The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 24 Read online

  “‘The Discord of Being’ is really my version of a love song to Morocco,” reveals the author. “I spent a short holiday there a couple of years ago, and it completely got under my skin. I loved the colour and the life and the sense of adventure it engenders. It’s also stunningly beautiful, with completely contrasting landscapes wherever we went.

  “There’s always a sense of discordance, though, when you’re in a strange place and don’t entirely understand its ways. All of those things found their way into ‘Discord’, along with a flavour of the local folklore. The thing that remained with me longest, though, was an odd sense of being homesick for somewhere that was never home – it’s probably unsurprising that the phrase found its way into the characters’ dialogue.”

  EMMA HADN’T BEEN to Morocco, the place her mother was buried and her father still lived, since she was little more than a child. All the same, as she stepped off the aeroplane it seemed familiar, despite the strangeness of the low, decorated terminal, the palm trees waving flag-like branches in the breeze. It was the sky, she decided. A grey covering of clouds rolled away into the distance; it was an English sky. Even so, her skin prickled with sweat as she walked towards immigration with the other passengers – holidaymakers, their children, and people going home.

  In the terminal, where families waited, one man stood among the others, holding a sign that bore her name. Her father had sent a colleague to meet her, a tall, neatly dressed man named Ibrahim. She shook hands with the stranger, remembering her father’s words on the telephone: You don’t need to come. She felt he had been offering an escape route for them both.

  The call had come late one night, the ring tone sounding just like any other. That was what seemed strange afterward, that the sound had carried no warning: that she hadn’t known.

  Disturbed, her father had said, and all Emma could think of was being pressed close to her mother’s body, safe, warm. Her grave has been disturbed. I just – I thought you should know. And then that eternal mantra: You don’t need to come.

  The thought of it angered her. How could he have done this? For it was her father she blamed, at once and entirely. He had brought her mother here, leaving Emma to stay with an aunt, just for a little while. And then her mother died and he decided to stay, just like that, not seeing Emma save for when she came for her mother’s funeral. How could he let her mother die like that? How could he let her die here? And how could he live among people who would do this to her grave?

  Emma opened her mouth to say something to Ibrahim, then closed it again. It was as if he read her thoughts. He turned to her with sympathy in his eyes. “The Moroccan people would not do this.”

  She scowled. “Then who?”

  It was his turn to subside. He shook his head, led her to the car.

  It wasn’t long before they reached the foothills of the Atlas Mountains. Emma watched the colours flash by. She had imagined somewhere sepia and bleak, without growth and life; instead there was this red land, with grasses and straw and brilliant yellow flowers, everything dotted with dark green argan trees.

  The engine protested as the road grew steeper, heading up towards the grey sky.

  “It will rain,” Ibrahim said, trying to lighten the mood. “I think you brought it from England,” and she smiled back at him as he was proved right; droplets speckled the windscreen. The wipers scraped and Emma wound down the window to see a river rattling down a narrow gully, palm trees darkening in the rain.

  They wound upwards until they reached a narrow track. To one side great boulders were piled atop one another, their ochre streaked with red and grey and orange. To the other side was a sheer drop. Emma glimpsed the road they had travelled far below, a village nestled into the hillside beyond, the mosque’s minaret towering over everything else.

  In front of them, an inlet was cut into the rocks. Buildings slotted into it, filling every inch, their wooden doorways painted bright colours. One opened and a man stepped out. He wore a point-hooded djellaba and had yellow babouches on his feet. He had a grey beard and was turning something in his hand; a piece of stone. With a tremor, Emma realised it was her father.

  When she turned to Ibrahim, he gave a sympathetic smile. Her father did not hold out his arms or say anything at all. Instead he raised his watery eyes, nodded, and led the way inside.

  The room was dark, its concrete floor strewn with threadbare rugs. There was a simple wooden table, shelves holding rocks and grit and tools: hammers, chisels, brushes. A mobile phone lay among them, dust-covered like the rest. The room smelled of damp stone and something sweeter; honey, perhaps. Emma felt a twinge of anger. As far as she’d known, her father had left England for a good job, a prestigious job, working with the fossil mining concerns that dotted the mountains. But this – was this why he had left? Her desk at work was just one grey cubicle among many, but the walls were smooth, the floor clean. She had a computer and a telephone, air conditioning.

  Then she saw a small bottle balanced on the lintel over the door, its contents dark red, muddy looking. She snatched it down and sniffed, thinking of alcohol, but the scent was of meat.

  Her father looked apologetic. “It’s for the djinn,” he said. “It keeps them out.” He shrugged.

  Emma snorted, banging it back onto the ledge. “Is this it?” She could barely keep the fury out of her voice. She waved a hand around the room, encompassing everything.

  Her father lifted his arms, let them fall. He still clutched something in his hand and he held it out. An ammonite, tight whorls inscribed in stone. “A new species,” he said. “New to science, anyway. I saved it for you.”

  She reached out and his fingers closed over it. “I meant I could name it for you.”

  Emma shook her head. He had named her. Her. And then he had left her for this shack with its dirt and its rocks.

  Her father nodded, as though it was what he had expected. “It is good to see you, Em.”

  “Emma.” She barked out the word, though he was right; Em was what people called her. It was what her mother had called her. Her stomach twisted.

  “Emma.” He nodded.

  “Are you going to tell me what happened?”

  “I will,” he said. “But first you can get settled. We’ll have tea together. I’ll show you around.”

  Emma glanced at the room. She had seen everything already.

  “No,” he said. “Not in here. Out there.”

  The mountains swirled around them, fading into the distance. Rain still pattered down but the sun shone through it, the light soft and delicate, turning the slopes to pastel. Wild flowers sparked in brilliant pinks and yellows. And everywhere, leaning against the building, lying on the ground, were ammonites and trilobites, some of them several feet across.

  Her father was talking about how the mountains had formed. Emma imagined him burrowing into the miles of fossils under his feet, chipping at the vastness until he had found each one, his home long forgotten. Out here, she could almost forget it too. The air was clean and smelled of rain, the mountains sweet, beguiling. And something he said struck her: it was all under the sea, and she felt a wave of vertigo, imagined fathoms of salt water above her head, stretching into the sky. She had a sense of the earth beneath her shifting and shattering, thrusting upwards over the millennia, movements on a scale impossible to imagine.

  “And you study all this.” She looked at the shapes on the ground, the spirals and lobes. She reminded herself that they were familiar from museums and nature programmes, known, catalogued. And yet he had been here for years. He worked for a company who dug up these creatures that had turned to stone and bought and sold them.

  “I study all this.”

  “So you understand it all.”

  He smiled. “No. No, I’ll never understand it all.”

  She scowled. “What happened to my mother?”

  He was silent.

  “What happened?”

  “She was at peace. She still is, Em.”

  She
did not correct him. She only waited.

  Her father’s throat clicked as he spoke. “They dug up the ground.”

  “Who did?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “How far?”

  He didn’t answer, though Emma knew he’d understood what she meant. How far down, is what she’d wanted to ask. He said nothing, raised his hands again and let them fall. Emma remembered the fossil in his hand, the delicate life written in stone, a species never before seen or numbered. That dizziness took her again. Amazing there could be anything new left to discover. A different kind of life, long turned to rock, held for a moment in the palm of his hand.

  “I want to see it,” she said. “I want to see everything.”

  The journey passed in bursts of rain and sunshine, blue patches of sky meeting and joining as they left the mountains. Emma’s father sat up front with Ibrahim. He hadn’t wanted to come, but Emma had insisted. She had felt like a geologist herself, fighting his reluctance, as though prising a fossil from its hole in the ground.

  Now the men exchanged occasional words in Darija, the Moroccan Arabic, low and quick as though they didn’t want to disturb her. Before they departed they’d packed the boot full of bags of fossils, so that Emma’s things wouldn’t fit; they were beside her on the seat.

  Emma looked out at the horizon and saw the higher peaks of the Altas, capped with snow. She remembered that somewhere out there lay the dunes of the Sahara, home of Tuareg and Bedouin, and felt again a wave of disorientation.

  Marrakesh, when they reached it, was something else again: a line of terracotta coloured rock walls. “The Red City,” said Ibrahim, and she imagined it being carved from the earth, the buildings rising like something organic.

  The grave was in a cemetery on the outskirts of the city, sectioned into Moslem, Jewish and Christian. The cemetery was narrow, spread around a hillside that had probably been no use for anything else. There were buildings opposite, shops with narrow alleys leading away.

  Emma was suddenly reluctant, but her father held out his hand. “It’s all right,” he said. “I told you.” She followed, glancing back to see that Ibrahim had stayed behind.

  Emma had been fifteen when her mother was buried, an event that was oddly and comprehensively missing from her memory, as if she’d tried to blank it out, or never really taken it in. A heart attack, they’d said; a Western death in a country far from home. Now Emma stood in the cemetery, though the recognition was strong and total, a knife in her gut. The headstones were lit by sharp, hard sunlight. She saw the one that was her mother’s, but it wasn’t right: it looked intact, a little crooked perhaps, but there was nothing to show that anything had happened. She stared at the words: Beloved wife and mother.

  “But it’s fine,” she said, her voice faltering. She felt she had been robbed, as if everything should be torn and uprooted and twisted.

  “It has been put right,” her father said. And then, hesitant: “I’m sorry.”

  “I wanted to see. I wanted to know everything.”

  Her father sighed. “No one really knows, Emma. It happened at night. The stone was overturned, the grave—”

  “Dug into.”

  “Yes.”

  “So did they find her? Did they reach the body? Did it happen to other graves, or just hers?” Emma waited, but the answer didn’t come. She scowled. It was as if he didn’t want to know, didn’t need to know. As if something was broken and had been fixed and he had already moved on.

  “It won’t do any good. Look, it’s all right now. No one seemed to know what happened. Sometimes – it’s difficult to find things out.” He sighed. “You didn’t need to come. I told you.”

  I told you. As though that was the answer to everything.

  “Did you upset someone?”

  “What?” He looked surprised.

  “In your job. Or whatever. Have you done something? Made someone want to hurt you – hurt my mother?”

  “Of course not.” He shook his head. Then, slowly: “Not like that. Sometimes I think, with the digging – we have gone too far.” His voice went distant. “The djinn . . .”

  She snorted, rolled her eyes. “For God’s sake.”

  He paused. “So I suppose you will go now. We can take you to the airport. We have business – we will stay awhile, now we are here, Ibrahim and I. Whenever you like—”

  Emma remembered the bags in the boot of the car. Of course, he had brought his work with him. Even her mother’s desecration was a reason to study his precious fossils, dead things dug from the ground. She shivered as she turned from the grave. She couldn’t get that out of her head: dead things, dug from the ground. She didn’t know how he could bear to look at them.

  Marrakesh was life and sound and noise. Emma stood at a crossroads full of cars all trying to turn at once, beeping their horns, missing each other by millimetres. Perhaps because her father seemed so willing for her to leave, she had decided to stay until she was ready. She turned her back, passed under an arched gate set into the city walls, and entered the old town or medina. There were no cars here, but although the sounds changed, the bustle was the same. The streets were narrow and full of people: tourists, locals in colourful djellabas, women with shaylah scarves over their hair or veiled faces. Donkey carts plodded along, unfazed by the motorcycles that gunned through it all, edging everything else out of the way.

  Emma had left her father and Ibrahim at the hotel, though they had offered to show her around. She hadn’t wanted to be shown around. She had wanted to walk and to think. Now she found thinking impossible. Everything was new, different. She passed a shop with brightly coloured sacks of spices on the ground, casting rich scents into the air; another with hundreds of shoes hanging outside, forming a solid curtain.

  She took a narrower turning into the souk, a roofed passageway so crowded with goods it felt like a tunnel. Stalls were hung with leather belts and babouches and wallets and bags in every colour. Everything smelled of leather. Men sat outside their shops, stitching or waiting to trade. Emma jumped out of the way of a motorcycle, the rider clutching a live chicken by its feet. Then leather gave way to lamps, every conceivable shape and size, each stall shining like a genie’s grotto. Emma let the colours and sounds play over her, the constant flow of Darija and Berber and French from the crowds, the blare of a radio, the tapping of stall-holders working on their wares and the bark of haggling. She felt stirred, overwhelmed, the sounds thrumming. All of life is here, she thought. It was naked in its intensity. People wanting to trade, needing to trade, to fleece a tourist so their children could eat.

  Emma kept wading through it all, drowning in it, seeing everything and thinking of nothing: not her father, not what had happened to her mother’s grave. And then someone turned in the crowd ahead, looking back so that Emma saw their face, and everything stopped.

  Someone knocked into her, muttered some apology or imprecation, but Emma couldn’t move. She stared at the figure and it looked back at her with her mother’s eyes. It was her mother. After a long moment she turned and melded with the crowd.

  Emma started to push her way through, trying to keep the figure in sight. Everywhere were faces, some indignant, some curious. And then the alleyway ended and Emma stumbled into an open space. It was thronged with people. She took a step forward, looking about. What had her mother been wearing? She couldn’t remember. Her breath came hard and fast. She couldn’t see her anywhere, didn’t know which way to go.

  Emma stepped forward into the square, into the strains of discordant music. She knew where she was from the pictures she’d seen: Djemaa el Fna, the most famous square in Morocco, perhaps in the world. And everywhere were people. Traders sitting on stools or carpets, stalls with fairground games, storytellers’ tents, people crossing from one place to another, friends meeting, kissing on the cheeks, men holding out water snakes or Barbary apes to tempt tourists to part with their dirhams. And everywhere, groups of musicians; flowerings of notes competed with thr
obbing drums and soothing pipes. She scanned it all, seeing nothing she could recognise. The woman who had looked like her mother had gone.

  Emma caught one of the city’s petit taxis back to the hotel, knowing she’d never find the way on her own. She hammered on her father’s door. It opened and she saw his lined face, his faded eyes. And Ibrahim, always there, a fossil and a magnifying glass held in his hands.

  “I saw her,” said Emma. In spite of herself she felt tears spring into her eyes.

  Her father squinted, as if he hadn’t yet adjusted to looking out at the world. “Who?”

  “I saw her.” Emma was suddenly furious. “I saw my mother.” Then her body sagged and she leaned against the door. Her father took her arm, led her to the only chair. A foot away was his bed, tousled and scattered with fossils. “This is ridiculous,” Emma snapped, and her father shrugged, helplessly.

  Ibrahim stepped forward. “A little tea, perhaps,” he said. “You thought you saw something. The heat, maybe. Morocco can be a strange place to those who do not know her.”

  Emma gave him a look, wiped at her eyes. “I saw my mother,” she insisted.

  “Someone who looked like her. There are many English in Marrakesh.”

  “I know that.”

  “She is in your heart, of course. In your thoughts.” Ibrahim’s voice was gentle, the kindness in it cutting through her, and Emma bit back a sob.

  “A drink, perhaps,” Ibrahim said again, this time to her father. Emma knew he was Moslem, wouldn’t touch alcohol, and had a sudden image of what she must look like: a stupid foreigner, overwhelmed by the noise and the heat. She closed her eyes and felt her father pushing a glass into her hands. It was wine, poured into a cheap hotel tumbler.

  “I’m sorry, Em.” Her father said. His voice seemed different when he said it. His eyes were rheumy, the wrinkles gleaming with moisture. “I never was a good father to you.”