The Best new Horror 4

by Stephen Jones

  “Sorry I was such an idiot last time,” he said.

  “That’s OK.” I didn’t look at him.

  “It’s just that everything was getting on top of me—Mum and Dad not being very happy and all that. Things had just been getting worse and worse, ever since . . .”

  He seemed to want me to say it for him.

  “I know what you mean,” I said, but that wasn’t good enough for him; he wanted it out in the open.

  “Since my uncle drowned himself.” He spoke very clearly, forcing me to look at him. “Drowned himself,” he repeated. “I told you something stupid about my dad last time. It wasn’t true.”

  “I know it wasn’t.” I had to agree with him. His father could never have done such a terrible thing as murder his brother, no matter what he might have said. “You were feeling pretty bad,” I told Rupert. “And we’d just seen that thing in the ice.”

  “Thought we’d seen. It’s not there now.”

  “And it wasn’t there then,” I insisted, backing him up. “It was just imagination. By both of us.”

  “Both of us.” He nodded. He was glad he had a friend, and to know that between us we’d scattered all the shadows from his mind. “Right,” he said, “I’ll race you back.”

  It was no race. He had done much more skating than me and his ankles were stronger, so from time to time he had to wait for me to catch up. We had gone further out into the fen than I had realized and, with my slow progress, the sun had dipped below the horizon and had left only an afterglow before the bridge came in sight.

  We were alone, the other skaters having long since climbed the banks and gone home, so when we came up to the bridge it was our voices alone that echoed beneath it.

  “One at a time,” said Rupert. “The thaw has made it wet under there.”

  He went first. There was no suggestion of a crack as he went forward cautiously, but when I followed I could see that his weight had made a pulse of water spill from the edge, so I kept to the centre as he waited for me to come through.

  I was concentrating so intensely on the ice beneath my skates that I almost ran into him and had to make a wide swerve to keep my balance. That was why I saw his father before he did. Mr Granger was at the top of the bank, looking down.

  “Where have you been?” he called to Rupert. “Your mother was worried.”

  Rupert did not answer. He was leaning forward like a runner trying to get his breath, and I went up alongside him to taunt him. He did not even turn his head my way and I was stooping to look into his face when I saw that, although his mouth was open, he was not gasping for breath. He was in the grip of terror.

  I did not wish to follow his gaze, but I was forced to turn my head and look down.

  It was there. I saw the frozen shoe and trouser leg, the stiff folds of the jacket and the fingers cased in ice. Even the hair on the back of the twisted head was visible.

  Neither Rupert nor I moved. We were locked to that dreadful place.

  “What are you doing down there?” It was his father’s voice from the bank. “It’s time to go home.”

  I had my hand on Rupert’s arm. I was beginning to pull him back, gently tugging at him, and my skates were making a faint rasping sound on the ice when it happened. The head began to turn. It was as though I had been scratching at the other side of a window pane and had aroused it. The head within the ice came round to face us. Yellow cheeks and an open mouth. And then the eyes, tight shut.

  “What’s happening?” Mr Granger’s voice died and, as it did so, leaving the air empty of all sound, the eyelids lifted. A handspan of ice lay over them, but the eyelids slipped back like a flicker of moonlight, and a pair of dead eyes, grey and as pale as milk, stared up at us.

  The cold air brushed the back of my neck as I jerked backwards, but Rupert did not stir. He remained where he was as the fingers came through the ice, and with them, the bulge of the head. It came up like a sleeper pushing back a sheet.

  I heard Rupert’s name shouted from the top of the bank, and his father came thudding and slithering towards him and snatched him away.

  I had slid backwards and was beneath the bridge when the dead figure stood upright and came to collect them. Water ran from its sleeves and dripped from its pale, plump fingers, and its sodden shoes swished on the ice as it advanced.

  Without realizing it, I had backed even further away, out of the shelter of the bridge, so I was clear of what happened. I was a spectator . . . as Rupert should have been. But he was with his father.

  I saw them enter the shadow of the dark arch together, and I saw Rupert slip and fall full length. His father stooped for him, but never got a chance to lift his son upright. The dripping figure came moving towards them and, in the black shadow under the bridge, embraced them both.

  The impact of Rupert’s fall had been too much for the ice. There was a soft, rending crack and a sheet the size of a table up-ended itself and in an instant, without a sound, the huddle of figures had gone. I flung myself forward, but the ice had slid back into place. I kicked it, but it was wedged. I put my full weight on its edge, and still it did not budge. I knelt and hammered on it, but Rupert was with his father on the other side of that door, and I never saw him again.

  JOEL LANE

  And Some Are Missing

  JOEL LANE was born in 1963 and lives in Birmingham. His short stories have appeared in various magazines and anthologies, including Fantasy Tales, Winter Chills, Ambit, Critical Quarterly, Panurge, Skeleton Crew, Exuberance (issue four was a Joel Lane special, featuring two stories, an interview and bibliography), Darklands and Darklands 2, The Sun Rises Red, Sugar Sleep and three volumes of Karl Edward Wagner’s The Year’s Best Horror Stories. His criticism has appeared in Foundation and Studies In Weird Fiction. A selection of his poems appeared in Private Cities, a three-poet anthology from Stride Publications.

  Like his story “Power Cut”, which we reprinted in Best New Horror 3, “And Some Are Missing” (“The title comes from a line in a Pet Shop Boys song” reveals Lane) depicts a bleak vision of Britain in the early 1990s.

  THE FIRST TIME, IT WAS SOMEONE I didn’t know. Inevitably. I’d gone out to use the phone box, around eleven on a Tuesday night. This was a month after I’d moved into the flat in Moseley. I phoned Alan, but I don’t remember what I said; I was very drunk. Coming back, I saw two men on the edge of the car park in front of the tower block I lived in. It looked like a drunk was being mugged. There was one man on the ground: grey-haired, shabby, unconscious. And another man crouching over him: pale, red-mouthed, very tense. As I came closer, he seemed to be scratching at the drunk’s face. His hand was like a freeze-dried spider. I could see the knuckles were red from effort. With his other hand, he was tugging at the man’s jacket.

  Too far gone to be scared, I walked towards them and shouted “What are you doing?” The attacker looked up at me. His eyes were empty, like an official behind a glass screen. I clenched my fist. “Fucking get off him. Go on . . .” He smiled, as if he knew something I didn’t. Then he got up and calmly stalked away into the darkness behind the garages. The man on the ground looked about fifty; from his clothes and stubble, he could have been a vagrant. There were deep cuts on his face, slowly filling up with mirrors of blood. He was sweating heavily.

  I ran back to the phone and called an ambulance. Then I went back to the injured man and dabbed uselessly at his face with my sleeve. Now the shock was wearing off, I needed to go to sleep. I looked at my wristwatch; it was past midnight. There was no blood on my sleeve. I looked again at the drunk’s face. It was pale with sweat and blurred by a greyish stubble. But there were no wounds. Jesus, I thought, I’ve started to hallucinate. It’s strictly Diet Coke from now on. Leaving him for the ambulance, I struggled into the building. Living on the top floor meant I didn’t have to keep count. The next thing I knew, my alarm clock was ringing. I didn’t remember setting it, let alone going to bed.

  The flat’s okay, though it costs more to rent than
a poorly furnished studio flat should. At least it’s pretty secure. You’d need wings or a sledgehammer to break in. Before I paid the deposit, I asked if there was a phone point; the landlord showed me where it was. It was only when I’d moved in that I discovered the phone point hadn’t been used in decades and was no longer viable. When I tried to contact the landlord, a snotty assistant told me it was hard luck, but they weren’t responsible for telephones. I said that having been told there was a phone line, I had a right to assume it was viable. She said they hadn’t told me it was. I thanked her for explaining, then hung up. My hands were shaking. Unless I was prepared to make the landlord a free gift of an installation costing a month’s rent, I’d have no telephone until I moved.

  A few nights after the incident in the car park, I woke up in the middle of the night. I’d been dreaming about Hereford, Alan’s home town. We’d spent the last Christmas there with his family. I remembered the cathedral, the old houses, the hills out towards Fownhope that were so heavily wooded you seemed to be indoors. Suddenly I was crying. Then I felt something touch my face. Fingers. They seemed to be following the tears. One of them scratched my right eye. I lay very still, sweating with fear. The touching was gentle, but there was no kindness in it. A cold palm slid over my mouth. I pulled away, then lashed out in the darkness, cursing. Something moved at the side of the bed. I switched the light on, but the room was empty. There was nobody else in the flat.

  I was more scared than I’d been when I thought there was someone in the room with me. I’m a real coward when it comes to dentists and hospitals, but with people my temper takes over. A few years ago, I was walking home late at night when I was stopped by this massive bloke. He asked for directions to somewhere or other, then pushed me against the wall and tried to take my wallet. I pushed him hard, shouted “Fuck off” and ran; he didn’t follow me. I sat on my bed, remembering this, staring at the walls of the flat. There was a picture of a town covered with snow at night, done in pastel blue and white on black paper; Alan had drawn that for me. There were Picasso and van Gogh prints, stills from James Dean films, and a sketch of mine that showed an abandoned card table on a bridge over a canyon. I’d filled the flat with images that made me feel at home. But it didn’t work.

  Some evenings, my head was full of a violence I could only control by drinking myself unconscious. The new flat had been rented in a hurry, while I was staying with friends after the split. Alan was in love with another man: a bearded American, younger than me and more intelligent. Two years of living together, and now suddenly it was all gone. Hard to believe; but every day I had to rediscover it by waking up. Alan and I were still close: we met regularly for coffee or lunch in the city centre, to exchange news or just spend time together.

  He wanted to go to America with Paul, and live there. Until that happened, I needed to hold onto whatever feelings for me still lived in him. Perhaps by refusing to let go of him completely, I was damaging both of us—as though the relationship were a kind of wound that we both carried, and which the contact between us kept reopening.

  It was at one of those awkward meetings that he told me Sean was dead. I hadn’t known him well—a familiar face in one or two pubs, always chatty, but genuinely friendly underneath the banter. He invented nicknames for people that were invariably perfect, and never malicious. One Sunday afternoon we met by chance at the Triangle cinema, and he gave me a lift home. He struck me then as rather subdued and thoughtful. We talked about people we both knew; Sean said he’d grown out of the scene, and wanted a more settled life.

  And now—what, eighteen months later?—he’d killed himself. From what Alan said, he’d been suffering from mental illness and couldn’t see himself recovering. I cried suddenly, briefly. Sean was only twenty-three. I wish I understood why so many people don’t value themselves. Why someone with vitality and humour and warmth should deliberately end his life. Perhaps it’s people like that who get hurt the most, and can’t hide from it. Somehow they come to believe that they don’t matter. And there’s nobody to tell them they’re wrong.

  Everyone seemed to be in trouble that week. It was late summer; the days were hot and sticky, you had people wearing sunglasses and carrying umbrellas. That kind of weather makes everyone restless and uneasy. A couple that Alan and I had known for years split up unexpectedly, and had to sell their house in order to live apart. I started losing track of who was seeing whom, and which affairs were open and which were secret.

  Jason, a good friend of mine, lost his job as the result of a pointless row. He was working for the council, answering phone calls from the public. A few of the senior management people had started complaining about the way he dressed. His clothes were colourful and stylish enough to have some of the grey people muttering about “flamboyance”. Perhaps Jason was too stubborn for his own good. Or perhaps he felt that, after four years of successful work, he deserved more acceptance from his colleagues. Either way, he tried to shame the management into an apology by offering his resignation. They accepted it.

  I didn’t have problems like that at work, but sometimes the general level of unhappiness in the company was frightening. Our salaries had been frozen indefinitely, while mishandling of computer files had cost the company a fortune. The directors blamed the recession; but the recession didn’t force them to be arrogant, inept and cynical. Nor, indeed, to be absent most of the time.

  At the end of that week, I went out to the Nightingale. They’d redecorated it in black wood-chip wallpaper, with black leather seating. The effect was deadpan and oppressive. I brought someone back to the flat. He was a quiet, sensitive guy in his mid-thirties, with a strong Black Country accent. It was more for company than anything else. We were both quite drunk. He used amyl nitrate in bed, which only seemed to distance him. I tried it, but it just made me sweat. Probably I was too tired. When he climaxed his body was immobile, like a statue melting in the rain.

  He was asleep when I woke up and saw a figure at the foot of the bed. It seemed hardly more than an outline, and it was somehow too jagged, stretched-looking, like some kind of satirical cartoon. It was just watching. Perhaps waiting for something to happen. That was when I first thought: the antipeople. I shifted closer to the sleeping man, touching his arm, his shoulder, his hair. But the cold feeling remained. In the morning we both felt a bit awkward, and didn’t arrange to meet again.

  A few days later, Alan drove round with some things I needed from the house. Because my new flat was so small, I’d left a lot of possessions behind. I’d have to collect them soon, before Alan moved out. He hoped to be with Paul in New York by the end of the year. We circled around each other nervously, able to hug but not kiss. He’d already said that I could sleep with him again if I wanted to. Paul wouldn’t mind—after all, he’d been seeing Paul for three months while I was still in the house. Moving out had reduced the stress, enabled me to get some kind of grip on things. But underneath, I still felt the same way.

  It didn’t happen until Alan was on the point of leaving. I kissed him fiercely and started to unbutton his shirt. “Lie down. Please.” It took less than fifteen minutes, but it was as good as any sex I can remember. Afterwards, we lay there and rested, no longer touching—as always when we slept together. Then I saw the creature sitting over him. It was probing his face with its narrow fingers; the nails were broken. Then it bent further down and pressed its teeth against his arm, just above the wrist. The creature looked a bit like me, but not very much. I hope.

  For a few seconds I wondered if I should just let it happen. It wasn’t that I wanted to hurt Alan. But . . . why should I protect him, after what he’d put me through? Then I reached out, grabbed the pale thing’s shoulder and pulled hard. My fingers sank into the stale flesh and hooked on the bone. The creature pawed at my arm, scratched it with one ragged finger. The skin turned white and hard. Then I was alone with Alan. He opened his eyes and reached for me.

  After he’d gone, I put a record on the stereo. Leonard Cohen sang: No
w I greet you from the other side of sorrow and despair / With a love so vast and shattered it will reach you everywhere. I poured myself a glass of gin and tried to think. Was human love enough to motivate life, to give everything a meaning? Or was it so debased that the only source of meaning was something above humanity? I didn’t know. In fact, I didn’t trust people who claimed that they knew. The scar on my arm was numb; it seemed to be frozen. About a week later, the strip of dead skin fell away.

  From the window in my flat, I can see out beyond the garages, to where a semicircle of trees forms a natural skyline. There’s a cedar, a few birches and a pine tree of some kind. It makes me think of forests, green places full of shadow and drifts of leaves; places where there are no people.

  The last few weeks of that summer were close and humid. The newspapers were full of road accidents, murders, rapes. I can remember walking through the city centre and seeing the crowd of people suddenly blur and sway, as though they had all started to dance. Alan and I kept in touch; he was under increasing stress, not knowing whether Paul really wanted to be with him in the future. He was holding onto a job and a home while hoping that he’d be asked to leave them behind. He said he still missed me. We were uneasy with each other, not really knowing what to say or to hope for. For me, it wouldn’t have been hard to forgive him. The most difficult thing would have been to trust him.

  In spite of this uncertainty, the glare of madness was fading in my head. I was drinking less heavily, though that had never been the core of the trouble. Many people helped me, friends and strangers; and while nobody’s help was crucial in itself, the total effect got me through. There’s more humanity around than I’ve tended to think. It’s not human nature that gives power to the vultures and maggots; it’s only human culture. Dead things like money and authority.