The Best new Horror 4

by Stephen Jones

  In for a penny, in for a pound. All judgment fled, Chase decided he really would like to see where Nemo Skagg lived. He bought a bottle of Bell’s, at Nemo’s suggestion, and they struggled off into the gathering night. Chase blindly followed Nemo Skagg through the various and numerous unexpected turnings of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Even if sober and by daylight, he’d not have had a clue as to where he was being led. It was Chase’s vague notion that he was soon to be one of the chosen few to visit with a fallen angel in his particular corner of Hell. In this much he was correct.

  Chase had been expecting something a little more grandiose. He wasn’t sure just what. Perhaps a decaying mansion. Nemo Skagg, however, was far past that romantic luxury. Instead, Nemo pushed aside a broken hoarding and slid past, waving for Chase to follow. Chase fumbled after him, weeds slapping his face. The way pitched downward on a path paved with refuse and broken masonry. Somewhere ahead Nemo scratched a match and lit a candle in the near-darkness.

  It was the basement level of a construction site, or a demolition site to be accurate. A block of buildings had been torn down, much of their remains carted away, and nothing had yet risen in their place save for weeds. Weathered posters on the hoarding above spared passersby a vision of the pit. The envisioned office building had never materialized. Scruffy rats and feral cats prowled through the weeds and debris, avoiding the few squatters who lurked about.

  Nemo Skagg had managed a sort of lean-to of scrap boards and slabs of hoarding—the lot stuck together against one foundation wall, where a doorway in the brick gave entrance to a vaulted cellar beneath the street above. Once it had served as some sort of storage area, Chase supposed, although whether for coal or fine wines was a secret known only to the encrusted bricks. Past the lean-to, Nemo’s candle revealed an uncertain interior of scraps of broken furniture, an infested mattress with rags of bedding, and a dead fire of charcoal and ashes with a litter of empty cans and dirty crockery. The rest of the grotto was crowded with a stack of decaying cardboard cartons and florist’s pots. Nemo Skagg had no fear of theft, for there plainly was nothing here to steal.

  “Here. Find a seat.” Nemo lit a second candle and fumbled about for a pair of pilfered pub glasses. He poured from the bottle of Bell’s and handed one clouded glass to Chase. Chase sat down on a wooden crate, past caring about cleanliness. The whisky did not mask the odor of methylated spirits that clung to the glass with the dirt.

  “To your very good health, Ryan,” Nemo Skagg toasted. “And to our friendship.”

  Chase was trying to remember whether he’d mentioned the name of his hotel to Nemo. He decided he hadn’t, and that the day’s adventure would soon be behind him. He drank. His host refilled their glasses.

  “So, this is it,” Chase said, somewhat recklessly. “The end of fame and fortune. Good-bye house in Kensington. Hello squat in future carpark.”

  “It was Chelsea,” Nemo replied, not taking offense. “The house was in Chelsea.”

  “Now he gets his kicks in Chelsea, not in Kensington anymore,” sang Chase, past caring that he was past caring.

  “Still,” Nemo went on, content with the Bell’s. “I did manage to carry away with me everything that really mattered.”

  He scrambled back behind the stack of cardboard cartons, nearly spilling them over. After a bit of rummaging, he climbed out with the wreckage of an electric guitar. He presented it to Chase with a flourish, and refilled their glasses.

  It was a custom-built guitar, of the sort that Nemo Skagg habitually smashed to bits on stage before hordes of screaming fans. Chase knew positively nothing about custom-built guitars, but it was plain that this one was a probable casualty of one such violent episode. The bowed neck still held most of the strings, and only a few knobs and bits dangled on wires from the abused body. Chase handed it back carefully. “Very nice.”

  Nemo Skagg scraped the strings with his broken fingernails. As Chase’s eyes grew accustomed to the candlelight, he could see a few monoliths of gutted speakers and burned-out amplifiers shoved in with the pots and boxes. Nothing worth stealing. Nothing worth saving. Ghosts. Broken, dead ghosts. Like Nemo Skagg.

  “I think I have a can of beans somewhere.” Nemo applied a candle to some greasy chips papers and scraps of wood. The yellow flame flared in the dark cave, its smoke carried outward past the lean-to.

  “That’s all right,” said Chase. “I really must be going.”

  “Oi. We haven’t finished the bottle.” Nemo poured. “Drink up. Of course, I used to throw better parties than this for my fans.”

  “Cheers,” said Chase, drinking. He knew he would be very ill tomorrow.

  “So, Ryan,” said Nemo, stretching out on a legless and spring-stabbed comfy chair. “You find yourself wanting to ask where all the money went.”

  “I believe you’ve already told me.”

  “What I told you was what people want to hear, although it’s partly true. Quite amazing how much money you can stuff up your nose and shove up your arm, and how fast that draws that certain group of sharks who circle about you and take bites till there’s nothing left to feed on. But the simple and unsuspected truth of the matter is that I spent the last of my fortune on my fans.”

  Chase was wondering whether he might have to crash here for the night if he didn’t move now. He finished Nemo’s sad story for him: “And then your fans all proved fickle.”

  “No, mate. Not these fans. Just look at them.”

  Nemo Skagg shuffled back into his cave, picked out a floral vase, brought it out into the light, cradling it lovingly in his hands for Chase to see. Chase saw that it was actually a funeral urn.

  “This is Saliva Gash. She said she was eighteen when she hung out backstage. After she OD’d one night after a gig, her family in Pimlico wouldn’t own her. Not even her ashes. I paid for the cremation. I kept her remains. She was too dear a creature to be scattered.”

  Ryan Chase was touched. He struggled for words to say, until Nemo reached back for another urn.

  “And this one is Slice. I never knew his real name. He was always in the front row, screaming us on, until he sliced his wrists after one show. No one claimed the remains. I paid for it.

  “And this one is Dave from Belfast. Pissed out of his skull, and he stuck his arm out to flag down a tube train. Jacket caught, and I doubt they picked up all of him to go into the oven. His urn feels light.”

  “That’s all right,” said Chase, as Nemo offered him the urn to examine. “I’m no judge.”

  “You ever notice how London is crammed with bloody cemeteries, but no one gets buried there unless they’ve snuffed it before the fucking Boer War? No room for any common souls in London. They burn the lot of us now, and then you get a fucking box of ashes to carry home. That’s if you got any grieving sod who cares a fuck to hold onto them past the first dustbin.”

  Nemo dragged out one of the cardboard boxes. The rotted carton split open, disgorging a plastic bag of chalky ashes. The bag burst on the bricks, scattering ashes over Nemo’s shoes and trouser cuffs. “Shit. I can’t read this one. Can you?”

  He handed the mildewed cardboard to Chase, then poured out more Bell’s. Chase dully accepted both. His brain hurt.

  “Bought proper funeral urns for them all at first,” Nemo explained. “Then, as the money went, I had to economize. Still, I was loyal to my fans. I kept them with me after I lost the house. After I’d lost everything else.”

  The fire licked at the moldy cardboard in Chase’s hand, cutting through his numbness. He dropped the box onto the fire. The fire flared. By its light Chase could make out hundreds of similar boxes and urns stacked high within the vault.

  “It’s a whole generation no one wanted,” Nemo went on, drinking now straight from the bottle. “Only I spoke for them. I spoke to them. They wanted me. I wanted them. The fans today want to worship dead stars. Sod ’em all. I’m still alive, and I have my audience of dead fans to love me.”

  Chase drank his
whisky despite his earlier resolve. Nemo Skagg sat enthroned in squalor, surrounded by chalky ashes and the flickering light of a trash fire—a Wagnerian hero gone wrong.

  “They came to London from all over; they’re not just East End. They told the world to sod off, and the world repaid them in kind. Dead, they were no more wanted than when they lived. Drugs, suicides, traffic accidents, maybe a broken bottle in an alley or a rape and a knife in some squat. I started out with just the fans I recognized, then with the poor sods my mates told me about. After a while I had people watching the hospital morgues for them. The kids no one gave a shit for. Sure, often they had families, and let me tell you they was always pleased to have me pay for the final rites for the dearly departed, and good riddance. They were all better off dead, even the ones who didn’t think so at first, and I had to help.

  “Well, after a time the money ran out. I don’t regret spending it on them. Fuck the fame. At least I still have my fans.”

  Nemo Skagg took a deep swig from the bottle, found it empty, pitched it, then picked up his ruined guitar. He scraped talons across the loose strings.

  “And you, Ryan, old son. You said that you’re still a loyal fan.”

  “Yes, Nemo. Yes, I did indeed say that.” Chase set down his empty glass and bunched the muscles of his legs.

  “Well, it’s been great talking with you here backstage. We’ll hang out some more later on. Hope you enjoy the gig.”

  “I’ll just go take a piss, while you warm up.” Chase arose carefully, backing toward the doorway of the lean-to.

  “Don’t be long.” Nemo was plugging wires into the broken speakers, adjusting dials on the charred amps. He peered into the vaulted darkness. “Looks like I got a crucial audience out there tonight.”

  It was black as the pit, as Chase blundered out of the lean-to. Nettles and thistles ripped at him. Twice he fell over unseen mounds of debris, but he dragged himself painfully to his feet each time. Panic steadied his legs, and he could see the halo of streetlights beyond the hoarding. Gasping, grunting, cursing—he bulled headlong through the darkened tangle of the demolition site. Fear gave him strength, and sadistic fortune at last smiled upon him. He found the rubble-strewn incline, clawed his way up to pavement level, and shouldered past the flimsy hoarding.

  As he fell sobbing onto the street, he could hear the roar of the audience below, feel the pounding energy of Nemo Skagg’s guitar. Clawing to his feet, he was pushed forward by the screaming madness of Needle’s unrecorded hits.

  Nemo Skagg had lost nothing.

  NICHOLAS ROYLE

  Night Shift Sister

  1993 HAS BEEN a busy year for Nicholas Royle. Barrington Books published his first novel, Counterparts, as a limited edition paperback and New English Library released the first mass-market edition of his British Fantasy Award-winning anthology Darklands, with a second and possibly further volumes to follow.

  Recent new stories have appeared in The Mammoth Book of Zombies, Dark Voices 5: The Pan Book of Horror, In Dreams, The Sun Rises Red, Sugar Sleep and Sunk Island Review.

  Bump in the Night Books recently issued a chapbook of short stories by Royle and Michael Marshall Smith, and his fiction has been selected for five consecutive volumes of The Year’s Best Horror Stories, all four volumes of Best New Horror, and his contribution to Narrow Houses was one of only two to be chosen from that anthology for The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Sixth Annual Collection.

  No wonder Fear called him “Britain’s most successful young writer of short horror fiction.”

  As the author explains, “ ‘Night Shift Sister’ was partly inspired by the video for the Siouxsie and the Banshee’s single ‘Kiss Them for Me’.” It also brings together some of his other favourite things, such as maps, hidden realms/parallel worlds, and gasholders, and became the starting point for a new novel entitled In the City.

  FIRST CARL FOUND THE MAP. It was a photocopy of a page taken from a book of street maps. He found it on the pavement outside the record shop one night when he’d worked later than usual sorting secondhand singles into categories. He knew that his customers would soon refile so many of them that his system would be ruined. That was partly why he liked doing it: to give the kids something to knock down. These days he rebelled only vicariously.

  But there were patterns everywhere. Even in his own filing systems he discerned some arcane force at work. Something which came from above him and directed his hands as they lifted and turned and slotted. When the customers changed the system they did so according to some secret order not even they were aware of.

  He left the shop late and became conscious while he was locking up of a fresh wind that carried a faint unpleasant odour reminiscent of domestic gas. For a moment he worried that there might be a leak in the shop but then it dispersed and he saw the map at his feet.

  Studying the map as he walked to his old Escort parked a couple of streets away, Carl became confused. It looked like a detail of a city, presumably his own because of where he found it, but the streets were unnamed. They were obviously streets, and railway lines, too, and parks, ponds, canals and open spaces and closed spaces, but none of them were named so he couldn’t say what locality it represented.

  He unlocked the car door and got in. Dropping the map on the passenger seat he started the engine and pulled away from the kerb. At a red light he looked at himself in the rearview mirror and ran a hand through his long black hair which was perhaps in need of another bottle of dye and certainly a thorough wash. He also needed a shave. His dirty white leather jacket creaked comfortably and he reached down to take the packet of Camels out of his left boot and light one using the car lighter. The light went green, he turned right and the Escort bounced over the uneven road surface in the gathering darkness. Carl liked this time of day. Once he’d shut up shop his time was his own. He liked company but only of his own selection. Crowds weren’t his scene. There was a radio in the car but he generally didn’t switch it on. He welcomed quiet after spinning singles all day to keep the kids from getting bored.

  He called in at the Cantonese takeaway and studied the map while he waited for his food. There were long straight drives and grids of narrow streets, and an area of streets which curved round and round like a game of solitaire where you have to get the ball to the middle. There was even a little circle at the centre.

  When he reached the flat he took the map and his A to Z from the glove compartment, and his sweet and sour, and went upstairs. The flat was sparsely furnished but all the walls were shelved to house his enormous record collection. In the living room there was also a battered old sofa, a low sturdy table with an overflowing ashtray, and a pretty good TV and VCR. The white-painted ceiling was nicotine-stained.

  He spent most of what remained of the evening going through the A to Z looking for a street layout that mirrored the one on his photocopied fragment, but without success.

  It had occurred to him that the map could be of a different city, but then why was the original owner using it here? Carl decided whatever the map depicted was to be found here or nowhere.

  The map’s patterns attracted him but when frustration set in he lit a cigarette and slid a cassette into the VCR. A big fan of Siouxsie and the Banshees, Carl just couldn’t get enough of the latest single. He played it several times a day at the shop and at home he watched the video over and over again. It helped him relax. And just looking at the way she moved made him feel less lonely, which was often a problem since Christine had fucked off to Paris without even leaving him a phone number. Or saying goodbye for that matter. All she’d said was something about him being a worthless drifter with less sense than her little sister. It had seemed harsh to him.

  Sometimes he got so miserable he felt like crying. Nearly thirty, he had nothing apart from a scummy record shop, a decrepit Ford Escort, four or five thousand records and a few videos. His only company was Siouxsie Sioux. On video. Christine had left a hole in his life and, rather than try to fill it with some
one else, he preferred to slip out through it and find something new.

  Most of his old friends were married and couldn’t come out because “it’s such short notice and we couldn’t get anyone to sit”. The only one of his old friends who was still single was Baz and all he ever offered Carl was a fix. Things weren’t that bad, he always thought to himself. Seeing Baz sometimes had the effect of cheering him up because he realised there was still a lot further to fall. He was determined to hang on. Maybe when the car dropped dead and he could no longer afford the spiralling rent on the shop. Maybe then he’d turn to Baz.

  Carl took another cigarette from the pack on the table and reached for his matches because like a dickhead he’d left his lighter at the shop. But the box was very light. He shook it. Empty.

  “Shit.”

  Kitchen.

  Carl switched on one of the electric rings on the hob and waited for it to heat up. When it was bright orange he swept his hair away from his face and bent down to light the cigarette. He didn’t turn the ring off but watched it becoming brighter and hotter as he smoked. He flinched as he remembered pressing the flat of his hand down on one of his mother’s electric rings when it was on. He’d been trying to climb on to a work surface and was using the cooker to lever his body up. As soon as he had felt the pain he had tried to withdraw his hand, but all his weight was on it, so he had screamed loud enough to pierce his mother’s eardrums and she had looked round as he began to fall. He remembered her picking him up off the floor, trying to uncurl his hand. The rings had left dark brown marks on his skin and the smell made him sick.

  He pulled on his cigarette. The scars had healed quite quickly but he had been left with a fear of the cooker. When he had bought his flat he had wanted gas but there wasn’t any, so he intended to get a cooker with a modern ceramic hob, but Christine bought him a moving-in present: a nice old-fashioned electric cooker with rings just like his mother’s.