The Best new Horror 4 Page 13

  His voice broke as he turned away, stifling sobs.

  “They did it to me as well,” Giuseppina said as she sponged dirt from Ann’s bruised legs. “I’m still here. And I do have two fine sons.”

  The reality of the trap had closed on Carlo. The Alfa had indeed disappeared. Photostats of the letters forged by Anzani had been waiting here for him to read.

  “Mind you,” the old woman went on—she was not truly old, he realized, just aged—“no other man would look at me after I’d born children out of wedlock. Men don’t understand. The women were kinder. She’s lucky: your wife, I mean. You’re a modern husband. Things are different nowadays, aren’t they? You hear about it, read it in newspapers and magazines. Even married women can take lovers and their husbands think it only fair. Well, so it is. They’ve always been used to having mistresses. They say that’s how it was in the old days. The Romans insulted Etruscan women because they dined with the menfolk and drank wine in company. So they told me when I was a little girl. But they still wouldn’t help me find a husband . . . It’s the cruelty of the Church, you know.”

  Someone—perhaps her son the priest—had provided a bottle of grappa. Carlo had drunk three glasses, not before persuading Ann to sip a little, and that had helped. He thought of the contrast between Giuseppina’s view of the Church and Anzani’s reference to teachers and kindness. The lawyer had been wrong, totally wrong, to say these people had remained unchanged. They were obviously trying to, yet their mental armour had been breached.

  Only not enough. How long would it take? Another two millennia?

  Ann stirred as Giuseppina completed her work and bore away the bowl of water and the washcloth. She had shed all the tears she could; her swollen eyes were dry.

  “Carlo . . .?” she whispered.

  He darted to kneel at her bedside.

  “Carlo, I cheated him, didn’t I? I figured out what he had in mind. I remembered what Giuseppina said: Vipegnos don’t marry, they take. But he didn’t reckon with my being on the Pill, did he? When I realized that, I stopped fighting him off. Wouldn’t you rather have me more or less in one piece? He could have beaten me unconscious, scarred me for life! He gave me some kind of drug—he had something in his palm when he put his hand over my mouth to stop me screaming, and even though I didn’t swallow when he forced it in I suddenly felt weak and dreamy . . . Carlo?”

  “Here!” he whispered, sliding his arm under her head.

  “We’ll go home in the morning, won’t we? And we’ll call in the police, and somebody will put a stop to all this, and the Etruscan relics will be put in a museum where they belong.” She was trying to keep her eyes open, but failing, and her voice was growing fainter.

  What was he to do? Tell the truth? Say, “They stole our car, Anzani is in league with them, it’s no use prosecuting or suing because they’ve been around since before money was invented and they know more nasty tricks than the Mafia and the Camorra and Freemasons added together—and anyhow that lot were probably taught by them in the first place!”?

  But Ann was asleep.

  There had been a tap at the back door, and half-heard speech. Now Giuseppina reappeared. On a leash she held one of the tall lean dogs. Rising to his feet, Carlo stared in sick despair, remembering Anzani’s words.

  “This is Aplu,” she announced. “Apollo, you would say. Great-great-grandson of Tin that watched over me and my sons. He will guard you until the child is born and nursed and old enough to live with his father and learn the knowledge he must learn. If he dies beforehand they will send another. He will sleep outside your door. Don’t try and pass him. I’ve put a chamber pot beneath the bed. Now get what rest you can. It’s been a busy night.”

  Carlo was too stunned to speak. As the door closed, Ann stirred a little and seemed to smile, as though hope had occurred to her in a dream. Convinced that hope was an illusion for them now, Carlo poured more grappa and sat drinking until the oil in the lamp ran out. Dying, the flame smoked its chimney as black as the future.

  And the past.

  LISA TUTTLE

  Replacements

  LISA TUTTLE was born in Texas and currently lives in Scotland. Her most recent novel, Lost Futures, despite being marketed as horror, was short-listed for the 1993 Arthur C. Clarke Award. Her other full-length works have included Familiar Spirit, Gabriel and the award-winning collaboration with George R. R. Martin, Windhaven.

  She also edited the acclaimed horror anthology by women, Skin of the Soul, and her science fiction tales have been collected in A Spaceship Built of Stone. However, Tuttle is best known for her disturbing stories of physical and psychological transformation and twisted desire. Some of her best horror and fantasy tales have been collected in A Nest of Nightmares and Memories of the Body. “Replacements” is a jolt of the pure stuff.

  WALKING THROUGH GREY NORTH LONDON to the tube station, feeling guilty that he hadn’t let Jenny drive him to work and yet relieved to have escaped another pointless argument, Stuart Holder glanced down at a pavement covered in a leaf-fall of fast-food cartons and white paper bags and saw, amid the dog turds, beer cans and dead cigarettes, something horrible.

  It was about the size of a cat, naked looking, with leathery, hairless skin and thin, spiky limbs that seemed too frail to support the bulbous, ill-proportioned body. The face, with tiny bright eyes and a wet slit of a mouth, was like an evil monkey’s. It saw him and moved in a crippled, spasmodic way. Reaching up, it made a clotted, strangled noise. The sound touched a nerve, like metal between the teeth, and the sight of it, mewling and choking and scrabbling, scaly claws flexing and wriggling, made him feel sick and terrified. He had no phobias, he found insects fascinating, not frightening, and regularly removed, unharmed, the spiders, wasps and mayflies which made Jenny squeal or shudder helplessly.

  But this was different. This wasn’t some rare species of wingless bat escaped from a zoo, it wasn’t something he would find pictured in any reference book. It was something that should not exist, a mistake, something alien. It did not belong in his world.

  A little snarl escaped him and he took a step forward and brought his foot down hard.

  The small, shrill scream lanced through him as he crushed it beneath his shoe and ground it into the road.

  Afterwards, as he scraped the sole of his shoe against the curb to clean it, nausea overwhelmed him. He leaned over and vomited helplessly into a red-and-white-striped box of chicken bones and crumpled paper.

  He straightened up, shaking, and wiped his mouth again and again with his pocket handkerchief. He wondered if anyone had seen, and had a furtive look around. Cars passed at a steady crawl. Across the road a cluster of schoolgirls dawdled near a man smoking in front of a newsagent’s, but on this side of the road the fried chicken franchise and bathroom suppliers had yet to open for the day and the nearest pedestrians were more than a hundred yards away.

  Until that moment, Stuart had never killed anything in his life. Mosquitoes and flies of course, other insects probably, a nest of hornets once, that was all. He had never liked the idea of hunting, never lived in the country. He remembered his father putting out poisoned bait for rats, and he remembered shying bricks at those same vermin on a bit of waste ground where he had played as a boy. But rats weren’t like other animals; they elicited no sympathy. Some things had to be killed if they would not be driven away.

  He made himself look to make sure the thing was not still alive. Nothing should be left to suffer. But his heel had crushed the thing’s face out of recognition, and it was unmistakably dead. He felt a cool tide of relief and satisfaction, followed at once, as he walked away, by a lagging uncertainty, the imminence of guilt. Was he right to have killed it, to have acted on violent, irrational impulse? He didn’t even know what it was. It might have been somebody’s pet.

  He went hot and cold with shame and self-disgust. At the corner he stopped with five or six others waiting to cross the road and because he didn’t want to look at them he looked dow
n.

  And there it was, alive again.

  He stifled a scream. No, of course it was not the same one, but another. His leg twitched; he felt frantic with the desire to kill it, and the terror of his desire. The thin wet mouth was moving as if it wanted to speak.

  As the crossing-signal began its nagging blare he tore his eyes away from the creature squirming at his feet. Everyone else had started to cross the street, their eyes, like their thoughts, directed ahead. All except one. A woman in a smart business suit was standing still on the pavement, looking down, a sick fascination on her face.

  As he looked at her looking at it, the idea crossed his mind that he should kill it for her, as a chivalric, protective act. But she wouldn’t see it that way. She would be repulsed by his violence. He didn’t want her to think he was a monster. He didn’t want to be the monster who had exulted in the crunch of fragile bones, the flesh and viscera merging pulpily beneath his shoe.

  He forced himself to look away, to cross the road, to spare the alien life. But he wondered, as he did so, if he had been right to spare it.

  Stuart Holder worked as an editor for a publishing company with offices an easy walk from St Paul’s. Jenny had worked there, too, as a secretary, when they met five years ago. Now, though, she had quite a senior position with another publishing house, south of the river, and recently they had given her a car. He had been supportive of her ambitions, supportive of her learning to drive, and proud of her on all fronts when she succeeded, yet he was aware, although he never spoke of it, that something about her success made him uneasy. One small, niggling, insecure part of himself was afraid that one day she would realize she didn’t need him anymore. That was why he picked at her, and second-guessed her decisions when she was behind the wheel and he was in the passenger seat. He recognized this as he walked briskly through more crowded streets towards his office, and he told himself he would do better. He would have to. If anything drove them apart it was more likely to be his behavior than her career. He wished he had accepted her offer of a ride today. Better any amount of petty irritation between husband and wife than to be haunted by the memory of that tiny face, distorted in the death he had inflicted. Entering the building, he surreptitiously scraped the sole of his shoe against the carpet.

  Upstairs two editors and one of the publicity girls were in a huddle around his secretary’s desk; they turned on him the guilty-defensive faces of women who have been discussing secrets men aren’t supposed to know.

  He felt his own defensiveness rising to meet theirs as he smiled. “Can I get any of you chaps a cup of coffee?”

  “I’m sorry, Stuart, did you want . . .?” As the others faded away, his secretary removed a stiff white paper bag with the NEXT logo printed on it from her desktop.

  “Joke, Frankie, joke.” He always got his own coffee because he liked the excuse to wander, and he was always having to reassure her that she was not failing in her secretarial duties. He wondered if Next sold sexy underwear, decided it would be unkind to tease her further.

  He felt a strong urge to call Jenny and tell her what had happened, although he knew he wouldn’t be able to explain, especially not over the phone. Just hearing her voice, the sound of sanity, would be a comfort, but he restrained himself until just after noon, when he made the call he made every day.

  Her secretary told him she was in a meeting. “Tell her Stuart rang,” he said, knowing she would call him back as always.

  But that day she didn’t. Finally, at five minutes to five, Stuart rang his wife’s office and was told she had left for the day.

  It was unthinkable for Jenny to leave work early, as unthinkable as for her not to return his call. He wondered if she was ill. Although he usually stayed in the office until well after six, now he shoved a manuscript in his briefcase and went out to brave the rush hour.

  He wondered if she was mad at him. But Jenny didn’t sulk. If she was angry she said so. They didn’t lie or play those sorts of games with each other, pretending not to be in, “forgetting” to return calls.

  As he emerged from his local underground station Stuart felt apprehensive. His eyes scanned the pavement and the gutters, and once or twice the flutter of paper made him jump, but of the creatures he had seen that morning there were no signs. The body of the one he had killed was gone, perhaps eaten by a passing dog, perhaps returned to whatever strange dimension had spawned it. He noticed, before he turned off the high street, that other pedestrians were also taking a keener than usual interest in the pavement and the edge of the road, and that made him feel vindicated somehow.

  London traffic being what it was, he was home before Jenny. While he waited for the sound of her key in the lock he made himself a cup of tea, cursed, poured it down the sink, and had a stiff whisky instead. He had just finished it and was feeling much better when he heard the street door open.

  “Oh!” The look on her face reminded him unpleasantly of those women in the office this morning, making him feel like an intruder in his own place. Now Jenny smiled, but it was too late. “I didn’t expect you to be here so early.”

  “Nor me. I tried to call you, but they said you’d left already. I wondered if you were feeling all right.”

  “I’m fine!”

  “You look fine.” The familiar sight of her melted away his irritation. He loved the way she looked: her slender, boyish figure, her close-cropped, curly hair, her pale complexion and bright blue eyes.

  Her cheeks now had a slight hectic flush. She caught her bottom lip between her teeth and gave him an assessing look before coming straight out with it. “How would you feel about keeping a pet?”

  Stuart felt a horrible conviction that she was not talking about a dog or a cat. He wondered if it was the whisky on an empty stomach which made him feel dizzy.

  “It was under my car. If I hadn’t happened to notice something moving down there I could have run over it.” She lifted her shoulders in a delicate shudder.

  “Oh, God, Jenny, you haven’t brought it home!”

  She looked indignant. “Well, of course I did! I couldn’t just leave it in the street—somebody else might have run it over.”

  Or stepped on it, he thought, realizing now that he could never tell Jenny what he had done. That made him feel even worse, but maybe he was wrong. Maybe it was just a cat she’d rescued. “What is it?”

  She gave a strange, excited laugh. “I don’t know. Something very rare, I think. Here, look.” She slipped the large, woven bag off her shoulder, opening it, holding it out to him. “Look. Isn’t it the sweetest thing?”

  How could two people who were so close, so alike in so many ways, see something so differently? He only wanted to kill it, even now, while she had obviously fallen in love. He kept his face carefully neutral although he couldn’t help flinching from her description. “Sweet?”

  It gave him a pang to see how she pulled back, holding the bag protectively close as she said, “Well, I know it’s not pretty, but so what? I thought it was horrible, too, at first sight. . . .” Her face clouded, as if she found her first impression difficult to remember, or to credit, and her voice faltered a little. “But then, then I realized how helpless it was. It needed me. It can’t help how it looks. Anyway, doesn’t it kind of remind you of the Psammead?”

  “The what?”

  “Psammead. You know, The Five Children and It?”

  He recognized the title but her passion for old-fashioned children’s books was something he didn’t share. He shook his head impatiently. “That thing didn’t come out of a book, Jen. You found it in the street and you don’t know what it is or where it came from. It could be dangerous, it could be diseased.”

  “Dangerous,” she said in a withering tone.

  “You don’t know.”

  “I’ve been with him all day and he hasn’t hurt me, or anybody else at the office, he’s perfectly happy being held, and he likes being scratched behind the ears.”

  He did not miss the pronoun shift. “I
t might have rabies.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “Don’t you be silly; it’s not exactly native, is it? It might be carrying all sorts of foul parasites from South America or Africa or wherever.”

  “Now you’re being racist. I’m not going to listen to you. And you’ve been drinking.” She flounced out of the room.

  If he’d been holding his glass still he might have thrown it. He closed his eyes and concentrated on breathing in and out slowly. This was worse than any argument they’d ever had, the only crucial disagreement of their marriage. Jenny had stronger views about many things than he did, so her wishes usually prevailed. He didn’t mind that. But this was different. He wasn’t having that creature in his home. He had to make her agree.

  Necessity cooled his blood. He had his temper under control when his wife returned. “I’m sorry,” he said, although she was the one who should have apologized. Still looking prickly, she shrugged and would not meet his eyes. “Want to go out to dinner tonight?”

  She shook her head. “I’d rather not. I’ve got some work to do.”

  “Can I get you something to drink? I’m only one whisky ahead of you, honest.”

  Her shoulders relaxed. “I’m sorry. Low blow. Yeah, pour me one. And one for yourself.” She sat down on the couch, her bag by her feet. Leaning over, reaching inside, she cooed, “Who’s my little sweetheart, then?”