The Best New Horror 6 Page 14

  After a time he dealt the pictures onto the floor, in the crux of the Tarot: The happy family. Smiling child. Detroit. Chelyabinsk. Idaho Falls. Byelolarsk. Leningrad. Three Mile Island. Webbers Falls. Chernobyl.

  The city: Where the dream, brighter than a thousand stars, had never ended.

  At the knock on the door, his pictures were forgotten; in their place were memories, sketched in fading colors, gone grey.

  “Yes.”

  The word was barely spoken; then she was inside. Her face was masked in shadow, but her body, tall and frail, burned with the bright pulse of neon. A silk blouse, tattered and torn, hung in loose folds from her bent shoulders. The black vinyl skirt was slit high on her hips. Her stockings, fishnet black, were holed and held to her emaciated legs by rubber bands. One shoe was white, scuffed and unheeled, the other red; she looked like a lost gypsy child playing dress-up.

  The stranger saw her, saw the other her, raven hair dancing in the sun, her golden skin and coral lips and emerald eyes, now faded. Nearly gone.

  “Karen.”

  She came out of the shadows and to his side: Face averted, arms rigid, bone-thin poles that fell to clenched and shaking fists. Her head seemed too heavy for her to raise. She looked up at him from the corners of her fugitive eyes. A snake of pain burrowed in her cheek.

  His hands reached out, took her, steadied her.

  “Karen.”

  She recoiled from his touch, and his hands fell away. He watched as she unbuttoned the torn blouse, let it slide from her sunken shoulders and onto the floor. She wore no bra; the chipped ruby nail of her index finger traced the pale scars of her dual mastectomy.

  He brushed back her thinning hair, saw the skull so close beneath the skin, the indecipherable scrawl of sutures at her brow and throat and neck. She sighed as he raised her head, looked into her eyes, lips parting expectantly. Then she tried to speak, nothing more than a gasp, her eyes tightening into slits, fighting tears as again her head dropped.

  “Karen,” he said, louder this time. He lifted her head with both hands, leaning in and kissing her, lips gently opening her tongueless mouth.

  In time, he drew her down onto the mattress. The neon flickered and flared, casting imaginary days and nights across them as they made love in the heart of the city.

  Black wing on white sky: A bird of prey, taking flight, then falling, blurred, gone in a wave of hands. His fists tightened into a chrysalis, fingers opening to spawn a butterfly, closing again to crush it. A stick man struggled into focus, stood and walked, only to fall, to stand, to fall again.

  Shadowplay: The light and the dark, and his hands in between, slowly moving in the air, creating life and then destroying it; with his hands. His own hands.

  “She’s gone.”

  Clouds fell; faces changed. His hands clutched at empty air. The wall of the vandalized lobby went black as the night outside: The shadow of the stranger.

  “Back to where she belongs.” Hagopian’s fingers bent into legs, mimed a fractured dance. “Somewhere . . . over the rainbow.” He brought the keys to the Land Rover from his back pocket, shook them once, twice, as if taunting a sleepy cat.

  “It’s time, isn’t it? Time for one last ride.”

  The shadow walked across the ceiling, black hat and coat and boots, and then there was no light, no shadow, at all. The stranger took the keys and went out into the night.

  When at last the light returned to the white wall, whose cracks were ever-widening, the black wings took flight again.

  Hagopian called after him, a statement, not a question: “You know what to do.”

  Through the countless corridors, a pistol in each hand, the stranger walked and killed, reloaded, then walked and killed again. The guards died first, then the white-coated technicians and the laborers and anyone else who stood in his way. Once he was shot, through the flesh of the arm; he tied the wound off with a rag and kept on walking and killing. His bullets were spent in ones and twos, finding chests and heads and anointing them in red. Soon there was no one left to kill.

  Outside, in the valley beyond the great grey domes, the flames coursed hungrily over the cancer colony. The stranger returned there, promises to keep. When finally his pistols were emptied, he cast them aside, and walked on until he found the last of the ragged tents, the final offering to the fires born of his hand.

  She lay there on a blanketed tabletop, as shrunken and silent as a stillborn child. Above her the canvas roof had been torn away, and her eyes, frozen in agony, dared the starless sky.

  The stranger watched as her lips, as if on cue, moved in a halting effort to form the words he had whispered to her an hour before: “At . . . dawn . . . At dawn.”

  The stranger kissed her one last time, and returned to the Land Rover, knowing, as he had known with his first glimpse of the city, that it would not end here.

  Another room, its door unlocked, where Hagopian sat in silent contemplation before a mirror circled with brass sunsigns. In time, his reflected eyes met those of the stranger.

  “I was not expecting you so soon.” He tapped his forearm, found the vein, his face sharpening as he plunged the needle in. A sigh, a loss of focus; then strangeness so hard to reflect.

  “You really are early, my friend.” The spent hypodermic rolled along the tabletop, past the vials, the bottles, the pills, the hollow hope of AD20 and laetrile; it came to rest against a thick paper envelope.

  “It’s not early.”

  Hagopian opened the envelope, drew out the dollars, caressed their green skin. Finally he counted them, one after another, onto the table: Payment in full.

  “It’s late. Too late.”

  “Won’t you wait for morning?”

  “Morning has passed.” The stranger reached for the dollars, clutched a fistful in his right hand; then he let them drop back onto the table, fallen leaves beneath a warm red rain. “And noon.” He brushed the long coat from his hip. “And now it is night . . . for the city.”

  “And the assassin is also a poet.” Hagopian laughed. “Had I known that when I hired you . . .”

  The laughter was done. Hagopian looked at himself, not the stranger, in the mirror.

  “Tell me one thing, stranger . . .” He spun the chair around. “Is there death after life?”

  The stranger’s left hand rose in slow motion. The mirror shone back a rainbow arc: blue steel.

  His trigger finger squeezed imperceptibly and the flare gun exploded into Hagopian’s face.

  This is the tomb, the end of it all: The place of the skull, the passion of another savior, the alpha and the omega. The beginning, and the end, and the stranger.

  The long night was nearly over. Fires raged in the east, a false aurora, at a place where no one would go to extinguish them. Beyond them the city shone on brightly, quite insane.

  His shovel bit into dirt, bit again, until at last he struck wood. Soon the coffin was freed from its resting place. His patient hands traced the name of no one that had been cut into its lid. With the knife from his boot, he jimmied out nail after nail, then pulled the groaning lid away.

  From his shirt pocket he took the first key. Metal clicked on metal; the key twisted in a quarter-circle and stopped. Numbers. Sequences. Red went yellow, then green.

  A sound rose in the distance, slow thunder that sped into a sudden storm of wings. Over the burning horizon soared a great grey mantis, rushing through cloud and shadow to the new Golgotha.

  He popped a smoke grenade and tossed it onto the tarmac, a balefire plumed in red. Then he reached for the second key.

  Soon the helicopter floated over him, churning dust and crimson smoke and reanimating the dead, who shook and shuddered like stringcut puppets in its wake. As the rush of wind tore at him, the stranger slid the second key into the coffin. His hat spun away, showing a sudden smile; a scythe.

  “It is finished,” he said, for no one; for everyone. Like the spinning rotors of the helicopter, the clocks were running.

  T
he stranger rose from the grave, his arms outstretched, raised high, hands open, as the beam of the helicopter’s searchlight found him, circled him, caught him. In a ray of golden light, he was taken up into the heavens.

  Ten years: ten hours: ten minutes: ten seconds.

  Time healed as in silence the numbers counted backward toward zero.

  And at dawn, the black sun would rise over the neon city that had finally learned how to die.

  in memory of Corbucci and Leone

  M. JOHN HARRISON

  Isabel Avens Returns to Stepney in the Spring

  AFTER BEING CLOSELY identified with Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds magazine as Literary Editor for seven years, M. John Harrison published his début novel, The Committed Men, in 1971.

  Since then, he has published such novels as The Centauri Device, The Pastel City and A Storm of Wings, and the collections Viriconium Nights and The Ice Monkey and Other Stories. Flamingo recently published his novel The Course of the Heart as a lead title, along with a reissue of Climbers (winner of The Boardman Tasker Memorial Award), a novel about rock climbing.

  The story that follows is the basis of the author’s next book . . .

  THE THIRD OF SEPTEMBER this year I spent the evening watching TV in an upstairs flat in North London. Some story of love and transfiguration, cropped into all the wrong proportions for the small screen. The flat wasn’t mine. It belonged to a friend I was staying with. There were French posters on the walls, dusty CDs stacked on the old-fashioned sideboard, piles of newspapers subsiding day by day into yellowing fans on the carpet. Outside, Tottenham stretched away, Greek driving schools, Turkish social clubs. Turn the TV off and you could hear nothing. Turn it back on and the film unrolled, passages of guilt with lost edges, photographed in white and blue light. At about half past eleven the phone rang.

  I picked it up. “Hello?”

  It was Isobel Avens.

  “Oh China,” she said. She burst into tears.

  I said: “Can you drive?”

  “No,” she said.

  I looked at my watch. “I’ll come and fetch you.”

  “You can’t,” she said. “I’m here. You can’t come here.”

  I said: “Be outside, love. Just try and get yourself downstairs. Be outside and I’ll pick you up on the pavement there.”

  There was a silence.

  “Can you do that?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  Oh China. The first two days she wouldn’t get much further than that.

  “Don’t try to talk,” I advised.

  London was as quiet as a nursing home corridor. I turned up the car stereo. Tom Waits, “Downtown Train”. Music stuffed with sentiments you recognise but daren’t admit to yourself. I let the BMW slip down Green Lanes, through Camden into the centre; then west. I was pushing the odd traffic light at orange, clipping the apex off a safe bend here and there. I told myself I wasn’t going to get killed for her. What I meant was that if I did she would have no one left. I took the Embankment at eight thousand revs, nosing down heavily on the brakes at Chelsea Wharf to get round into Gunter Grove. No one was there to see. By half past twelve I was on Queensborough Road, where I found her standing very straight in the mercury light outside Alexander’s building, the jacket of a Karl Lagerfeld suit thrown across her shoulders and one piece of expensive leather luggage at her feet. She bent into the car. Her face was white and exhausted and her breath stank. The way Alexander had dumped her was as cruel as everything else he did. She had flown back steerage from the Miami clinic reeling from jet lag, expecting to fall into his arms and be loved and comforted. He told her, “As a doctor I don’t think I can do any more for you.” The ground hadn’t just shifted on her: it was out from under her feet. Suddenly she was only his patient again. In the metallic glare of the street lamps, I noticed a stipple of ulceration across her collar bones. I switched on the courtesy light to look closer. Tiny hectic sores, closely spaced.

  I said: “Christ, Isobel.”

  “It’s just a virus,” she said. “Just a side-effect.”

  “Is anything worth this?”

  She put her arms around me and sobbed.

  “Oh China, China.”

  It isn’t that she wants me; only that she has no one else. Yet every time I smell her body my heart lurches. The years I lived with her I slept so soundly. Then Alexander did this irreversible thing to her, the thing she had always wanted, and now everything is fucked up and eerie and it will be that way for ever.

  I said: “I’ll take you home.”

  “Will you stay?”

  “What else?”

  My name is Mick Rose, which is why people have always called me “China”. From the moment we met, Isobel Avens was fascinated by that. Later, she would hold my face between her hands in the night and whisper dreamily over and over – “Oh, China, China, China, China.” But it was something else that attracted her to me. The year we met, she lived in Stratford-on-Avon. I walked into the café at the little toy aerodrome they have there and it was she who served me. She was twenty-five years old: slow, heavy-bodied, easily delighted by the world. Her hair was red. She wore a rusty pink blouse, a black ankle-length skirt with lace at the hem. Her feet were like boats in great brown Dr Marten’s shoes. When she saw me looking down at them in amusement, she said: “Oh, these aren’t my real Docs, these are my cheap imitation ones.” She showed me how the left one was coming apart at the seams. “Brilliant, eh?” She smelled of vanilla and sex. She radiated heat. I could always feel the heat of her a yard away.

  “I’d love to be able to fly,” she told me.

  She laughed and hugged herself.

  “You must feel so free.”

  She thought I was the pilot of the little private Cessna she could see out of the café window. In fact I had only come to deliver its cargo – an unadmitted load for an unadmitted destination – some commercial research centre in Zürich or Budapest. At the time I called myself Rose Medical Services, plc. My fleet comprised a single Vauxhall Astra van into which I had dropped the engine, brakes and suspension of a two litre GTE insurance write-off. I specialized. If it was small I guaranteed to move it anywhere in Britain within twelve hours; occasionally, if the price was right, to selected points in Europe. Recombinant DNA; viruses at controlled temperatures, sometimes in live hosts; cell cultures in heavily armoured flasks. What they were used for I had no idea. I didn’t really want an idea until much later; and that turned out to be much too late.

  I said: “It can’t be so hard to learn.”

  “Flying?”

  “It can’t be so hard.”

  Before a week was out we were inventing one another hand over fist. It was an extraordinary summer. You have to imagine this –

  Saturday afternoon. Stratford Waterside. The river has a lively look despite the breathless air and heated sky above it. Waterside is full of jugglers and fire-eaters, entertaining thick crowds of Americans and Japanese. There is hardly room to move. Despite this, on a patch of grass by the water, two lovers, trapped in the great circular argument, are making that futile attempt all lovers make to get inside one another and stay there for good. He can’t stop touching her because she wants him so. She wants him so because he can’t stop touching her. A feeding swan surfaces, caught up with some strands of very pale green weed. Rippling in the sudden warm breeze which blows across the river from the direction of the theatre, these seem for a moment like ribbons tied with a delicate knot – the gentle, deliberate artifice of a conscious world.

  “Oh look! Look!” she says.

  He says: “Would you like to be a swan?”

  “I’d have to leave the aerodrome.”

  He says: “Come and live with me and be a swan.”

  Neither of them have the slightest idea what they are talking about.

  Business was good. Within three months I had bought a second van. I persuaded Isobel Avens to leave Stratford and throw in with me. On the morning of her last day at the aerodro
me, she woke up early and shook me until I was awake too.

  “China!” she said.

  “What?”

  “China!”

  I said: “What?”

  “I flew!”

  It was a dream of praxis. It was a hint of what she might have. It was her first step on the escalator up to Alexander’s clinic.

  “I was in a huge computer room. Everyone’s work was displayed on one screen like a wall. I couldn’t find my A-prompt!” People laughed at her, but nicely. “It was all good fun, and they were very helpful.” Suddenly she had learned what she had to know, and she was floating up and flying into the screen, and through it, “out of the room, into the air above the world.” The sky was crowded with other people, she said. “But I just went swooping past and around and between them.” She let herself fall just for the fun of it: she soared, her whole body taut and trembling like the fabric of a kite. Her breath went out with a great laugh. Whenever she was tired she could perch like a bird. ‘I loved it!’ she told me. “Oh, I loved it!”

  How can you be so jealous of a dream?

  I said: “It sounds as if you won’t need me soon.”

  She clutched at me.

  “You help me to fly,” she said. “Don’t dare go away, China! Don’t dare!”

  She pulled my face close to hers and gave me little dabbing kisses on the mouth and eyes. I looked at my watch. Half past six. The bed was already damp and hot: I could see that we were going to make it worse. She pulled me on top of her, and at the height of things, sweating and inturned and breathless and on the edge, she whispered, “Oh lovely, lovely, lovely,” as if she had seen something I couldn’t. “So lovely, so beautiful!” Her eyes moved as if she was watching something pass. I could only watch her, moving under me, marvellous and wet, solid and real, everything I ever wanted.