The Best new Horror 4

by Stephen Jones

  Down the creaking stairs, I led her, flinching at each squeak of the rotten boards.

  “Wait.” I peered out into the dark-lit street; it was empty. A fitful wind was blowing; a rusty shutter banged. If I could hurry her to my home unobserved, there I could conceal her, care for her, observe her, learn all the secrets of her metamorphosis –

  “It’s clear.”

  She hung back, shaking her pale head.

  “I can see no-one there. Trust me.”

  But she was so weak, her limbs so wasted that she could hardly put one foot in front of the other; she sank against me, a featherweight, her fragile frame weighed down by my cloak.

  And as I struggled—vainly—to support her, I felt her tense in my arms. Looking up, I saw the splash of fire against the buildings.

  Torches.

  They stood at the end of the street, barring our escape. As I frantically spun around, I saw them closing in on us from behind. We were trapped.

  “Why, Doctor Taziel, I see you have served me well.”

  Farindel. Coming straight towards us, a pitch torch in his hands, weeping gouts of flame onto the wet cobblestones.

  “Served you!” I cried although my voice shook. “What makes you think – ”

  Mynah whimpered, cowering in my arms, trying to hide her face from the brightness of the flames.

  “Don’t listen to him,” I whispered to her urgently. “This is none of my doing. They must have followed me – ”

  “And what have we here?” He stood over us. The others formed a ring. I could hear the muttered chants, could smell the acrid smoke of burning incense herbs.

  “A patient of mine,” I said defiantly “Will you let us pass? She is very weak and must lie down.”

  “Don’t play games with me, Astar,” he said, his voice hard-honed as my surgeon’s scalpel. “We know what she is. And you know what the penalty is for harbouring one such as she.”

  He made a sudden slash towards her with his torch; Mynah let out a shrill, keening cry, the cry of an animal meshed in a snare. The cry pierced me like a knife. And the muttered chants began to grow louder, more insistent.

  “To the flames, to the flames, to the flames with her – ”

  Farindel stooped and pulled at Mynah’s hood; her white head was exposed to the torchglare, her huge insectile eyes which I had tried to shield from the firelight.

  “Stop!” I cried as she flinched away. “Don’t torment her!”

  “A perfect specimen,” he said, smiling. I knew what it meant, that slow smile. I had seen it before. All the while the chanting was rising louder, dinning into my ears with its merciless, mindless monotony. And now Mynah was struggling against me, struggling as the flames burned brighter and her dark eyes reflected their eerie glare.

  “You can’t hold her back, Astar,” Farindel said softly. “She can’t resist the flames. She is drawn to them.”

  “Don’t look, Mynah,” I implored her. “Hide your eyes.”

  “Mynah,” Farindel echoed, still so softly, so seductively, “come to the fire, Mynah.”

  And then she broke free. I went sprawling onto the cobbles—as they closed in on her, trampling me, pushing me down into the mud as I tried to stop them, frantically tearing at their cloaks, their coats –

  I heard their triumphant shout as the flames caught.

  And her cry. I heard her cry. Ecstatic as the bright ring of flames engulfed her—then wordless, mindless agony as her silkspun hair became a tracery of fire, as the fire shot heavenwards in an explosion of star-sparks and the frail creature that had been made of moonshine burned like a moth in a candleflame—until something charred, blackened, dropped lifeless to the damp cobbles.

  I think I went crazy then. I charged in amongst them, hitting, kicking, screaming all the curses I could call down upon their heads.

  They took me away. And locked me in this cell. Soon they will return to question me. I must set this record down—for even if I do not leave this cell alive, someone else may read this, my journal, and understand.

  My Lord Arkhan,

  You must stop this massacre of innocents.

  We have misunderstood the nature of these mutations. Driven by fear, we have mercilessly crushed them at their most vulnerable when, just emerged from their cocoons, they are limp and weak. We have looked on their Otherness and seen it as a token of divine displeasure. Now I know we are wrong. Horribly wrong.

  Boskh heals—when taken in tiny doses. And those who are Changed by boskh are Healers. They heal by touch—by the touch of sound upon the mind and body, this extraordinary shimmering, piercing web of sound that they weave. If you could but hear it, my lord . . .

  That irresistible sound. It haunts me. Why do I have this feeling—that if I could only hear it again, all would be well?

  (They are coming. I can hear their footsteps echoing in the passageway.)

  If you could but hear it, you would understand. And so I beg you to end the slaughter. Else those unearthly voices will be stilled. And we shall remain locked in our brutish ignorance, not knowing that we have –

  Here end the writings of Doctor Astar Taziel. As you can see, my lord Arkhan, Maistre Taziel never completed his Journals. Hints of the physician’s rapid mental disintegration are to be found as the work progresses. The balance of his mind became so disturbed that he ended by defending the very mutations he had earlier sought to destroy. His paranoia became so severe that he believed us, the enforcers of justice and mercy, to be his enemies! It was disturbing to have to witness the rapid disintegration of a once-distinguished intellect. Astar Taziel is at present deeply sedated in the Asylum where I give you every assurance, my lord, he will end his days under constant surveillance.

  Farindel, Clerke

  KARL EDWARD

  WAGNER

  Did They Get You

  to Trade?

  KARL EDWARD WAGNER is a regular contributor to Best New Horror. DAW Books recently published the 21st volume of his own annual anthology series, The Year’s Best Horror Stories; his latest collection is entitled Exorcisms and Ecstasies; he is completing a medical horror novel, The Fourth Seal; and Penguin/ROC in Britain are reprinting his classic Kane series of heroic fantasy novels. However, he disowns the recent DC Comics graphic novel, Tell Me, Dark, after the publisher tampered with his storyline.

  Like that graphic work, “Did They Get You to Trade?” is also set in a London milieu which Wagner knows well and is fast making his own. More knowledgeable horror fans might recognise a brief cameo appearance by the remains of a well-known Irish Lovecraftian illustrator, but perhaps what makes the following tale even more disturbing is that the author claims he based it on a true story . . .

  RYAN CHASE WAS WALKING ALONG SOUTHAMPTON ROW at lunchtime, fancying a pint of bitter. Fortunately there was no dearth of pubs here, and he turned into Cosmo Place, a narrow passage behind the Bloomsbury Park Hotel and the Church of St. George the Martyr, leading into Queen Square. The September day was unseasonably sunny, so he passed by Peter’s Bar, downstairs at the corner—looking for an outdoor table at The Swan or The Queen’s Larder. The Swan was filling up, so he walked a few doors farther to The Queen’s Larder, at the corner of Queen Square. There he found his pint of bitter, and he moved back outside to take a seat at one of the wooden tables on the pavement.

  Ryan Chase was American by birth, citizen of the world by choice. More to the point, he spent probably half of each year knocking about the more or less civilized parts of the globe—he liked hotels and saw no romance in roughing it—and a month or two of this time he spent in London, where he had various friends and the use of a studio. The remainder of his year was devoted to long hours of work in his Connecticut studio, where he painted strange and compelling portraits, often derived from his travels and created from memory. These fetched rather large and compelling prices from fashionable galleries—enough to support his travels and eccentricities, even without the trust allowance from a father who had wanted him to g
o into corporate law.

  Chase was pleased with most of his work, although in all of it he saw a flawed compromise between the best he could create at the time and the final realization of his vision, which he hoped someday to achieve. He saw himself as a true decadent, trapped in the fin de siècle of a century far drearier than the last. But then, to be decadent is to be romantic.

  Chase also had a pragmatic streak. Today a pint of bitter in Bloomsbury would have to make do for a glass of absinthe in Paris of La Belle Epoch. The bitter was very good, the day was excellent, and Chase dug out a few postcards from his jacket pocket. By the end of his second pint, he had scribbled notes and addresses on them all and was thinking about a third pint and perhaps a ploughman’s lunch.

  He smelled the sweet stench of methylated spirit as it approached him, and then the sour smell of unwashed poverty. Already Chase was reaching for a coin.

  “Please, guv. I don’t wish to interrupt you in your writing, but please could you see your way towards sparing a few coins for a poor man who needs a meal?”

  Ryan Chase didn’t look like a tourist, but neither did he look British. He was forty-something, somewhere around six feet, saddened that he was starting to spread at the middle, and proud that there was no grey in his short black beard and no thinning in his pulled-back hair and short ponytail. His black leather jacket with countless studs and zips was from Kensington Market, his baggy slacks from Bloomingdale’s, his T-shirt from Rodeo Drive, and his tennis shoes from a Stamford garage sale. Mild blue eyes watched from behind surplus aviator’s sunglasses of the same shade of blue.

  All of this in addition to his fondness for writing postcards and scrawling sketches at tables outside pubs made Chase a natural target for London’s growing array of panhandlers and blowlamps. Against this Chase kept a pocket well filled with coins, for his heart was rather kind and his eye quite keen to memorize the faces that peered back from the fringes of Hell.

  But this face had seen well beyond the fringes of Hell, and as Chase glanced up, he left the pound coin in his pocket. His panhandler was a meth-man, well in the grip of the terminal oblivion of cheap methylated spirit. His shoes and clothing were refuse from dustbins, and from the look of his filthy mackintosh, he had obviously been sleeping rough for some while. Chalky ashes seemed to dribble from him like cream from a cone in a child’s fist. Beneath all this, his body was tall and almost fleshless; the long-fingered hand, held out in hope, showed dirtcaked nails resembling broken talons. Straggling hair and unkempt beard might have been black or brown, streaked with grey and matted with ash and grime. His face—Chase recalled Sax Rohmer’s description of Fu Manchu: A brow like Shakespeare and eyes like Satan.

  Only, Satan the fallen angel. These were green eyes with a tint of amber, and they shone with a sort of majestic despair and a proud intelligence that not even the meth had wholly obliterated. Beneath their imploring hopelessness, the eyes suggested a still smoldering sense of rage.

  Ryan Chase was a scholar of human faces, as well as impulsive, and he knew any coins the man might beg here would go straight into another bottle of methylated spirit. He got up from his seat. “Hang on a bit. I’ll treat you to a round.”

  When Chase emerged from The Queen’s Larder he was carrying a pint of bitter and a pint of cider. His meth-man was skulking about the Church of St. George the Martyr across the way, seemingly studying the informational plaque affixed to the stucco wall. Chase handed him the cider. “Here. This is better for you than the meth.”

  The other man had the shakes rather badly, but he steadied the pint with both hands and dipped his face into it, sucking ravenously until the level was low enough for him to lift the pint to his face. He’d sunk his pint before Chase had quite started on his own. Wiping his beard, he leaned back against the church and shuddered, but the shaking had left his hands as the alcohol quickly spread from his empty stomach.

  “Thanks, guv. Now I’d best be off before they take notice of me. They don’t fancy my sort hanging about.”

  His accent was good, though too blurred by alcohol for Chase to pin down. Chase sensed tragedy, as he studied the other’s face while he drained his own pint. He wasn’t used to drinking in a rush, and perhaps this contributed to his natural impulsiveness.

  “They’ll take my money well enough. Take a seat at the table round the corner, and I’ll buy another round.”

  Chase bought a couple packets of crisps to accompany their pints and returned to find the other man cautiously seated. He had managed to beg a cigarette. He eagerly accepted the cider, but declined the crisps. By the time he had finished his cider, he was looking somewhat less the corpse.

  “Cheers, mate,” he said. “You’ve been a friend. It wasn’t always like this, you know.”

  “Eat some crisps, and I’ll buy you one more pint.” No need to sing for your supper, Chase started to say, but there were certain remnants of pride amidst the wreckage. He left his barely tasted pint and stepped back inside for more cider. At least there was some food value to cider in addition to the high alcohol content, or so he imagined. It might get the poor bastard through another day.

  His guest drank this pint more slowly. The cider had cured his shakes for the moment, and he was losing his whipped cur attitude. He said with a certain foggy dignity: “That’s right, mate. One time I had it all. And then I lost it every bit. Now it’s come down to this.”

  Chase was an artist, not a writer, and so had been interested in the man’s face, not his life story. The story was an obvious ploy to gain a few more pints, but as the face began to return to life, Chase found himself searching through his memory.

  Chase opened a second bag of crisps and offered them. “So, then?”

  “I’m Nemo Skagg. Or used to be. Ever heard of me?”

  Chase started to respond: “Yes, and I’m Elvis.” But his artist’s eye began filling in the eroded features, and instead he whispered: “Jesus Christ!”

  Nemo Skagg. Founder and major force behind Needle—probably the cutting edge of the punk rock movement in its early years. Needle, long without Nemo Skagg and with just enough of its early lineup to maintain the group’s name, was still around, but only as a ghost of the original. Rolling Stone and the lot used to publish scandalous notices of Nemo Skagg’s meteoric crash, but that was years ago, and few readers today would have recognized the name. The name of a living-dead legend.

  “Last I read of you, you were living the life of a recluse at someplace in Kensington,” Chase said.

  “You don’t believe me?” There was a flicker of defiant pride in those wounded eyes.

  “Actually, I do,” Chase said, feeling as though he should apologize. “I recognize your face.” He wiped his hands on his trousers, fumbling for something to say. “As it happens, I still have Needle’s early albums, as well as the solo album you did.”

  “But do you still listen to them?”

  Chase felt increasingly awkward, yet he was too fascinated to walk away. “Well. I think this calls for one more round.”

  The barman from The Queen’s Larder was starting to favor them with a distasteful frown as he collected glasses from outside. Nemo Skagg nodded toward Great Ormond Street across the way. “They do a fair scrumpy at The Sun,” he suggested.

  It was a short walk to the corner of Great Ormond and Lamb’s Conduit Street, giving Chase a little time to marshal his thoughts. Nemo Skagg. Nova on the punk rock scene. The most outrageous. The most daring. The savior of the world from disco and lame hangers-on from the 60s scene. Totally full-dress punk star: the parties, the fights on stage, the drugs, the scandals, the arrests, the hospital confinements. Toward the last, there were only the latter two, then even these were no longer newsworthy. A decade later, the world had forgotten Nemo Skagg. Chase had assumed he was dead, but now could recall no notice of his death. It might have escaped notice.

  The Sun was crowded with students as usual, but Chase made his way past them to the horseshoe bar and sloshed back outsi
de with two pints of scrumpy. Nemo had cleared a space against the wall and had begged another fag. They leaned against the wall of the pub, considering the bright September day, the passing show, and their pints. Chase seldom drank scrumpy, and the potent cider would have been enough to stun his brain even without the previous bitter.

  “Actually,” Nemo said, “there were three solo albums.”

  “I had forgotten.”

  “They were all bollocks.”

  “I’m not at all certain I ever heard the other two,” Chase compromised.

  “I’m bollocks. We’re all of us bollocks.”

  “The whole world is bollocks.” Chase jumped in ahead of him.

  “To bollocks!” Nemo raised his glass. They crashed their pints in an unsteady toast. Nemo drained his.

  “You’re a sport, mate. You still haven’t asked what you’re waiting to ask: How did it all happen?”

  “Well. I don’t suppose it really matters, does it?”

  Nemo was not to demur. “Lend us a fiver, mate, and I’ll pay for this round. Then Nemo Skagg shall tell all.”

  Once, at the White Hart in Drury Lane, Chase had bought eight pints of Guinness for a cockney pensioner who had regaled him with an impenetrable cockney accent concerning his adventures during the Dunkirk evacuation. Chase hadn’t understood a word in ten, but he memorized the man’s face, and that portrait was considered one of his very finest. Chase found a fiver.

  The bar staff at The Sun were loose enough to serve Nemo, and he was out again shortly with two more pints of scrumpy and a packet of fags. That was more than the fiver, so he hadn’t been totally skint. He brightened when Chase told him he didn’t smoke. Nemo lit up. Chase placed his empty pint on the window ledge and braced himself against the wall. The wall felt good.