The Best new Horror 4

by Stephen Jones

  While Vlad Tepes was scrambling to right himself, the rest of his court were in confusion. Some returned to their bloody pleasure, some fell insensate.

  She could do nothing for Beauregard.

  Ruthven was uncertain. With the Queen truly dead, things were going to change. He could have barred her way from the palace, but he hesitated—ever the politician—then stood aside.

  Merrick had the doors open for her, and she escaped from the infernal heat and stench of the throne-room. He then slammed the doors shut, and put his back to them. He had been part of Beauregard’s conspiracy, also willing to give his life for his sovereign. He nodded to the main doors, and made a long howl that might have meant “go.”

  She saluted the man, and ran from the Palace. Outside, in the night, fires were burning high. The news would soon be spreading.

  A spark had touched the gunpowder keg.

  PETER ATKINS

  Aviatrix

  PETER ATKINS was born in Liverpool in 1955—a year of birth he is proud to share with Disneyland, rock ’n’ roll, and the movies This Island Earth and Kiss Me Deadly. For six years he acted with Clive Barker’s experimental theatre group, The Dog Company, and then trod the boards for another half-decade, this time as composer, musician and singer with a band called The Chase. For twenty years he has been convinced that Buster Keaton is God.

  Atkins is best known to horror fans for his movie scripts for Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988) and Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992), both based on concepts created by his old school-chum Barker.

  However, he is also the author of Morningstar, an assured first novel which combines vampires and serial killers; his short fiction has been published in Fear and Demons and Deviants; he has contributed scripts to Epic’s Hellraiser comic books and graphic novels, and has written two teleplays for Propaganda Films’ Inside-Out TV series. His work has also appeared in the non-fiction volumes Clive Barker’s Shadows In Eden, Cut! Horror Writers on Horror Film, Pandemonium and The Hellraiser Chronicles. Current projects include writing Hellraiser IV as well as an epic Egyptian fantasy/adventure co-scripted with director Anthony Hickox, and a new novel.

  All you need to know about “Aviatrix” is explained by the author in his Afterword . . .

  I

  WAY HE FIGURED IT WAS THIS. You go up in one of those things, it’s going to crash. It crashes, you’re going to die. You’re going to die, what the hell’s stopping you from going to Stan’s Corner Donuts in Westwood Village three hours before check-in at LAX and eating your way through five Maple Bars? Shit, you’d be cinders and memory long before that superlative sweetness transformed itself into inches and artery-closure so who cared?

  II

  He actually settled for three. He wasn’t hedging his bets on survival or anything, it was just that three really were enough. Finishing the third, filling his mouth with the last two inches of maple-flavored frosting and soft warm dough, was the optimum point of pleasure. Starting another would undercut the sensual perfection. Better to stop. But God, they were good. Sugar and fat. It didn’t get any better. The Western World had reached apotheosis at the moment that combinations of those two foodstuffs became readily available to anyone with half an income. Keep your Beethoven. Fuck your Goya. Sugar and Fat. That was culture.

  “You wanna refill on the coffee, Steve?”

  Dyson looked over his shoulder to the counter. His name wasn’t Steve but he was the only customer in there so he figured it was him who was being asked.

  “No. No thanks. I’m fine.”

  The guy behind the counter—young, long-haired, loud shirt—grinned.

  “Can’t be fine, Steve. Three donuts. Gotta be some kind of oral compensation going on.”

  Dyson (still not Steve, still Jonathan) hesitated. He’d always hated people guessing things about him, hated more the readiness of some strangers to break the social contract of silence with which we surround such guesses. Nevertheless, he answered. Probably because he also hated appearing to care.

  “Flying,” he said, “Hate it. Every time I know I’m going to die.”

  “And every time you haven’t.”

  “God’s oversight. Or his little joke.”

  “False sense of security thing?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Get you to where you think maybe, just maybe, this is gonna be alright then—bam! Gotcha! Yeah?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Don’t wanna burst your bubble, Steve . . . but you’re probably not that important. Know what I mean?”

  “Oh, I don’t feel special or anything. I . . .”

  “You figure the joke’s on all of us. ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.’ Macbeth.”

  “Lear.”

  “What?”

  “It’s Lear. King Lear. Not Macbeth.”

  “Oh. Whatever. It’s still bullshit. They’ve got better things to do.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Like watching us learn to fly. And being proud of us.”

  Dyson paused before replying, filling the silence by draining his cup of what little coffee remained. He looked over the styrofoam lip at the counterman, at his flawless young face, at his open smile. He didn’t need this. He came to Stan’s for donuts not facile New Age optimism. Worse; he’d conversed. Next time he came in and this guy was working there was a ready-made opening for more conversation. He hated that. Donuts were private. Stan’s was ruined for him.

  He put the cup down beside the wax-paper and crumpled napkins, mumbled a mock high-spirited hope-you’re-right-see-ya, hefted up his on-flight bag, and left. It was only when he reached the taxi-rank at the corner of Westwood and Lindbrook that he realised he’d assumed there would be a Next Time at Stan’s. The sudden anger he felt at the counterman for tricking him into such an expectation was subsumed in the nauseating warmth of the anxiety rush that flooded his system as punishment for hope. His legs were weak as he grinned inanely at the driver of the first cab in line and let himself into the back seat.

  “Hi. Howya doin’?” he said, in response to the driver’s enquiring eyes in the rear-view mirror. “LAX please.”

  III

  Dyson was always very strict with himself about when he could take the valium. Before check-in was no good—you might find out there that the flight was delayed and thus have wasted one of the precious little pills (increasingly harder to get because stupid doctors thought beta-blockers were healthier. Healthier! Who fucking cares?!)—but, equally, you didn’t want to wait too long after getting your boarding pass—take-off was the worst part and God forbid you should be hurtled down that runway still waiting for the drug to kick in, embarrassing yourself and disturbing other passengers with your moans and copious sweating. No, there was a five or ten minute window immediately after check-in during which a bar could be found, a large scotch on the rocks ordered, a ten-milligram placed on the tongue, and the liquor swallowed in a single gulp, carrying the pill with it.

  Dyson had done all that and was now strapped in his window seat pretending to read the airline’s magazine. He glanced at his watch. Takeoff was in fifteen minutes. But he wasn’t waiting for takeoff. He was waiting for that first evidence of the drug’s efficacy, the half-sleep he always fell into immediately before the plane taxied. Mustn’t prompt it, he thought, and looked back down at the article on French street-markets.

  Apparently you could buy groceries there. And occasionally clothes. Sometimes prints. How fucking riveting. The disembodied voice of a cabin crew member began advising passengers about the safety features to be found on this 767. Several of the bookstalls by the Seine sold English paperbacks. In the unlikely event of an emergency wine was much cheaper than in the cafés. There were several exits near the market and clothes could be found under the banks of the river in front of you. The child by the bookstall was clearly indicated and even though oxygen was flowing would not inflate. Beside the river, far from the boy, was a w
oman who was speaking. People were walking by, not even noticing her strange manner of dress. She was clad in a bulky fur-lined leather jacket and had a tight-fitting leather helmet on her head, its unfastened straps hanging on either side of her face.

  Dyson wanted to hear what she was saying and walked nearer to her. She smiled at his approach and continued her explanation even as she motioned for him to climb in the open seat behind the one in which she sat.

  “Static is occasionally encountered on the radios of Heaven.”

  Her voice was confident and benign. Dyson fastened the belt around his waist and adjusted his goggles. He looked beyond the jarring geometries of the struts between the upper and lower sets of wood-and-canvas wings to the undisturbed green fields on either side of the sandy runway. The fields, perfectly flat, stretched to every horizon. He, the woman, and the biplane itself were the only foreign objects. It was important that they left.

  The woman turned round in her seat to smile at him again.

  “We must discover the horizontal movement of elevators,” she said, and, turning away from him once more, started up the plane’s small engine, sending the single front-mounted propeller spinning furiously. Transmuted by the propeller’s frenzy, the formerly still air whipped back across Dyson’s face as an intimate and exhilarating wind. He opened his mouth to it, excited, and placed his hands on either side of the narrow open cockpit as the plane began to rush forward across the sand. The runway was uneven and bumpy but Dyson felt no fear as the fragile biplane hurtled faster and faster along it. The machine and the moment were implicit with flight, pregnant with escape. The trajectory held no potential other than a leap into the sky and the freedom of the winds.

  Dyson wondered how he could hear the pilot’s voice against the combined roaring of engine and air but hear it he did.

  “You need to put your seat in the upright position,” she seemed to be saying, though he could see only her back and the waves of corn-blonde hair that hung below the back of her helmet. He looked down at himself. The seat was welded in position tight against the cockpit. How could he move it? He closed his eyes to think about this further.

  “Sir? Your seat has to be upright for takeoff.”

  Dyson opened his eyes. A dark-haired Flight Attendant was smiling apologetically at him as she stood in the aisle beside the seat of the passenger next to him.

  “I’m sorry,” she stressed, stretching the word out to demonstrate further her distress at disturbing him. “But the Captain’s about to take off and I need your seat to be upright.”

  Dyson nodded vigorously and blinked himself more thoroughly awake.

  “Of course, of course,” he said and pressed the button in the arm-rest beside him, leaning from the waist as he did so to allow the seat-back to inch forward into its takeoff position.

  “Thank you,” the Stewardess said, rewarding him with another smile before moving on to check the seat-positions of other passengers.

  Dyson hadn’t lowered his seat consciously. He’d never do that. He always fastened his seat-belt immediately he sat down, too. He hated having to be asked or reminded about either of those things. One of the masks he wore to hide his terror was the seasoned, bored-with-the-rituals, flier and he hated to be caught out. His thigh must have pressed against the button as he dozed and lowered his seat-back in his sleep. He looked out of his window. The plane had left the gate and was swinging round onto the designated runway to begin its launch. A wave of anxiety went through him, small (the valium was doing its job) but unpleasant enough. He was furious with his thigh. He’d really been asleep, so asleep that maybe for the first time he could have gotten through takeoff unconscious and woken only when the plane had already reached cruising altitude. That would have been great. But no, here he was as usual—convinced of death and powerless to do anything about it as the huge machine (Too big. Too heavy. How could these things fly? How could they?) thundered its way toward immolation. He sat bolt upright, tense in every muscle, conscious of every breath, and waited for the inevitable catastrophe.

  IV

  Dyson finished his cognac and settled back a little in his seat. He felt a lot better now. The plane had been at a steady 31,000 feet for over an hour and all the banking and turning that made the first twenty minutes of any flight the worst were long over. Dyson had had two scotches before dinner, a red wine to accompany the filet mignon, and a cognac to accompany the coffee. And the Byrds were on one of the in-flight audio channels, the falling bass-line and soaring harmonies of Turn, Turn, Turn entering each of Dyson’s ears and meeting somewhere in the middle of his head.

  He often experienced these twenty or thirty-minute stretches of euphoria during a flight, times where he could gaze out of his window at the distant landscapes below him and feel genuinely good about being up in a plane. But it took a lot of alcohol to get him in such states and it took very little to get him out of them; ten seconds of turbulence was enough, or the sight of another plane through his window (distance and direction didn’t matter—if there were two planes in the same cubic mile of air, he assumed they would find each other). But the Byrds and the booze and the unshaky sky had given him this period of peace and he luxuriated in it.

  Over on the video monitor a couple of rows in front of him he could see actors mouthing words and buildings exploding silently. He wondered about tuning his headset to the movie soundtrack but decided against it. He closed his eyes instead, turned the music down slightly, and stretched his legs out as much as he could beneath the seat in front of him.

  The sea below them was a pale purple. They’d left the glass mountains and their strange shifting subterranean contents long behind them, though the aviatrix had dipped the biplane sufficiently at the time for Dyson to catch a glimpse of one huge clouded eye the size of a shopping-mall parking-lot, which had blinked beneath the crystal as they’d buzzed past. Dyson was more impressed with the waves though; with no shore to break against save gravity, they rose in the middle of their ocean, losing their colour as they did so, to climb vertically in towering translucency and foam themselves into a fury of deep-white dissolution at their skyscraper-high peaks.

  Occasionally, his pilot would turn half-round in her front seat to smile at him and to gesture with a directional hand at some other point of interest. They’d been flying for hours, it seemed, and Dyson felt he could fly forever. His pilot was beautiful and the sights they shared were wonderful. He was reaching forward to tap her shoulder and tell her this when a sharp pinging noise somewhere above his head distracted him and made him look up.

  He found that he was looking at an illuminated sign telling him to fasten his seat-belt. For a moment he was terribly confused and then a quick glance around him reminded him of where he was. His seat-belt of course was still fastened but the heavy-set man beside him needed to fish the two halves of his belt out from beneath his expansive backside and clip them together. The senior Flight Attendant’s voice emerged from the overhead speakers in the cabin to reinforce the instruction.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the Captain has found it necessary to illuminate the seat-belt signs while we go through this turbulence. If you are standing anywhere in the cabin, please return to your seats. Thank you.”

  Dyson’s heart beat a little faster. The plane was bumping and rocking like an express train on a bad stretch of track. He dropped that simile bloody quickly; derailment here didn’t mean ploughing up some farmer’s field, it meant a drop. A big drop. Thirty. One. Thousand. Feet. Stop it, stop it, he told himself. Turbulence, that’s all. Very normal. Very ordinary. He looked at his watch. Good. The flight was well past the halfway point—which probably meant nothing aeronautically but was always a good psychological signpost for him. He tried to summon up the feeling he had had in his dream in which flight was not only a miracle but an ecstasy. He failed of course but at least it gave him something to think about as the plane rode out the wind.

  The dream from which he’d just awoken was plainly a continuation of
the one he’d had immediately before takeoff. That was very strange. He’d never re-entered a dream before. The nearest he’d had to even a recurring dream was on those few occasions that he woke feeling that he’d visited places in the night which were geographically close to places he’d dreamed in before—as if somehow his night-time self might sometime meet a dream cartographer who would lay out for him route-marked maps demonstrating that this dream of a Tuesday in March, ten years ago, took place about four blocks from this one of a recent July, and that both were only a short cab-ride from the nightmare of December last.

  This dream, though, felt like it had continued while he was busy being awake and that he had rejoined it after an elapsed time equivalent to the time he had spent away. Very strange—it gave the dream state an equal standing with the waking one that he had never before granted to it. It was as if he was waking from each into the other, moving between equally valid territories rather than simply being entertained by his unconscious.

  He thought of the woman in his dream and her romantically anachronistic dress. He recognised the provenance of the imagery of course—those 1930s women fliers whose likenesses he had seen in magazine photos and documentary footage—but the aviatrix of his unconscious was something more than them. She was the paradigm of them all, the missing original from which they had been cast. It was as if he had dreamed of Amelia Earhart and dreamed not of the living woman who had disappeared during her last flight but of her spirit, of her principle, of the idea of which she had been simply the symbol.

  His dreaming self had fashioned her into an Amelia Earhart who was never lost, but translated—an Amelia Earhart who had flown herself through the clouds of unknowing into a yonder never so blue nor so wild. Not lost, but escaped; flying forever across imagination’s skies; borne on the secret winds that blow above the dream country.