His finger was black and cauterised. His face was blank. The light was red again. He replaced the cigarette lighter and waited for the light to change. When it did he shifted into first gear, wincing and moaning slightly as his burnt finger brushed against the passenger seat.
How long would it be before she appeared? He cruised slowly to give her enough time, but there was no sign of her and soon he was pulling up outside the flat. Maybe she’d be waiting for him inside. He looked at his finger with a curious, childlike expression as he climbed the stairs. It still wasn’t bleeding. He stuffed his hand in his back pocket to check on the map. It was still there. His mind dulled in response to the friction against his jeans.
The flat was empty but it didn’t feel like his own any more. When he put the record on and turned the volume right up he felt a druggy mixture of euphoria and emptiness. His forehead itched. He wondered dully if Baz was involved. The inscription on the runout groove. “It’s a gas.” It was the kind of thing Baz would say. The girl couldn’t have recorded, cut and pressed a record all on her own; she needed accomplices. Someone had to inhabit the streets on his map.
He looked at the thousands of records lining his walls. He’d wasted so much time searching for all that noise when all along the real music had been waiting for him just a few streets away.
In the kitchen he switched the ring on full and watched it get hot. He could still hear the music swirling around him, making of him its heart. But his forehead was hurting, like scratched sunburn. Maybe he could burn up the pain by lowering his forehead on to the ring. He bent over the cooker and was about to do it when he heard a car pull up outside.
It was her.
He left the kitchen without switching off the cooker and looked out of the living-room window. There was a black Mini parked in front of his Escort. He crossed to the door and as he looked back for a moment before closing the door he felt a tug. He realised this was his last chance. If he didn’t turn back now he might never be able to. He looked at the photograph of Christine he still kept by the bed and felt a stab of regret. But as he sharpened his focus on the picture he saw that now she looked more like Siouxsie. And more like the candyman waiting outside in the car.
He left the door open and walked down the staircase. As he stepped into the street he felt a warm breeze and detected the faint odour of gas. The map was in his back pocket. He reached for the door handle on the Mini but the girl gunned the engine into life and moved forward several feet to dissuade him. He walked towards his own car and glanced in through the Mini’s windows.
On the back seat lay a long knife.
He followed her in the Escort. She turned off his familiar route into the warren of semi-circular streets where he’d lost her for the first time. Despite his injured finger he kept pace with her. The road curved round to the right, then they turned right and curved some more. They seemed to be drawing in towards some hidden centre. He noticed a clocktower among a group of school buildings, but the clockface was devoid of hands. He accelerated and felt the road, once he’d passed the playground, twist round to the right. The streets were lined with bay-window semis. What suburban relapse could have occurred at the heart of this model landscape?
Carl fumbled the map from his back pocket and unfolded it. As he had vaguely remembered, there was a pocket of circular streets, effectively a spiral.
Take me back, take me back, he silently entreated the girl in the car ahead. But she took him on.
They turned right again and eventually the houses disappeared, giving way to waste ground, a procession of electricity pylons and an enormous gasholder.
The girl parked and started walking. Carl had to run to catch her up. They walked over ground dotted with sorrel and belladonna. He looked at the map. They were heading for the circle which lay at the centre of the curled maze of streets. The gasholder.
It reared up before them, a wonderful monster of overlapping curved metal plates. A telescopic spiral ready to expand or contract. It glowed in the moonlight and appeared to hover just above the ground like a ghostly carousel.
Carl followed the girl to the base of the gasholder. The long knife stuck out of the back pocket of her jeans. When she reached an opening she turned and looked back. The moon fell on her face which Carl now saw for the first time outside of his dream. She was, as he had dreamt, the perfect synthesis of Siouxsie and Christine. She had the most beautiful face he had ever seen. His stomach went into a slow dive. But it was love in a void and he felt his heart turn to stone. He would have wept but for the detail on her forehead which, though he caught only the briefest of glimpses, chilled him to the bone.
She turned and vanished inside the gasholder.
Carl followed because, no longer in control of his actions, there was nothing else he could do.
Inside the gargantuan chamber it was dark and Carl was forced to rely on other senses. He raised his arms to protect his face as he stepped forward. The overwhelming impression was of noise: of hundreds or thousands of slowly shuffling feet and in the highest reaches of the metal skin there resounded the magnified hiss and clicks and cannon booms of the white label. It threw its hooks into Carl immediately and he felt himself being drawn into a mass of swaying bodies. He visualised a charnel house of carcasses and raw heads and bloody bones.
There was something else he sensed but couldn’t put a name to.
Carl succumbed to the silent music but the darkness awakened his fear and he felt pulled to bits. He pictured the girl’s forehead and imagined all the flitting spellbound shapes around him to be similarly disfigured.
They pressed nearer and he was horrified to realise he felt close to them in mind as well as body. He imagined he could feel Christine’s breath on his face and for a moment the gasholder almost became a place of paradise. But there was still the niggling feeling that something else was wrong but he didn’t know what. Something around him that he should be aware of.
A cold object sliced his forehead and he felt a warm liquid run down into his eyes. Then the girl pressed harder with the knife but it was always a light, intimate touch, intended to brand rather than hurt.
Carl panicked. These weren’t his people. It wasn’t his celebration. He had never wanted oblivion, just a change. Something secret and new. Now he wanted his life back.
As far as he could tell, they were scared of the light.
He slipped his hand into the pocket of his leather jacket and closed his fingers round his cigarette lighter. He lifted it up to eye level and in the very same moment that he spun the wheel and created a dazzling, vivid snapshot of hundreds of raised foreheads marked by needle-fine spiral scars, he realised what the other thing was. A silly thing really.
The smell of gas.
SIMON INGS &
M. JOHN HARRISON
The Dead
“THE DEAD” is the first of two contributions M. John Harrison makes to Best New Horror 4, so you can find his bibliographical notes with his story “Anima”, later in this volume.
Simon Ings works nights as a legal proof reader, days at his third novel or being rude to his elders. He has recently signed to write a short film script for the British Film Institute, based loosely on material from his first novel, HotHead, and its sequel, HotWired. His short fiction has been published in Other Edens III, Zenith 2, New Worlds and Omni, and a literary fantasy novel, City of the Iron Fish, is due in 1994. Like rust, he rarely sleeps.
The story which follows was originally published in Chris Kenworthy’s small press anthology The Sun Rises Red and quickly reprinted in Interzone. It marks the first—but, we hope, not last—collaboration between two of Britain’s most exciting and original writers.
ONE YEAR, IN THE PARK, there were strange grey birds scavenging the shoreline of the ornamental lake.
“Don’t be afraid,” Elizabeth’s mother said.
She said:
“Feed them. They’re hungry.”
The birds, which were perhaps geese, looked at Elizabeth
with big round greedy eyes. They walked very slowly—very smoothly—back and forth over the snow-speckled gravel. Elizabeth’s mother stroked Elizabeth’s neck: woollen gloves scratched Elizabeth’s skin just above her red scarf.
“Feed them,” she repeated.
Her grip was fierce.
Elizabeth’s Uncle Tony laughed. It was just his way of trying to cheer her up. He would laugh in exactly the same way at his brother’s funeral—which was, of course, her father’s too. Uncle Tony was gauche. He found it difficult to speak. Now he laughed at the geese and said to Elizabeth:
“Look. They’re almost human.”
And indeed they had formed a little line, to wait for the bread.
“Almost human!” said Uncle Tony.
“Shut up,” said Elizabeth’s mother.
“Nearly human.”
Why have a stale bread roll in the pocket of your tailored red coat, if not to feed the birds? Elizabeth, always a punctilious child, took the roll out of its paper bag, broke it up, and scattered the pieces. The geese bobbed up and down in front of her in a slow way, necks curved, beaks open. Elizabeth’s mother stared at them with an angry but helpless expression, as if her feelings ran in contrary directions. Her eyes, Elizabeth saw, were more gold than green; there were wrinkles under her jaw.
In those days the winters were colder than the rest of the year. Every month they would visit Uncle Tony, who was a painter in the city. They often set out in darkness, arriving so early that mist still obscured the ends of the cobbled streets. After feeding the birds, they would eat breakfast in the house: fresh rolls, strong coffee for the mother, hot chocolate for Elizabeth.
“Will I have a cake?”
Uncle Tony was delighted.
“No one has cake for breakfast.”
“Will I have some cheese?”
He threw up his hands. What a game!
“Cheese is for lunch, Elizabeth.”
“Will I have a goose, then?”
Silence.
“Can I have a goose?”
“Shut up Elizabeth,” said her mother.
Elizabeth was four years old.
She found Uncle Tony’s house hard to sleep in. Pocked bulky wooden beams emerged from the plaster work in one room, to disappear into another. By day the bare, varnished boards were black with trapped reflections. At night they creaked; while the uncle gave great shouts and snores, like communiques from his dream-life. He would speak a full sentence just before dawn, his voice reasonable and calm:
“I wanted blue.”
Or:
“Let’s get the pegs first.”
There were other noises, perhaps less random. One night on a visit not long after her eighth birthday, Elizabeth was woken by a woman sobbing. One moment, this sound was low and contemplative, brooding over events gone by; the next it rose angrily to meet some immediate pain. It came and went in the night, full of the pure pity of the self—present anguish, passing sorrow—but also something raw as a broken tooth.
Elizabeth got out of bed and knocked on her mother’s door. The only answer was an inhuman screech. Elizabeth opened the door and looked in. There her mother knelt, quite alone, on all fours on the bare floor in the dark. Moonlight came through the window, picking out the wooden bed-head, the white china jerry. It glistened in the sweat on the mother’s forehead, pooled between the muscles in the narrow small of her back, which she first hollowed then rounded in some rhythm of frustration.
“Mother?”
“Go away.”
“Mother?”
There was a strong smell in the room. The mother’s breasts hung down. She stared emptily ahead.
“Go away and wait your turn,” she said.
After that, things went from bad to worse. It rained all winter; and all the following summer, and all the winters and summers which followed that. December was too warm. July was too cold. At home Elizabeth’s mother spent her nights on a trestle bed in the conservatory, while Elizabeth’s father sat on the stairs practising the violin until his wife was quiet.
When she was fourteen, Elizabeth’s father taught her a song.
Oubliez les anges, it advised:
Oubliez les bosseus
Et partout
Oubliez les professeurs!
He took her to the cafe by the bus station, where, from a table by the window, a very fat woman called Hetty Calver played clock patience and watched the buses go in and out all day. The air was full of the smell of cigarettes and hot fat. As soon as you entered, Hetty would drag herself to her feet and fetch from behind the formica-topped counter a bottle of marjolaine, a dusty jar of honey. Anywhere else they would warm the honey over a little hotplate before it was added to the marjolaine. That was the modern way. But Hetty Calver still dipped her finger in the jar, licked the honey off, and rolled it round her mouth to liquefy it.
“There you are, dear.”
“I’m not drinking that,” said Elizabeth.
“It tastes of roses,” said her father. He smacked his lips mournfully.
“It’s been in her mouth.”
“We all loved Hetty when she was young.”
He took Elizabeth to the park. It was a miserable day for summer, as if someone had collected all the damp and forgettable moments of the year and strung them together regardless of season. The fair was cancelled. Elizabeth’s coloured paper parasol, so necessary in former summers, crumpled in the drizzle and fell to pulp. If the summer was no longer hot, the winter was no longer cold. Elizabeth fidgeted.
“Why is Mummy like she is?”
Her father made no answer.
“Listen,” he said.
The town’s famous silver band had begun its afternoon practise.
“Listen,” he began.
He said “There are a great many dead – ”
Elizabeth’s father was quite different from his brother. Everything had to be proper for him: a suit, a marriage, a phrase in music. He smelled of lavender water. If he over-wound his watch that morning he would walk round worriedly all day, murmuring: “The spring will be strained. The spring has strained. Perhaps the spring is broken.” Uncle Tony had no watch. His paint brushes stuck up surprisingly out of a jam jar, like men with mad and sticky hair. These brushes were responsible for the biggest, most garish pictures Elizabeth had ever seen. Hot yellow fishes hung in a green sky, a sky the colour of her mother’s eyes. “Green sky!” Elizabeth ticked him off. “Rubbish! And those fishes are a baby’s fishes.” Her father was easily defeated by life, but Uncle Tony would never give up. It would be hard to imagine two more different people, but Elizabeth loved them both.
“There are a great many dead,” her father repeated.
“They far outnumber the living,” he explained. “We must pay our debt to them.”
He thought for a moment.
“We must accommodate them somehow.”
At his own funeral, some months later, the rain never stopped. The cortege wound its way across town, up a hill, between factories, behind rusty gasometers and over the canal by the derelict lock-gates, corner by corner, junction by junction, as if it had lost its way. It was late afternoon. The pall bearers tried to walk in the centre of the street, where the wet cobbles, gleaming in the light of the boarding-house windows, were less overgrow. Bird droppings mottled the flagstones in the churchyard, piled up in the corners beneath the broken guttering. Elizabeth’s father changed hands three times on the journey. His friends from the silver band, somewhat drunk, found him heavy; they played him along on their sodden instruments, with Oubliez les Anges. Hetty Calver followed a little way behind the mourning party. Great fat woman, great fat arms. She had brought her son with her, an idiot with dirt under his nose and breeches several sizes too big, who prowled about the edges of the cortege picking up half-bricks and bits of corroded pipe and calling out, “No more. No more.” Over the grave he was the only one to produce tears. “Hush,” said Hetty Calver, stroking his hair: “Hush.” The cemetery, Eli
zabeth saw, was full of headstones so worn you could read on them only the word “Father”.
Afterwards, as they ate the funeral baked meats in a room above the grocer’s shop, a grey bird came tapping against the window. Elizabeth stared at it and burst into tears. She cried until she was sick. The women stood round her, uncertain what to do. The air was absolutely still. The rain fell straight down, and Elizabeth’s father was dead, and everything smelled the way it had smelled for weeks. “There, there,” said the women. The grey bird ruffled its feathers as if settling into a coat, and looked in at Elizabeth from the window sill.
“Get it away!” she screamed.
What happened to Elizabeth’s mother?
She died, too, but not before she explained everything.
“You will remember?” she said anxiously. “Your father would want you to remember.”
She sighed and took Elizabeth’s hand.
“There really is nothing we can do, is there? About the world? Little one?”
“I hate you,” said Elizabeth. “I hate him too.”
The mother laughed softly.
“How shocked I was when you came into that room and found me there! All those years ago, when we still had summers and winters.”
“I hate you.”
Elizabeth inherited her father’s house and her mother’s advice. “Pick a clear, starless night. Wear a cotton dress. Get up onto the mausoleum. It helps to lick your finger and wet yourself between the legs. If anyone is with you, have them turn away.” And then:
“Do you remember our summers by the lake? You used to love them so. Feed the birds my darling. Goodbye.”
One other thing she inherited was her mother’s chair, an ugly wooden object with a high back and a curious, scooped-out seat. “We must carry it to your room,” her mother said. How heavy and awkward it was, for an old woman and a young girl. At first it would not go through the door. But between them they got it in, and set it down in the corner by the window. “There!” the mother said. She tried to smile, but exhaustion made her face immobile. She and Elizabeth, at this astonishing juncture of their lives, could only make together a comedy of domestic affections—each starting to speak, each hanging back for the other, over and over again. In the end, the mother said:
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