The Best new Horror 4

by Stephen Jones

  Another ping from above his head stopped his analysis. He looked up. The seat-belt light had gone out. Dyson felt a rush of pleasure. She was still piloting him, it seemed; his thoughts of her had taken him through the turbulence into calmer skies without his usual neurotic attention to every second and every shudder.

  He smiled. He missed her, he realised. He wondered where they were and over what wonders she was flying him while he was away. Would it be possible to go back? Could he will himself into that territory into which he had previously merely stumbled? Excited, he fished through the seat-pocket for the in-flight courtesy bag and pulled out the complimentary eye-mask. On his rare forays up and down the aisles of aircraft on which he’d flown he’d always thought the passengers wearing those things looked inordinately fucking stupid, but now he didn’t give a shit what he looked like and he slipped the elasticated strap over his head and leaned back in his seat.

  “Aviatrix,” he said silently, relishing the word like a mantra or a spell of summoning, “aviatrix”.

  VI

  The desert was sentient.

  It lay beneath them, an expanse of subtly shifting sands, and Dyson, looking behind him, could see no beginning to its hugeness and, looking ahead, could see no end. What he could see, however, was that the desert observed their flight just as much as they observed it. For the most part its observation was implicit—a sensed thing rather than a seen—but occasionally, in a spirit of inquiry, it would reform part of itself, sending up into the air vast sheets of sand that would rise with breathtaking speed on either side of the biplane, so that where a moment before they had been high above a plain they were suddenly flying low between the towering walls of a valley, walls that shimmered with the constant movement of their countless grains.

  Once, it even completed the canopy, curving the tops of its walls toward each other until they met so that Dyson and the aviatrix were flying within a tunnel, a tunnel that should have been lightless but was somehow not—as if the desert had widened the spaces between every tiny grain of itself to allow its visitors the luxury of sight.

  They followed the tunnel for several minutes before the desert fell back around them to its passive state below. The woman turned in her cockpit to look at Dyson. Her hands were off the controls but he had realised some time back that she didn’t really need physical contact with the machinery. She and the plane were essentially one. They drove themselves through these dream skies by desire, not science.

  “Thunder has three sides, Steve,” she said, “But no dalmatians.”

  Dyson nodded. He was beginning to understand her. And was already terribly in love. She nodded downwards and he looked to see.

  They were flying over a hole in the world. Bounded like a midwest lake by long shore-roads, what Dyson saw was no body of water but a jet-black expanse of deep space, studded with distant stars and cloudy filaments of gases.

  The roar of an explosion suddenly deafened him. He couldn’t understand for a moment. He could see nothing that had happened that would explain the sound. Then he heard a voice to his side screaming in terminal panic.

  “Jesus fucking Christ! The wing’s gone!”

  VII

  Dyson, already screaming himself, tore the eye-mask from his face with fingers tingling with prescient terror.

  The fat man in the seat beside him was twitching like a speared beast, arms flapping uselessly in the air, the stink of his voided bowels invading Dyson’s senses almost before anything else.

  Dyson, unaware of the whimpers and screams coming from his own mouth, swept the cabin with his eyes. People were ripping themselves free of their restraining belts and clambering pointlessly into the aisles. There was nothing they could do for themselves, but they were listening to a primal voice within that decreed movement even when movement couldn’t save them.

  One Flight Attendant was paying lip service to procedure and shouting out for the passengers to remain calm while her colleagues, knowing it was over, joined in the atavistic dance of the civilians, running, scrambling, stumbling, screaming. The howls of the doomed filled the cabin of the aircraft and for one precious fleeting second Dyson had an absurd sense of satisfaction. He’d always known this terror—at least in embryo—and now that, fully born, it was running rampant through the souls of the previously complacent he felt the poisoned vindication of the doomsayer.

  It was all of three seconds since the exploding engine had torn the wing from the 767 and, incredibly, apart from the shuddering lurch to the side that accompanied the sundering, the crippled plane had stayed more or less steady.

  That stopped being true.

  Nose first, it dropped like a stone.

  Dyson’s belt was still fastened around him. It hurt like fuck as all his weight pressed against it. The passengers who had found the time to snap their belts, though, fell screaming down the vertical chute that the cabin of the plane had become and smashed into the first solid objects that barred their way. Eight people died before the plane hit the ground. Twenty-three people wished they had. One hundred and fifty more were beyond thought, pushed howling into a primal state of animal terror.

  Dyson was one of them. He was squealing like a three-day torture victim. There was nothing in his mind except dread and denial and nothing in his body save ice and emptiness. Nothing could save him and nothing did.

  The plane arrowed itself into the unyielding rock of a mountain range and, fuel-tanks still one third full, exploded instantly into all-consuming fire, killing everyone on board.

  VIII

  Dyson had been screaming the second before he died and was surprised to find he was still screaming the second after. He was still falling at a nauseating speed, as if the mountain and the explosion had not interrupted him at all. He was no longer in his seat, however, and no longer in the plane. It was just him, falling through complete blackness and screaming.

  By the time a minute had passed, though, continuing to scream seemed a little stupid. And so he stopped. The blackness was still all around him and there seemed to be little he could do about that except continue to fall through it. Unless of course he opened his eyes. And so he did.

  The sky was jade-green and tasted moist and slightly acidic. Far below, the ground was writhing. It was a mass of intertwined worm-like creatures, each the length of Europe and all of them the colours of bruising. Immediately in front of him, and falling just as fast, was the aviatrix.

  Dyson tried to reach out to her but found it difficult to move his limbs against the rush of air. It was unnecessary. She turned toward him, riding the air like a sky-diver, and took hold of his hand. Instantly, their fall stopped. Dyson gasped. They were hovering in mid-air. Her eyes locked on his and he found himself unable to look away as her change began.

  IX

  Above the unending territories of the dream country the great white bird flew as she had always flown, her vast shadow bringing night in her wake.

  Invisible from the ground, in the warmth of that huge snowy breast, nestled Dyson, fingers clinging happily to the feathers of the white goddess as her great wings beat tireless against the skies and flew into forever.

  AFTERWORD

  Dave Rae, a friend of mine, works for Liverpool City Council. A year or so ago, a memo from the Council came down to all employees. Dave showed it to me. It was essentially a list of words which were deemed to be no longer acceptable. These words were Politically Incorrect. It was a very long list. Among it were the obvious words—chairman, postman, etc.—and many many more. One of them was aviatrix.

  Now, the first thing to occur to us was how ludicrously unlikely it was that any city employee would ever have need to make use of such a glorious anachronism as “aviatrix” and Dave and I had many a drunken laugh trying to work the word into hypothetical Council communications. Secondly, we bemoaned the waste of time, energy and tax-payer’s money that went into the production of such a thorough list when a general instruction to avoid words or phrasing that were redolent of ra
cism or sexism would have done the job.

  Thirdly—and this is what’s scary—aviatrix is a beautiful word and these dickheads wanted to ban it. They wanted to remove it from the language because it had a feminine ending. It presupposed that there was a difference between a male flier and a female one and this was deemed unacceptable. Does the phrase “thought-police” occur to anyone? One of the primary functions of language is to provide us with a set of symbols by which we understand the world; to allow us to illuminate the tiniest shades of the meaning of things and of the differences between things. When any Authority attempts to control language, they are really trying to take away your ability to understand, to perceive subtle differences, to think.

  A woman dressed in a flying uniform is different than a man dressed in a flying uniform. She’s not inferior. She’s not superior. But she’s different. And a language that denies itself a word to illustrate that difference is a crippled language.

  Further—don’t these people have ears? Are they deaf to the music of language? Do they not hear that it’s about sound as much as it’s about sense? Aviatrix is a gorgeous set of sounds even if you don’t know what it means. So these arbiters of ideological soundness not only want to rob us of subtle shades of meaning, they want to rob us of melody, too. Fuck ’em. Fuck ’em all. May they burn in a non-creed-specific Hell.

  I wrote “Aviatrix” for several reasons, but one of them is to ensure that there are now in the world more pieces of paper bearing this beautiful banned word than there used to be. The story is dedicated to Dave Rae.

  Peter Atkins

  Los Angeles

  September 1992

  IAN R. MACLEOD

  Snodgrass

  MUCH AS IAN MACLEOD would “sometimes like to say that I work part-time as a wall-of-death-rider or have just come back from a couple of months investigating the life cycle of the Tibetan swamp moth, I remain a writer and a house-husband, and reasonably content with my lot.”

  He actually lives in Britain’s Sutton Coldfield with his wife Gillian and daughter Emily. After working for ten years in the Civil Service, he quit his job to become a full-time writer.

  The first story he sold, “l/72nd Scale” (reprinted in Best New Horror 2), was nominated for a Nebula Award in 1990 by the Science Fiction Writers of America. He has made three successive appearances in Gardner Dozois’ The Year’s Best Science Fiction/Best New SF anthologies, and stories have been published in Interzone, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, Pulphouse and In Dreams. A hardback collection is possibly forthcoming in America, and he is currently re-writing the “first” novel following “various rejections, buggerings-about and near-misses with publishers.”

  About “Snodgrass”, MacLeod confesses to “being no great Beatles or Lennon fan. I started wondering about the chances that brought the Beatles together, and the flukes of talent and history that made them what they were.

  “I think that the driving engine of the story as far as I was concerned was actually a kind of fear—which perhaps helps to explain its inclusion in a horror collection. The fear in question is the fear of artistic failure, which, in the minds of most artists (i.e., me) is closely linked with failing in life as a whole. You want to shout things from the golden rooftops, but instead you end up mumbling in the gutter . . .”

  I’VE GOT ME WHOLE LIFE WORKED OUT. Today, give up smoking. Tomorrow, quit drinking. The day after, give up smoking again.

  It’s morning. Light me cig. Pick the fluff off me feet. Drag the curtain back, and the night’s left everything in the same mess outside. Bin sacks by the kitchen door that Cal never gets around to taking out front. The garden jungleland gone brown with autumn. Houses this way and that, terraces queuing for something that’ll never happen.

  It’s early. Daren’t look at the clock. The stair carpet works greasegrit between me toes. Downstairs in the freezing kitchen, pull the cupboard where the handle’s dropped off.

  “Hey, Mother Hubbard,” I shout up the stairs to Cal. “Why no fucking cornflakes?”

  The lav flushes. Cal lumbers down in a grey nightie. “What’s all this about cornflakes? Since when do you have breakfast, John?”

  “Since John got a job.”

  “You? A job?”

  “I wouldn’t piss yer around about this, Cal.”

  “You owe me four weeks’ rent,” she says. “Plus I don’t know how much for bog roll and soap. Then there’s the TV licence.”

  “Don’t tell me yer buy a TV licence.”

  “I don’t, but I’m the householder. It’s me who’d get sent to gaol.”

  “Every Wednesday, I’ll visit yer,” I say, rummaging in the bread bin.

  “What’s this job anyway?”

  “I told yer on Saturday when you and Kevin came back from the Chinese. Must have been too pissed to notice.” I hold up a stiff green slice of Mighty White. “Think this is edible?”

  “Eat it and find out. And stop calling Steve Kevin. He’s upstairs asleep right at this moment.”

  “Well there’s a surprise. Rip Van and his tiny Winkle.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t say things like that. You know what Steve’s like if you give him an excuse.”

  “Yeah, but at least I don’t have to sleep with him.”

  Cal sits down to watch me struggle through breakfast. Before Kevin, it was another Kevin, and a million other Kevins before that, all with grazed knuckles from the way they walk. Cal says she needs the protection even if it means the odd bruise.

  I paste freckled marge over ye Mighty White. It tastes just like the doormat, and I should know.

  “Why don’t yer tell our Kev to stuff it?” I say.

  She smiles and leans forward.

  “Snuggle up to Dr Winston here,” I wheedle.

  “You’d be too old to look after me with the clients, John,” she says, as though I’m being serious. Which I am.

  “For what I’d charge to let them prod yer, Cal, yer wouldn’t have any clients. Onassis couldn’t afford yer.”

  “Onassis is dead, unless you mean the woman.” She stands up, turning away, shaking the knots from her hair. She stares out of the window over the mess in the sink. Cal hates to talk about her work. “It’s past eight, John,” she says without looking at any clock. It’s a knack she has. “Hadn’t you better get ready for this job?”

  Yeah, ye job. The people at the Jobbie are always on the look-out for something fresh for Dr Winston. They think of him as a challenge. Miss Nikki was behind ye spit-splattered perspex last week. She’s an old hand—been there for at least three months.

  “Name’s Dr Winston O’Boogie,” I drooled, doing me hunchback when I reached the front of ye queue.

  “We’ve got something for you, Mr Lennon,” she says. They always call yer Mister or Sir here, just like the fucking police. “How would you like to work in a Government Department?”

  “Well, wow,” I say, letting the hunchback slip. “You mean like a spy?”

  That makes her smile. I hate it when they don’t smile.

  She passes me ye chit. Name, age, address. Skills, qualifications—none. That bit always kills me. Stapled to it we have details of something clerical.

  “It’s a new scheme, Mr Lennon,” Nikki says. “The Government is committed to helping the long-term unemployed. You can start Monday.”

  So here’s Dr Winston O’Boogie at the bus stop in the weird morning light. I’ve got on me best jacket, socks that match, even remembered me glasses so I can see what’s happening. Cars are crawling. Men in suits are tapping fingers on the steering wheel as they groove to Katie Boyle. None of them live around here—they’re all from Solihull—and this is just a place to complain about the traffic. And Monday’s a drag cos daughter Celia has to back the Mini off the drive and be a darling and shift Mummy’s Citroën too so yer poor hard-working Dad can get to the Sierra.

  The bus into town lumbers up. The driver looks at me like I�
�m a freak when I don’t know ye exact fare. Up on the top deck where there’s No standing, No spitting, No ball games, I get me a window seat and light me a ciggy. I love it up here, looking down on the world, into people’s bedroom windows. Always have. Me and me mate Pete used to drive the bus from the top front seat all the way from Menlove Avenue to Quarry Bank School. I remember the rows of semis, trees that used to brush like sea on shingle over the roof of the bus. Everything in Speke was Snodgrass of course, what with valve radios on the sideboard and the Daily Excess, but Snodgrass was different in them days. It was like watching a play, waiting for someone to forget their lines. Mimi used to tell me that anyone who said they were middle class probably wasn’t. You knew just by checking whether they had one of them blocks that look like Kendal Mint Cake hooked around the rim of the loo. It was all tea and biscuits then, and Mind, dear, your slip’s showing. You knew where you were, what you were fighting.

  The bus crawls. We’re up in the clouds here, the fumes on the pavement like dry ice at a big concert. Oh, yeah. I mean, Dr Winston may be nifty fifty with his whole death to look forward to but he knows what he’s saying. Cal sometimes works at the NEC when she gets too proud to do the real business. Hands out leaflets and wiggles her ass. She got me a ticket last year to see Simply Red and we went together and she put on her best dress that looked just great and didn’t show too much and I was proud to be with her, even if I did feel like her dad. Of course, the music was warmed-over shit. It always is. I hate the way that red-haired guy sings. She tried to get me to see Cliff too, but Dr Winston has his pride.