door on it, and there was a kind of haughtiness in him that made me see that he was so deeply ashamed of what he had told me he could never speak of it. I told myself that what I had seen in the ice was made by weeds frozen near the surface, and that it was Rupert’s imagination because of the terrible time he’d been through that had somehow forced us both to see what he’d seen last summer when they found his uncle.

  Then one day the sun shone. The clouds, that for weeks had ground their way towards the horizon as slowly as a glacier, showed gaps of blue, and the sun began to put its fingers through the thin crust of snow on gardens and gutters. Even Rupert smiled and said, “We shan’t get much more skating this year, I reckon.”

  “Too bad,” I replied, thinking that he wanted to shrug the whole business away for ever.

  “So why don’t you come over tomorrow before it’s too late?” he asked.

  He had taken me by surprise and I looked so sharply at him that he reddened and mumbled so
mething, saying that there were bound to be other people around as it was a Saturday, so there was nothing to worry about. It was the nearest he’d come to mentioning what was on our minds, and I was a bit nettled that he thought I may have been afraid to go skating alone out there, so of course I said yes.

  I even managed to get my skates from my brother, so I was properly equipped when I cycled out to see him. The sun was bright, but I had to push against a biting wind which kept the temperature so low that I knew the ice would still be in good condition. And Rupert was right about other people being there. You could never say the ice was crowded because there was so much of it, but there were skaters wherever you looked, and their tiny black figures were dotted away into the distance. An occasional speed man came slicing by, one arm behind his back and the other swinging, and we decided we would join these long-distance skimmers.

  Without either of us saying a word we set out towards the distant bridge and this meant we had to go over the spot where the shadows had frightened us so badly. We did not ignore it, but neither did we linger. We circled once, gazing down, and I was certain of the exact spot because the ice there was clear even though its surface was now criss-crossed by blade strokes. The sunlight would have shown any dead man beneath the ice, but there was nothing. There was only darkness below, and when I looked up and caught Rupert’s eye he grinned sheepishly and skated off at speed as if to put it behind him once and for all.

  We could hear the squeals of girls and the shouts of boys long before we reached the little groups that were strung out over the ice, but we skimmed by until we were far out in the fens. The sun, although now a blazing red, had shed the last of its heat for the day and was beginning to bury itself in the horizon before we thought of turning back. We stretched out on the frozen grass for a few minutes to rest our ankles.

  “It’s good out here,” said Rupert. He was panting and there was even some colour in his cheeks. “I’m glad you could come today.”

  We weren’t in the habit of paying each other compliments, so I just mumbled that I, too, was enjoying myself. I expected the matter to end there, but Rupert had something on his mind; unfinished business.