The Best new Horror 4

by Stephen Jones

  Shar stands up. “I’ll go do something about lunch. The caterers must be gone by now.”

  The whale continues to swim in great circles out in the bay, close in, then farther out again. Bill begins to tell Gary about the financial problems his company has encountered, through no fault of their own. Gary promises nothing. He will study the financial statements, the local restrictions, and so on. Bill understands. He lays his hand on Gary’s arm and assures him that he understands.

  Veronica doesn’t come out for lunch, and after the others eat, Shar and Bill withdraw to nap. Gary puts on his trunks and swims in the pool, then stretches out under a cluster of palm trees, something Reclinatus, Bill said. You can transplant full-grown palm trees, instant garden, Gary thinks, listening to the wind in the fronds, a soothing rainlike sound. You dredge up the bay bottom, smooth it out, cover it with a carpet of sod, plant trees, flowers, shrubs, plant a house, plant people. Instant paradise. And there are no insects in the ground. Barren, pseudodirt. Not real.

  Veronica said, after her hospitalization, “Sometimes I wonder, if I reach out to touch you when you’re not looking, not thinking about me, not concentrating on being you, will my hand go through you?”

  “Meaning?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing you do is real. You work with money—bits of paper that have no meaning. You don’t even see the money. It isn’t real, just figures on paper, symbols in the computer. You don’t make anything, or fix anything. After you finish for the day, does the office lose its shape, melt down to nothing until you get back and give it a pseudoreality again?”

  “Veronica! For heaven’s sake!” He reached for her and she drew away sharply, in recoil almost.

  “No! That isn’t real either. A touch, a kiss, a fuck. Pseudoreal.”

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “You can tell if it’s real. You can tell. If it’s there years later. If you can go to it and find it years later.” Her voice became a whisper, her gaze on something he could not see. “Money becomes figures on paper. Patients become organs that become numbers in the computer. Pseudoreal.”

  After she is well again, they will separate. He has already decided. She is young, pretty until she became ill. She will marry again, maybe even have children. She wants children; he said later, after we’re established, a little money saved. Later. And he will find someone new, someone with gaiety in her laugh, who isn’t sick. Someone who will bring fun into his life again.

  He dozes in the shade and awakens to find that the sun is burning his legs. The distant throbbing has entered his head; it is his head, but there is another noise, screeching and screaming.

  “Hey, old buddy, you want a gin and tonic?” Bill calls from the doorway.

  “I sure as hell want something,” Gary says. He feels worse than he did that morning.

  Bill steps out to the terrace, shielding his eyes with his hand, looking at gulls screaming, diving, shrieking, just off the end of the dock. “Must be a school running,” he says, and starts to walk toward the commotion.

  Gary follows him slowly. They stop halfway up the dock. The whale is alongside the structure, the entire animal clearly visible in the quiet water. Blood is flowing from under it. The gulls wheel and scream overhead; now and then one of them dips to the surface of the water, darts up again.

  “I will be God damned!” Bill says in wonder. “She’s going to give birth. For Christ’s sake!”

  The whale pays no attention to the men on the dock. Now and then a long shudder passes through her, rippling from her great black head down to her tail. She is gleaming black, nine feet long, sleek; her blowhole opens and closes convulsively. She shudders; her body twists. She sinks, surfaces again.

  “She’s in trouble,” Gary says.

  Bill looks at him blankly.

  “It shouldn’t take more than a minute or so. I read that somewhere. And she’s bleeding too much.”

  The stain rises in the water, spreads like a cloud. It seems to rise like smoke signals.

  “There must be someone who knows what to do,” Gary says, staring at the helpless animal. “The university?”

  “It’s after five, Saturday,” Bill says. “The Coast Guard. I’ll call them. Someone there will know.”

  Gary stands on the dock, his hands clenched, watching the animal and the distress signals dispersing through the water. He doesn’t hear the others until Shar says, “Oh, my God!” He turns to see her and Veronica staring at the whale.

  “They’ll find someone to send,” Bill says, hurrying across the yard. “It might take a while, though.”

  The animal doesn’t have a while, Gary knows. He doesn’t say it. They continue to watch in horrified fascination as the ripples that are pain reactions spread throughout the animal regularly.

  Suddenly Shar draws her breath in. “Oh, no!” she cries. She is staring out at the bay. “Sharks!”

  Gary sees them, two fins moving through the water almost leisurely, as if they know there is no need to hurry. Bill turns and runs to the house. He comes back moments later with a rifle. He puts a handful of shells on the dock and loads a clip.

  “Where are they?” His voice is hoarse, the words slurred. Shar points. He doesn’t raise the rifle. “Too far,” he says in his strange voice.

  It is excitement, Gary realizes; his own mouth is dry and he feels prickly with sweat and goose bumps, as if something loathsome has touched him.

  “It won’t do any good,” Veronica says, and her voice is different, too, high and clear, but steady. “As soon as the baby is born, she’ll want to go out to sea, won’t she? They’ll be waiting for her.”

  She is looking out at the channel. There are more fins. A pack then. They must have followed the trail of blood from out in the gulf. Veronica appears transfixed, as if in a trance.

  “You’d better go inside,” he says. She does not give any sign that she heard him. He touches her arm and she twitches with a convulsive shudder, like the whale’s. She does not look at him. “Get inside, damn it!” His hand falls from her arm and he turns away. She wants to see the blood fest, he realizes, sickened. The near rapture on her face makes her look like a transcendent Joan at the moment when the torch touches the faggots. He takes a few long steps away from her, but then comes back; he can’t leave, neither can he stand still and watch. He hunches his shoulders and paces back and forth, back and forth.

  Suddenly the rifle goes off and the sound is a shock that hurts. It rolls over the water, echoing.

  “You can’t kill them from here!” Shar cries.

  “Only wanted to nick one,” Bill says, aiming again. “They’ll turn on one that’s wounded, maybe leave her alone.” The sharks move in a great semicircle, not coming directly toward the dock. They are swimming faster. He fires again.

  “The bastards! The bastards!” Bill says over and over, nearly sobbing. “The bastards!”

  Without warning the false killer whale moves away from the dock. She swims for about ten feet and rolls to her side. A cloud of blood spreads over the water. The gulls screech in a frenzy. They swoop down on the water, hiding the whale from view. She jerks and makes a great splash; they rise, screaming.

  The baby is being expelled. Gary can see the body, the curled tail already straightening, and now the head is free. With what must have been an agony of effort the mother whale rolls suddenly, away from the infant, making a complete turn in the water in one swift, sharp movement. She has broken the cord. As she finishes the turn she comes up under the infant and nudges it to the surface. It rolls to one side and does not move. It is white underneath, three feet long, and it is dead. It starts to sink and again the mother whale nudges it to the surface of the water. And again. And again. Gary turns away.

  He hears Shar being sick over the rail of the dock.

  “They’re coming!” Veronica screams.

  Gary swings around in time to see Veronica snatch the rifle from Bill’s limp hands; Bill is staring at the
whale as if in a daze. Veronica points the rifle and begins to fire very fast, not at the sharks, but downward. The sleek black whale thrashes in the water, she tries to jump, but doesn’t clear the surface, and then a paroxysm of jerks overtake her; finally she rolls over. The sharks begin to hit her.

  Veronica turns toward the house; the rifle in her hands is pointed directly at Gary. He does not move. Her face is closed and hard, a stranger’s face. She opens her hands and the rifle falls, clatters on the shells still on the dock. She walks past him without another glance at the sharks, at him, at anyone.

  The water churns and froths; it is all red. Shar staggers away from the rail. She reaches for Gary’s arm to steady herself and he jerks away involuntarily. Her hand would go through him, he thinks; she begins to run toward the house.

  “She’s afraid your wife will burn it down,” Bill says in a thick, dull voice. For a moment his face is naked; he knows. “I might burn it down myself one day. Just might do that.” He walks away, his shoulders bowed, his head lowered.

  The frenzied gulls, the boiling water, the heat of the sun, all that’s real, Gary thinks. Veronica firing the rifle, that was real. He remains on the dock until the Coast Guard cutter comes into sight, speeding toward the dock. The water is calm again; there is nothing for them to see, nothing for them to do. He doesn’t even bother to wave to them. One of the men is standing in the boat scanning the water, and suddenly he points. The sharks are still in the channel. The boat veers, makes waves as it swings around and heads out away from the dock.

  They didn’t even see him, Gary knows. He is not surprised. Slowly he lifts his hands and looks at them, and then lets them drop to his sides. In his mind is an image of a raging inferno.

  M. JOHN HARRISON

  Anima

  M. JOHN HARRISON says that he’s “working too hard to have a biography at the moment.” After being closely identified with Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds magazine in the late 1960s, his debut novel, The Committed Men, set in a post-holocaust Britain, was published in 1971.

  Since then, Harrison has written in a variety of genres, including horror, science fiction, sword & sorcery, graphic novels and rock climbing. In the UK, Flamingo has recently published his novel The Course of the Heart as a lead title, along with reissues of Climbers (winner of The Boardman Tasker Award) and his disturbing collection, The Ice Monkey and Other Stories. He also reviews for the Times Literary Supplement.

  “I’m working on a novel, Signs of Life,” reveals the author, “and a semi-autobiographical non-fiction centred on ‘high access’ engineering, The Drop, some of the research for which gave rise to the character Choe Ashton in ‘Anima’.”

  For his second contribution to this volume of Best New Horror, Harrison takes us on a quest into one man’s secret past . . .

  A WEEK AGO LAST TUESDAY I dreamed all night of trying to find out what had happened to the woman I loved. She was a pianist and a writer. We had met in New York when she played a concert of American and British music. She had reminded me how I had once been able to dance. Now, some time later, she had come to Britain to find me. But she could no longer speak, only weep. How had she travelled here? Where did she live? What was she trying to say? It was a dream heavy with sadness and urgency. All avenues of inquiry were blocked. There were people who might know about her, but always some reason why they could not be asked, or would not tell. I walked up and down the streets, examining the goods on the market stalls, my only clue the re-issue date of a once-banned medicine.

  I never dreamed anything like this until I met Choe Ashton –

  Ten past ten on a Saturday night in December, the weekend Bush talked to Gorbachev on the Maxim Gorki in half a gale in Valetta Harbour. In the east, governments were going over like tired middleweights—saggy, puzzled, almost apologetic. I sat in the upper rooms of a media drinking club in central London. The occasion was the birthday of a corporate executive called Dawes who sometimes commissioned work from me. Shortly they would be giving him a cake-shaped like half a football on which had been iced the words: OVER THE MOON BUT NOT OVER THE HILL!

  Meanwhile they were eating pasta.

  “Now that’s two thousand calories. How much more do you want?”

  “So far I’ve had cheese but not much else, which is interesting – ”

  “Are we going to get that fettucini we’ve paid for?”

  The women were in TV: the last of the power dressers. The men were in advertising, balding to a pony tail. Men or women, they all had a Range Rover in the car park at Poland Street. They were already thinking of exchanging it for one of the new Mazdas. I moved away from them and went to stare out of the window. The sky over towards Trafalgar Square looked like a thundery summer afternoon. The buildings, side-lit by street lamps, stood out against it, and against one another, like buildings cut from cardboard. I followed an obscure line of neon. A string of fairy lights slanting away along the edge of a roof. Then cars going to and fro down at the junction by St Martin-in-the-Fields, appearing very much smaller than they were. I had been there about a minute when someone came up behind me and said:

  “Guess what? I was just in the bog. I switched the hand-drier on and it talked to me. No, come on, it’s true! I put my hands under it and it said, ‘Choe, I really like drying your hands.’ ”

  I knew his name, and I had seen him around: no more. He was in his forties, short and wiry, full of energy, with the flat-top haircut and earring of a much younger man. His 501s were ripped at the knees. With them he wore a softly-tailored French Connection blouson which made his face, reddened as if by some kind of outdoor work, look incongruous and hard.

  “Has anything like that ever happened to you? I’m not kidding you, you know. It talked to me!”

  I shrugged.

  “OK. Give us a fag then, if you don’t believe me. Eh?”

  He was delighted by my embarrassment.

  “I don’t smoke,” I said.

  “Come on,” he wheedled. “Every fucker smokes. Dawsie only knows people who smoke. Give us a fag.”

  I had spent all day feeling as if my eyes were focusing at different lengths. Every so often, things—especially print—swam in a way which suggested that though for one eye the ideal distance was eighteen inches, the other felt happier at twelve. Choe Ashton turned out to be the perfect object for this augmented kind of vision, slipping naturally in and out of view, one part of his personality clear and sharp, the rest vague and impressionistic. What did he do? Whose friend was he? Any attempt to bring the whole of him into view produced a constant sense of strain, as your brain fought to equalize the different focal lengths.

  “I’m sick of this,” he said. “Let’s fuck off to Lisle Street and have a Chinese. Eh?”

  He gave me a sly, beautiful smile. An ageing boy in a French Connection jacket.

  “Come on, you know you want to.”

  I did. I was bored. As we were leaving, they brought the birthday cake in. People always seem very human on occasions like this. Dawes made several efforts to blow the candles out, to diminishing applause; and ended up pouring wine over them. Then an odd thing happened. The candles, which—blackened, but fizzing and bubbling grossly, dripping thick coloured wax down the sides of the football—had seemed to be completely extinguished, began to burn again. Blinking happily around, Dawes had taken the incident as a powerful metaphor for his own vitality, and was already pouring more wine on them.

  “Did you see that?” I asked Choe Ashton.

  But he was halfway out of the door.

  At first we walked rapidly, not talking. Head down, hands rammed into the pockets of his coat, Ashton paused only to glance at the enormous neon currency symbols above the Bureau de Change on Charing Cross Road. “Ah, money!” But as soon as he recognized Ed’s Easy Diner, he seemed content to slow down and take his time. It was a warm night for December. Soho was full of the most carefully dressed people. Ashton pulled me towards a group standing outside the Groucho, so that he could adm
ire their louche haircuts and beautifully crumpled chinos. “Can’t you feel the light coming off them?” he asked me in a voice loud enough for them to hear. “I just want to bask in it.”

  For a moment after he had said this, there did seem to be a light round them—like the soft light in a 70s movie, or the kind of watery nimbus you sometimes see when you are peering through a window in the rain. I pulled him away, but he kept yearning back along the pavement towards them, laughing. “I love you!” he called to them despairingly. “I love you!” They moved uncomfortably under his approval, like cattle the other side of a fence.

  “The middle classes are always on watch,” he complained.

  We dodged briefly into a pick-up bar and tried to talk. The only free table was on a kind of mezzanine floor on the way to the ladies’ lavatory. Up there you were on a level with the sound system. Drunken girls pushed past, or fell heavily into the table.

  “I love them all!” shouted Ashton.

  “Pardon?”

  “I love them!”

  “What, these too?”

  “Everything they do is wonderful!”

  Actually they just sat under the ads for Jello-shots, Schlitz and Molson’s Canadian and drank Lowenbrau: boys in soft three-button shirts and Timberline boots, girls with tailored jackets over white silk trousers. I couldn’t see how they had arrived there from Manor House or Finsbury Park, all those dull, broken, littered places on the Piccadilly line; or why. Eventually we got sick of bawling at one another over the music and let it drive us back out into Cambridge Circus.

  “I was here this afternoon,” he said. “I thought I heard my name called out.”

  “Someone you knew.”

  “I couldn’t see anyone.”

  We ended up in one of those Lisle Street restaurants which specialize in degree-zero décor, cheap crockery and grudging service. There were seven tables crammed into an area smaller than a newsagent’s shop. The lavatory—with its broken door handle and empty paper roll—was downstairs in the kitchens. Outside it on a hard chair sat a waitress, who stared angrily at you as you went past. They had a payphone: but if you wanted to use it, or even collect your coat from the coat rack, you had to lean over someone else’s dinner. Choe Ashton, delighted, went straight to the crepe paper shrine mounted in the alcove to show me a vase of plastic flowers, a red-and-gold tin censer from which the stubs of old incense sticks protruded like burnt-out fireworks, two boxes of safety matches.