The last time I saw one of the antipeople was in August. It was outside the Nightingale, between two and three a.m. on a Saturday night. I was drunk and on my own, wishing I had someone to share the taxi fare with; or even pay it myself, but not have to go home alone. Opposite the Hippodrome, I saw a body crumpled against a wire fence. Somebody was kneeling over it. As I crossed the road, the figure reared up and gave me an unmistakeable look that meant Go away. This one’s mine. When I saw the face of the man on the ground, my skin turned cold. It was Jason, and he was bleeding from a deep cut above one eye. The creature’s long fingers were pressed against the wound. I saw them turn red and stiffen like tiny pricks. They were hollow.
For a moment, I hesitated. It seemed impossible to change what was happening. Then I lurched towards them, almost falling, and grabbed at the thing’s hair. It felt like a mesh of dry plastic threads. I was afraid the hair would pull out and leave me with no grip. But he tilted backwards and twisted around to face me, his arm stretching before the fingers came loose from Jason’s face with a kind of tearing sound. The creature’s own face was flat and expressionless, with eyes like holes in the ground. He fell against me, knocking me over; when I picked myself up, he’d gone.
Jason was lying very still, but he was breathing. One arm was pinned under his body. His face was like a copper mask, melting at the nose and forehead. I shook him gently; his eyes opened. “David,” he said. “My God. What time is it? I must . . . I got beaten up. Did you see them?”
I shook my head. “You’ll be all right. Take it easy.” He stood up, then wavered and nearly fell. I caught hold of him, and we hugged each other for a few moments. He was wearing a crimson silk shirt which was dark with sweat. The cut in his forehead was like a jewel, and suddenly I thought of Douglas Fairbanks as Sinbad in a film I’d seen as a child. Still holding onto him, I steered Jason across the road and down the sidestreet to the club entrance. They were about to close up, but I told them what had happened and one of their staff went to get some tissues and ice. They knew Jason. He sat down on the doorstep, quite calmly. There was hardly anyone about. The night was blue and warm.
When the wound was cleaned up, I could see a bruise forming around it. His nose and right cheek were puffy too, though the skin was even paler than usual. The ice seemed to lessen the pain. After a few minutes, we walked down to the taxi-hire firm. I told him we’d have to go to the hospital. “Can’t I just go home?” he said.
“If you don’t get that cut stitched up, it won’t heal properly.” He nodded slowly. We waited in silence, Jason holding a ball of clotted tissues like a rose stiff with colour. I bit my lip to stay awake. Eventually a taxi came.
The casualty department at the General Hospital was brightly lit and reassuringly blank. Several rows of plastic chairs marked out the waiting area. In front of Jason was a rather gaunt-looking man of thirty or so, who was explaining loudly to the nurse that he’d swallowed a penny and was now unable to shit. It had been three days, he said. “I don’t know why I swallowed it. It was just something I had to do.” The nurse, with well-concealed impatience, suggested he try a curry. “Nothing works,” he said. The look of hopelessness in his face betrayed him. I could pencil in his background easily enough: he lived alone, was unemployed, an incipient schizophrenic or perhaps an outpatient at Highcroft. But no amount of psychiatric help could change the fact that he had no friends and no way of gaining affection from another human being. When the nurse dismissed him, he took a seat behind us and waited to be seen again.
After Jason had talked to the nurse, we went and sat in another waiting area, with red upholstered seats and a number of silent people, all with minor injuries. I thought about the antipeople. They seemed to be everywhere in this hospital, waiting just out of sight. Perhaps they hung around the little curtained rooms where patients were left alone. One thought kept recurring to me, something Alan had said once. The opposite of love is indifference.
Eventually, Jason’s name was called and he followed a nurse out through the swing doors. I waited, still drunk but sober in whatever part of me reacted to what was happening. Half an hour later he came back, with fourteen stitches in his forehead. It was past four o’clock. Jason lived in Kidderminster with his parents; he’d had to move back there after losing his job. I took him back to my flat, where he slept like a child. In the morning, I woke up and lay there for a while, looking at him. If anything visited him in the night, I didn’t see. He woke up around midday and left soon afterwards, thanking me repeatedly for my help. But somehow, I still felt responsible. Fourteen stitches are not enough.
LES DANIELS
The Little Green Ones
LES DANIELS was recently honoured as co-Writer Guest of Honour with Peter Straub at the 1993 World Horror Convention, held in Stamford, Connecticut.
His short fiction has been published in Cutting Edge, Borderlands, Dark Voices 4 and 5, After the Darkness, The Mammoth Book of Vampires and The Mammoth Book of Zombies, but he is perhaps best known for his series of novels about the vampire anti-hero Don Sebastian de Villanueva. They include The Black Castle, The Silver Skull, Citizen Vampire, Yellow Fog, No Blood Spilled, and the still forthcoming White Demon.
A long-time devotee of comic books, Daniels has contributed a chapter on vampire comics to The Compleat Vampire’s Companion, is the author of the recent bestseller Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World’s Greatest Comics, and he is currently working on a similar volume about the history of DC Comics.
The initial inspiration for the “The Little Green Ones” occurred when the author attended the 1988 World Fantasy Convention, held in West London. The child-like statues in the story can be found in the cemetery adjacent to the convention hotel, and we can attest to the fact that they are definitely as creepy as Daniels’ chilling description . . .
HE NEVER KNEW WHO IT WAS that he followed into the cemetery, much less why. His mind was on something else entirely as he wandered down the leafy London street, and evidently he had fallen into step behind some stranger, for when he looked up he was just inside the gate. He felt as if he were teetering on the edge of a dream. Behind him was a modern street, and he knew that if he turned his head he would see a photocopy shop with a bright orange sign, but in front of him was a shady expanse of ancient trees and weathered stone.
“The Public Are Permitted to Walk in the Cemetery Daily,” proclaimed a sign, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for people to stroll through rows of corpses for their pleasure, and in fact he saw figures in the distance, moving slowly through the autumn haze. He couldn’t see their faces. He wondered what his friends in Phoenix would say if they saw him go inside himself; it certainly wasn’t like him to be morbid, but somehow this spot aroused his curiosity. He felt that this was the real London, that the cars and television sets outside were only a façade hiding something much less modern. Even the cemetery, apparently Victorian, was only a few layers deeper into the layers of disguise that covered something almost sinister in the city, something unutterably old.
He didn’t like that, and he wanted to go home.
He had come on business, but there wasn’t much business: he wouldn’t have been walking around if someone hadn’t cancelled an appointment. He didn’t even have a room at the convention hotel: some mix-up had shunted him off to a dingy, dark place where the elevator creaked and his room was a box just barely big enough to hold a bed. He was beginning to think he didn’t even care if franchises for Cowboy Bob’s Bar-B-Q sprang up all over London or not. All that glass and plastic and concrete would be just another trick to fool the eye; the real London stretched out before him.
He stepped through the stone arch in the wall and went into the cemetery. It was quiet, and so big he couldn’t see the end of it. Dead leaves littered the pathway, crunching unpleasantly under his feet, but there was still green in the trees overheard. He noticed a squirrel fleeing frantically from his intrusion, and scrambling up the side of a small mausoleum. The motion
drew his eyes to the words “Devoted and Gentle Son”, and to the pale stone face of a youth beside them. He looked to be about twenty, but his countenance was blackened in spots by time, especially around the eyes. The sculpture was giving way to some sort of rot, like the decay that long ago had turned the face inside the tomb to putrid fruit.
He felt the first hint of a shudder, looked away, and saw the children. There were two of them, standing on the other side of the path, and they were green.
He realized almost at once that they were statues, but somehow he was not reassured. Both of them, the girl and the boy, were staring at him with that disconcerting directness which only small children can summon; they appeared to be about seven, and they had been made lifesize. Except for their colour, which really was quite odd, they looked like figures from an antiquated textbook, a typical pair of typical children from several generations ago. The girl wore a dress that hung straight down from her shoulders to her knees; her shoes had little straps and there was a big bow in her short hair. The boy wore a sailor suit, complete with cap and kerchief; he had short pants and long stockings. They had their heads thrust forward, as if to increase the intensity of their gaze, and they had their arms behind their backs. They stood straight, almost at attention, yet time had tilted each one slightly away from the other, as if they might at any moment fall rigid to the ground. Their faces were earnestly expressionless.
He was only a few paces from the gate, yet in the presence of these little ones he felt terribly alone; he decided on the spot that he would not venture any further into the realm they seemed to guard. After all, he had no business in a graveyard anyway. Still, he stepped across the path to take a closer look at them. He couldn’t quite resist the pull of these odd little figures, which seemed so commonplace and yet so horrible. Evidently someone’s kids had died, and been commemorated in a fashion that was perhaps not in the best of taste, especially since the statues had turned green. He never would have contemplated such a thing if anything had happened to his two boys, who of course were safe at home, and certain to outlive him in any case. There was no connection with his family anyway; these really quite atrocious little figures were from another time and place.
The girl and boy stood watch over a slab of granite, conventionally grey and shaped somewhat like a coffin. There was an inscription on either side of it, and he discovered to his astonishment that the people buried here were a married couple who had died in middle age. She had given up the ghost in 1927, and he had followed her less than a year later. These were not the graves of children after all.
Then what was the significance of these little green ones who gazed at him so balefully, their loathsome, almost iridescent colour a match for the few leaves clinging to a tumorous old tree behind them? Why were they looking at him, and why was he looking back?
What weird sentiment had inspired these nasty little statues? Who had commissioned them? Was it some whimsical relative, or perhaps the grieving husband, who realized that his time was near and chose to commemorate their early days as childhood sweethearts? Had he killed himself to join her? Had he been hanged for killing her? And why were they so damned green?
It was a sickly, milky green, like lichen or moss, although it might have been oxidation if the things were made of metal. He could have found out easily enough, but he was damned if he was going to touch them. It was too easy to imagine them crumbling beneath his touch, held together by nothing but the strange stuff that encrusted them. Worse yet, his hand might sink into a mass of fungus. People thought green was the colour of life, but this was a festering life that fed on death.
He hurried away from there, hardly taking time to notice another sign beside the gate: “Persons in Charge of Children Are Required to Control Them.”
His nerves were shot, no doubt. The trip wasn’t going well, and he hadn’t been sleeping much: jet-lag. But it was this city, too, and the whole country, really. It was on the wrong side of the world. The gravity was wrong here, and so was the light. He longed to be back in God’s country, where things stood new and clean against a desert sky, where nothing was old and nothing was green.
On his way back to the hotel, he had to wait for a hateful and ridiculous traffic signal. Instead of an honest and direct “WALK” or “DON’T WALK”, the electric sign displayed a slumped red figure to keep pedestrians immobile, and a strutting, glowing green figure when it was time to march. He stared at something green taking its first step and felt his eyelids twitch.
He was bone weary, no doubt about that, and he would be expected to perform like a happy salesman at the reception that was only a few hours away. He stumbled into his hotel, made his way to his room, locked the door behind him and fell into his little bed. He told himself he was taking a nap. After all, your health is more important. The room grew dark around him while he lay like a man who had been poleaxed.
Half asleep in his overpriced coffin, he heard a quiet voice, something between a groan and a sigh. It was right there in the cramped confines of his room. He jerked upright like an old-fashioned mechanical toy and peered into the twilight. Was someone there? Or had he made that noise himself?
He got up, more drained than ever, and turned on the light. There was nothing to be seen, but the bathroom door was closed and he decided to leave it that way. He went out to the convention without bothering to shave or shower or change his clothes.
The party was noisier and stupider than he would have thought possible. He drank heavily and tried not to talk to anyone. A man got up on a table and took his pants down. The future of Cowboy Bob’s Bar-B-Q was in his hands. Amazingly, nobody seemed to object. Even the English seemed crude and crass, oblivious to the verdant mysteries that slept beneath their soil. Christ, even Robin Hood had dressed in green. Was everybody blind?
He took a cab back to his hotel and wondered whether his wife was going to leave him. He was in London, but there wasn’t even any goddam fog. He could see every landmark they passed, even Brompton Cemetery. The gates, thank God, were locked, and the little green ones safe inside—unless they’d been out for hours. Do you know where your children are tonight?
The cab dropped him off, and every building he could see around him was the work of men long dead. The sky was gigantic. Everyone was going to die, no matter what they did, and something small was going to come around the corner unless he got inside. Why was this happening to him? He hadn’t done anything—he’d only looked.
He stood outside his room, so sure the little green ones were inside that he couldn’t even bring himself to open the door. He thought about them for a long time, then said the hell with it and went inside, which was a reasonable plan since they didn’t visit him until after he was asleep. It wasn’t sleep, really, just the fitful snooze of the ageing and the afraid, but it was good enough until he saw the kids again, their arms locked behind their backs as if they were tied. They didn’t reach out for him, and they didn’t come toward him; instead they went into the bathroom and stood in the shower. They made no sound, but all at once the silence seemed shrill, as if someone had turned up the volume on an unplugged radio. The boy and the girl waited under the running water, their little faces bland and boring and reproachful, and the green that covered them dribbled away, filling the tub and overflowing on to the floor. It slopped toward him, while the children, washed free of it, gave forth a blistering white light that streamed into his eyes and woke him up.
It was sunlight, of course, and it was his last day in London. All he had to do was survive this, and he would be safe.
A phoney banquet at the big hotel. International food franchise folks, eat this. It couldn’t have been worse. Everything was green.
He had walked past the cemetery on his way, and had peered in for long enough to see the kiddies still standing there, but he sensed that they were not through with him, and every course he ate confirmed it. Watercress soup. Avocado salad. Lamb with mint sauce, the green flecks swimming up through the innocuous oil. Green bea
ns, potatoes sprinkled with parsley. Lime mousse for dessert, and mints wrapped in green foil. It was all fucking green, and he didn’t eat much. Green Perrier bottles were all around him, but he was slugging back cheap Scotch.
He ran for the plane.
Whatever it was that there was dropped behind him as he soared into the sky, but not before he looked out of the window and saw the whole accursed island spread out below him. It was green, green from stem to stern, green for hundreds of miles in every direction, as far as the eye could see. An alien empire, drifting into insignificance. Christopher Robin’s dead.
It was hard to shake them, of course. Their grave little features were engraved on each one of the peas in his plastic plate, and when the plane hit an air pocket he would see their small, sad faces.
They were gone, however, by the time he got to Phoenix, and Death was something that grew in the old world.
He told himself that, even when his wife showed up in a green rented car and asked him for a divorce. She had spent his money on green contact lenses, which transformed her eyes into something glassy, cold, and enigmatic. Maybe she was right, but how could fake and hate bring happiness? It was all nonsense, right up to the last moment, the land around him brown and clean and honest and American. The dead kids were a thousand, thousand miles away. There was nothing to remind him of them.
Dead was dead, and green was green, and that was the end of it.
Yet when his own children ran out to greet him at the door, he saw to his dismay that they were not alone.
STEVE RASNIC TEM
Mirror Man
AS USUAL, it’s been a prolific year for Steve Rasnic Tem, with short stories published in MetaHorror, In Dreams, Narrow Houses, The Mammoth Book of Vampires, The Dedalus Book of Femmes Fatales, Gauntlet 3, Dark at Heart, Best New Horror 3, and elsewhere.
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