The Best new Horror 4

by Stephen Jones

  I was about to mention Norman’s 1956 appearance with Ruby Murray at the Palladium in Painting The Town when I became distinctly aware of her interest waning. She was fidgeting about in her chair as if anxious to leave the table.

  “Anyone would think you didn’t like Norman Wisdom,” I said, by way of a joke.

  “Actually, I’m not much of a fan, no,” she said suddenly, then added, “Forgive me, Stanley, but I’ve suddenly developed a headache.” And with that she went to her room, without even offering to do the washing up. Before I went to bed I stood outside her door listening, but could hear nothing.

  I have a bad feeling about this.

  Diary Entry # 7 Dated 27 October

  She is avoiding me.

  It sounds hard to believe, I know, but there can be no other explanation. Last night she returned to the flat and headed directly to her room. When I put my head around the door to see if she wanted a late night cup of cocoa (I admit this was at three o’clock in the morning but I could not sleep for worrying about her) it seemed that she could barely bring herself to be polite. As I stepped into the room, her eyes widened and she pulled the blankets around her in a defensive gesture which seemed to suggest a fear of my presence. I must confess I am at a loss to understand her.

  Could she have led me on, only pretending to share my interests for some secret purpose of her own?

  Diary Entry # 8 Dated 1 November

  At work today we were informed that Mick had died. Complications from the hepatitis, annoyingly unspecified, but I gained the distinct impression that they were unpleasant. When one of the secretaries started crying I made a passing flippant remark that was, I fear, misconstrued, and the girl gave me a look of utter horror. She’s a scruffy little tart who was sweet on Mick, and much given to conspiring with him about me. I felt like giving her something to be horrified about, and briefly wondered how she would look tied up with baling wire, hanging in a storm drain. The things we think about to get us through the day.

  At home the situation has worsened. Saskia arrived tonight with a male friend, a doctor whom she had invited back for tea. While she was in the kitchen the two of us were left alone in the lounge, and I noticed that he seemed to be studying me from the corner of his eye. It was probably just an occupational habit, but it prompted me to wonder if Saskia had somehow voiced her suspicions to him (assuming she has any, which I consider unlikely).

  After he had gone, I explained that it was not at all permissible for her to bring men into the house no matter how well she knew them, and she had the nerve to turn in her chair and accuse me of being old-fashioned!

  “What on earth do you mean?” I asked her.

  “It’s not healthy, Stanley, surrounding yourself with all this,” she explained, indicating the alphabetised film and tape cassettes which filled the shelves on the wall behind us. “Most of these people have been dead for years.”

  “Shakespeare has been dead for years,” I replied, “and people still appreciate him.”

  “But he wrote plays and sonnets of lasting beauty,” she persisted. “These people you listen to were just working comics. It’s lovely to collect things, Stanley, but this stuff was never meant to be taken so seriously. You can’t base your life around it.” There was an irritating timbre in her voice that I had not noticed before. She sat smugly back in her wheelchair, and for a moment I wanted to smother her. I could feel my face growing steadily redder with the thought.

  “Why shouldn’t these people still be admired?” I cried, running to the shelves and pulling out several of my finest tapes. “Most of them had dreary lives filled with hardship and pain, but they made people laugh, right through the war and the years of austerity which followed. They carried on through poverty and ill-health and misery. Everyone turned on the radio to hear them. Everyone went to the pictures to see them. It was something to look forward to. They kept people alive. They gave the country happy memories. Why shouldn’t someone remember them for what they did?”

  “All right, Stanley. I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to upset you,” she said, reaching out her hand, but I pushed it away. It was then that I realised my cheeks were wet, and I turned aside in shame. To think that I had been brought to this state, forced to defend myself in my own home, by a woman, and a wheelchair-bound one at that.

  “This is probably a bad time to mention it,” said Saskia, “but I’m going to be leaving London earlier than I first anticipated. In fact, I’ll be going home tomorrow. The tests haven’t taken as long as the doctors thought.”

  “But what about the results?” I asked.

  “They’ve already made arrangements to send them to my local GP. He’ll decide whether further treatment is necessary.”

  I hastily pulled myself together and made appropriate polite sounds of disappointment at the idea of her departure, but inside a part of me was rejoicing. You see, I had been watching her hands as they rested on the arms of her wheelchair. They were trembling.

  And she was lying.

  Diary Entry # 9 Dated 2 November

  I have much to relate.

  After our altercation last night, both of us knew that a new level in our relationship had been reached. The game had begun. Saskia refused my conciliatory offer of tea and went straight to her bedroom, quietly locking the door behind her. I know because I tried to open it at two o’clock this morning, and I heard her breath catch in the darkness as I twisted the knob from side to side.

  I returned to my room and forced myself to stay there. The night passed slowly, with both of us remaining uncomfortably awake on our respective beds. In the morning, I left the house early so that I would not be forced to trade insincere pleasantries with her over breakfast. I knew she would be gone by the time I returned, and that, I think, suited both of us. I was under no illusions—she was a dangerous woman, too independent, too free-minded to ever become my friend. We could only be adversaries. And I was dangerous to her. I had enjoyed her company, but now she would only be safe far away from me. Luckily, I would never see her again. Or so I thought. For, fast as the future, everything changed between us.

  Oh, how it changed.

  This morning, I arrived at work to find a terse note summoning me to my supervisor’s office. Naturally I assumed that I was finally being notified of my promotion. You may imagine my shock when, in the five-minute interview which followed, it emerged that far from receiving advancement within the company, I was being fired! I did not “fit in” with the new personnel, and as the department was being “streamlined” they were “letting me go”. Depending on my attitude to this news, they were prepared to make me a generous cash settlement if I left at once, so that they could immediately begin “implementing procedural changes”.

  I did not complain. This sort of thing has happened many times before. I do not fit in. I say this not to gain sympathy, but as a simple statement of fact. Intellect always impedes popularity. I accepted the cash offer. Disheartened, but also glad to be rid of my vile “colleagues”, I returned home.

  It was raining hard when I arrived at the front gate. I looked up through the dank sycamores and was surprised to find a light burning in the front room. Then I realised that Saskia was reliant on the council for arranging her transport, and as they were never able to specify an exact collection time, she was still in the house. I knew I would have to use every ounce of my control to continue behaving in a correct and civilised manner.

  As I turned the key in the lock I heard a sudden scuffle of movement inside the flat. Throwing the door wide, I entered the lounge and found it empty. The sound was coming from my bedroom. A terrible deadness flooded through my chest as I tiptoed along the corridor, carefully avoiding the boards that squeaked.

  Slowly, I moved into the doorway. She was on the other side of the room with her back to me. The panels of the wardrobe were folded open, and she had managed to pull one of the heavy-duty bin-liners out of the floor. Somehow she sensed that I was behind her, and the wheelchair spun ar
ound. The look on her face was one of profound disturbance.

  “What have you done with the rest of them?” she said softly, her voice wavering. She had dislodged a number of air fresheners from the sacks, and the room stank of lavender.

  “You’re not supposed to be in here,” I explained as reasonably as possible. “This is my private room.”

  I stepped inside and closed the door behind me. She looked up at the pinned pictures surrounding her. The bleak monochrome of a thousand celebrity photographs seemed to absorb the light within the room.

  “Saskia. You’re an intelligent girl. You’re modern. But you have no respect for the past.”

  “The past?” Her lank hair was falling in her eyes, as she flicked it aside I could see she was close to tears. “What has the past to do with this?” She kicked out uselessly at the plastic sack and it fell to one side, spilling its rotting human contents onto the carpet.

  “Everything,” I replied, moving forward. I was not advancing on her, I just needed to get to the bedside cabinet. “The past is where everything has its rightful place.”

  “I know about your past, Stanley,” she cried, pushing at the wheels of her chair, backing herself up against the wardrobe, turning her face from the stinking mess. “Nurse Clarke told me all about you.”

  “What did she say?” I asked, coming to a halt. I was genuinely curious. Nurse Clarke had hardly ever said more than two words to me.

  “I know what happened to you. That’s why I came here.” She started to cry now, and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. Something plopped obscenely onto the floor as the sack settled. “She says you had the worst childhood a boy could ever have. Sexual abuse, violence. You lived in terror every day. Your father nearly killed you before the authorities took charge. Don’t you see? That’s why you’re so obsessed with this stuff, this trivia, it’s like a disease. You’re just trying to make things all right again.”

  “That’s a damned lie!” I shouted at her. “My childhood was perfect. You’re making it up!”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head, snot flying from her nose. “I saw the marks when you were in the kitchen that first night. Cigarette burns on your arms. Cuts too deep to ever heal. I thought I knew how you must have felt. Like me, always shoved around, always towered over, always scared. I didn’t expect anything like this. What were you thinking of?”

  “Are you sure you don’t know?” I asked, advancing toward the cabinet. “I’m the kind of person nobody notices. I’m invisible until I’m pointed out. I’m in a private world. I’m not even ordinary. I’m somewhere below that.”

  I had reached the cabinet, and now slowly pulled open the drawer, groping inside as she tried to conceal her panic, tried to find somewhere to wheel the chair.

  “But I’m not alone,” I explained. “There are many like me. I see them begging on the streets, soliciting in pubs, injecting themselves in alleyways. For them childhood is a scar that never heals, but still they try to stumble on. I end their stumbling, Saskia. Miss Chisholm says I’m an angel.”

  My fingers closed around the handle of the carving knife, but the point was stuck in the rear wall of the drawer. I gave it my attention and pulled it free, lowering the blade until it was flat against my leg. A sound from behind made me turn. With a dexterity that amazed me, the infuriating girl had opened the door and slipped through.

  I ran into the lounge to find her wheelchair poised before the tape archives and Saskia half out of the seat, one hand pincering a stack of irreplaceable 78s featuring the vocal talents of Flanagan and Allen.

  “Leave those alone!” I cried. “You don’t understand.”

  She turned to me with what I felt was a look of deliberate malice on her face and raised the records high above her head. If I attacked her now, she would surely drop them.

  “Why did you kill those people?” she asked simply. For a moment I was quite at a loss. She deserved an explanation. I ran my left thumb along the blade of the knife, drawing in my breath as the flesh slowly parted and the pain showed itself:

  “I wanted to put their pasts right,” I explained. “To give them the things that comfort. Tony Hancock. Sunday roast. Family Favourites. Smiling policemen. Norman Wisdom. To give them the freedom to remember.”

  I must have allowed the knife to come into view, because her grip on the records faltered and they slid from her hands to the floor. I don’t think any smashed, but the wheels of her chair cracked several as she rolled forward.

  “I can’t give you back the past, Saskia,” I said, walking towards her, smearing the knife blade with the blood from my stinging thumb. “I’m sorry, because I would have liked to.”

  She cried out in alarm, pulling stacks of records and tapes down upon herself, scattering them across the threadbare carpet. Then she grabbed the metal frame of the entire cabinet, as if trying to shake it loose from the wall. I stood and watched, fascinated by her fear.

  When I heard the familiar heavy boots quickening on the stairs, I turned the knife over and pushed the blade hard into my chest. It was a reflex action, as if I had been planning to do this all along. Just as I had suspected, there was no pain. To those like us who suffered so long, there is no more pain.

  Diary Entry # 10 Dated 16 November

  And now I am sitting here on a bench with a clean elastic bandage patching up my stomach, facing the bristling cameras and microphones, twenty enquiring faces before me, and the real probing questions have begun.

  The bovine policewoman who interrogated me so unimaginatively during my initial detainment period bore an extraordinary resemblance to Shirley Abicair, the Australian zither player who performed superbly as Norman’s love interest in Rank’s 1954 hit comedy One Good Turn, although the Evening News critic found their sentimental scenes together an embarrassment.

  I think I am going to enjoy my new role here. Newspapers are fighting for my story. They’re already comparing me to Nilsen and Sutcliffe, although I would rather be compared to Christie or Crippen. Funny how everyone remembers the name of a murderer, but no one remembers the victim.

  If they want to know, I will tell them everything. Just as long as I can tell them about my other pet interests.

  My past is safe.

  My future is known.

  My present belongs to Norman.

  KIM NEWMAN

  Red Reign

  KIM NEWMAN’S critically-acclaimed novel Anno Dracula was described by Locus as “the most comprehensive, brilliant, dazzlingly audacious vampire novel to date.” “Red Reign” was the novella which inspired that work, and the version which appears here has been revised from that originally published in The Mammoth Book of Vampires.

  The author’s other novels include the equally audacious The Night Mayor, Bad Dreams, Jago and The Quoram. Under his not-so-secret “Jack Yeovil” pseudonym, Boxtree has finally published the author’s Warhammer volume Genevieve Undead, a trilogy of vampire novellas and a follow-up to his previous books in the series, Drachenfels and Beasts in Velvet.

  With Paul J. McAuley, he co-edited one of the best original anthologies of 1992, In Dreams; his tale “The Man Who Collected Barker” was recently adapted into a stage play in Los Angeles, and his fiction has appeared in Dark Voices 5: The Pan Book of Horror, The Mammoth Book of Zombies, The Dedalus Book of Femmes Fatales and Narrow Houses. A short story collection is forthcoming.

  If you’re a fan of vampire movies or fiction, get set to enter a bizarre alternate Victorian society, where the King of the Undead holds sway over many familiar characters . . .

  I

  Dr Seward’s Diary

  (Kept in phonograph)

  8 SEPTEMBER, 1888. Tonight’s was easier than last week’s. Perhaps, with practice, everything becomes easier. If never easy. Never . . . easy.

  I’m sorry.

  It is hard to keep one’s thoughts in order, and this apparatus is unforgiving of digressions. I cannot ink over hasty words, terminate unthought-out thoughts, tear out a spoile
d page. I must be concise. After all, I have had medical training. This record may be of importance to posterity.

  Very well.

  Subject: female, apparently in her twenties. Recently dead, I would say. Profession: obvious. Location: Hanbury Street, Whitechapel. Near the Salvation Army mission. Time: shortly before five in the morning. The fog was thick as mud, which is the best for my nightwork. In this year, fog is welcome. The less one can see of what London has become, the better.

  She gave her name as Lulu. She was not English. From her accent, I would judge her German or Austrian by birth. A pretty thing, distinctive. Shiny black hair cut short and lacquered, in an almost Chinese style. In the fog and with the poor light of the street, her red lips seemed quite black. Like all of them, she smiled too easily, disclosing sharp little pearl-chip teeth. A cloud of cheap perfume, sickly sweet scent to cover the reek of decay.

  The streets are filthy in Whitechapel, open sewers of vice and foulness. The dead are everywhere.

  She laughed musically, the sound like something wrung from a mechanism, and beckoned me over, loosening the ragged feathers around her throat. Lulu’s laugh reminded me of Lucy. Lucy when she was alive, not the leech-thing we finished in Kingstead Cemetery.

  Three years ago, when only Van Helsing believed . . . The world has changed since then. Thanks to the Prince Consort.