The Best new Horror 4 Read online

  Normally he would have taken a seat beside her. Now, though, he eyed the pale, misshapen bundle on her lap and, after handing her a glass, retreated across the room. “Don’t get mad, but isn’t having a pet one of those things we discuss and agree on beforehand?”

  He saw the tension come back into her shoulders, but she went on stroking the thing, keeping herself calm. “Normally, yes. But this is special. I didn’t plan it. It happened, and now I’ve got a responsibility to him. Or her.” She giggled. “We don’t even know what sex you are, do we, my precious?”

  He said carefully, “I can see that you had to do something when you found it, but keeping it might not be the best thing.”

  “I’m not going to put it out in the street.”

  “No, no, but . . . don’t you think it would make sense to let a professional have a look at it? Take it to a vet, get it checked out . . . maybe it needs shots or something.”

  She gave him a withering look and for a moment he faltered, but then he rallied. “Come on, Jenny, be reasonable! You can’t just drag some strange animal in off the street and keep it, just like that. You don’t even know what it eats.”

  “I gave it some fruit at lunch. It ate that. Well, it sucked out the juice. I don’t think it can chew.”

  “But you don’t know, do you? Maybe the fruit juice was just an aperitif, maybe it needs half its weight in live insects every day, or a couple of small, live mammals. Do you really think you could cope with feeding it mice or rabbits fresh from the pet shop every week?”

  “Oh, Stuart.”

  “Well? Will you just take it to a vet? Make sure it’s healthy? Will you do that much?”

  “And then I can keep it? If the vet says there’s nothing wrong with it, and it doesn’t need to eat anything too impossible?”

  “Then we can talk about it. Hey, don’t pout at me; I’m not your father, I’m not telling you what to do. We’re partners, and partners don’t make unilateral decisions about things that affect them both; partners discuss things and reach compromises and . . .”

  “There can’t be any compromise about this.”

  He felt as if she’d doused him with ice water. “What?”

  “Either I win and I keep him or you win and I give him up. Where’s the compromise?”

  This was why wars were fought, thought Stuart, but he didn’t say it. He was the picture of sweet reason, explaining as if he meant it, “The compromise is that we each try to see the other person’s point. You get the animal checked out, make sure it’s healthy and I, I’ll keep an open mind about having a pet, and see if I might start liking . . . him. Does he have a name yet?”

  Her eyes flickered. “No . . . we can choose one later, together. If we keep him.”

  He still felt cold and, although he could think of no reason for it, he was certain she was lying to him.

  In bed that night as he groped for sleep Stuart kept seeing the tiny, hideous face of the thing screaming as his foot came down on it. That moment of blind, killing rage was not like him. He couldn’t deny he had done it, or how he had felt, but now, as Jenny slept innocently beside him, as the creature she had rescued, a twin to his victim, crouched alive in the bathroom, he tried to remember it differently.

  In fantasy, he stopped his foot, he controlled his rage and, staring at the memory of the alien animal, he struggled to see past his anger and his fear, to see through those fiercer masculine emotions and find his way to Jenny’s feminine pity. Maybe his intuition had been wrong and hers was right. Maybe, if he had waited a little longer, instead of lashing out, he would have seen how unnecessary his fear was.

  Poor little thing, poor little thing. It’s helpless, it needs me, it’s harmless so I won’t harm it.

  Slowly, in imagination, he worked towards that feeling, her feeling, and then, suddenly, he was there, through the anger, through the fear, through the hate to . . . not love, he couldn’t say that, but compassion. Glowing and warm, compassion filled his heart and flooded his veins, melting the ice there and washing him out into the sea of sleep, and dreams where Jenny smiled and loved him and there was no space between them for misunderstanding.

  He woke in the middle of the night with a desperate urge to pee. He was out of bed in the dark hallway when he remembered what was waiting in the bathroom. He couldn’t go back to bed with the need unsatisfied, but he stood outside the bathroom door, hand hovering over the light switch on this side, afraid to turn it on, open the door, go in.

  It wasn’t, he realized, that he was afraid of a creature no bigger than a football and less likely to hurt him; rather, he was afraid that he might hurt it. It was a stronger variant of that reckless vertigo he had felt sometimes in high places, the fear, not of falling, but of throwing oneself off, of losing control and giving in to self-destructive urges. He didn’t want to kill the thing—had his own feelings not undergone a sea change, Jenny’s love for it would have been enough to stop him—but something, some dark urge stronger than himself, might make him.

  Finally he went down to the end of the hall and outside to the weedy, muddy little area which passed for the communal front garden and in which the rubbish bins, of necessity, were kept, and, shivering in his thin cotton pajamas in the damp, chilly air, he watered the sickly forsythia, or whatever it was, that Jenny had planted so optimistically last winter.

  When he went back inside, more uncomfortable than when he had gone out, he saw the light was on in the bathroom, and as he approached the half-open door, he heard Jenny’s voice, low and soothing. “There, there. Nobody’s going to hurt you, I promise. You’re safe here. Go to sleep now. Go to sleep.”

  He went past without pausing, knowing he would be viewed as an intruder, and got back into bed. He fell asleep, lulled by the meaningless murmur of her voice, still waiting for her to join him.

  Stuart was not used to doubting Jenny, but when she told him she had visited a veterinarian who had given her new pet a clean bill of health, he did not believe her.

  In a neutral tone he asked, “Did he say what kind of animal it was?”

  “He didn’t know.”

  “He didn’t know what it was, but he was sure it was perfectly healthy.”

  “God, Stuart, what do you want? It’s obvious to everybody but you that my little friend is healthy and happy. What do you want, a birth certificate?”

  He looked at her “friend,” held close against her side, looking squashed and miserable. “What do you mean, ‘everybody’?”

  She shrugged. “Everybody at work. They’re all jealous as anything.” She planted a kiss on the thing’s pointy head. Then she looked at him, and he realized that she had not kissed him, as she usually did, when he came in. She’d been clutching that thing the whole time. “I’m going to keep him,” she said quietly. “If you don’t like it, then . . .” Her pause seemed to pile up in solid, transparent blocks between them. “Then, I’m sorry, but that’s how it is.”

  So much for an equal relationship, he thought. So much for sharing. Mortally wounded, he decided to pretend it hadn’t happened.

  “Want to go out for Indian tonight?”

  She shook her head, turning away. “I want to stay in. There’s something on telly. You go on. You could bring me something back, if you wouldn’t mind. A spinach bahjee and a couple of nans would do me.”

  “And what about . . . something for your little friend?”

  She smiled a private smile. “He’s all right. I’ve fed him already.” Then she raised her eyes to his and acknowledged his effort. “Thanks.”

  He went out and got take-away for them both, and stopped at the off-license for the Mexican beer Jenny favored. A radio in the off-license was playing a sentimental song about love that Stuart remembered from his earliest childhood: his mother used to sing it. He was shocked to realize he had tears in his eyes.

  That night Jenny made up the sofa bed in the spare room, explaining, “He can’t stay in the bathroom; it’s just not satisfactory, you know it’s n
ot.”

  “He needs the bed?”

  “I do. He’s confused, everything is new and different, I’m the one thing he can count on. I have to stay with him. He needs me.”

  “He needs you? What about me?”

  “Oh, Stuart,” she said impatiently. “You’re a grown man. You can sleep by yourself for a night or two.”

  “And that thing can’t?”

  “Don’t call him a thing.”

  “What am I supposed to call it? Look, you’re not its mother—it doesn’t need you as much as you’d like to think. It was perfectly all right in the bathroom last night—it’ll be fine in here on its own.”

  “Oh? And what do you know about it? You’d like to kill him, wouldn’t you? Admit it.”

  “No,” he said, terrified that she had guessed the truth. If she knew how he had killed one of those things she would never forgive him. “It’s not true, I don’t—I couldn’t hurt it any more than I could hurt you.”

  Her face softened. She believed him. It didn’t matter how he felt about the creature. Hurting it, knowing how she felt, would be like committing an act of violence against her, and they both knew he wouldn’t do that. “Just for a few nights, Stuart. Just until he settles in.”

  He had to accept that. All he could do was hang on, hope that she still loved him and that this wouldn’t be forever.

  The days passed. Jenny no longer offered to drive him to work. When he asked her, she said it was out of her way and with traffic so bad a detour would make her late. She said it was silly to take him the short distance to the station, especially as there was nowhere she could safely stop to let him out, and anyway the walk would do him good. They were all good reasons, which he had used in the old days himself, but her excuses struck him painfully when he remembered how eager she had once been for his company, how ready to make any detour for his sake. Her new pet accompanied her everywhere, even to work, snug in the little nest she had made for it in a woven carrier bag.

  “Of course things are different now. But I haven’t stopped loving you,” she said when he tried to talk to her about the breakdown of their marriage. “It’s not like I’ve found another man. This is something completely different. It doesn’t threaten you; you’re still my husband.”

  But it was obvious to him that a husband was no longer something she particularly valued. He began to have fantasies about killing it. Not, this time, in a blind rage, but as part of a carefully thought-out plan. He might poison it, or spirit it away somehow and pretend it had run away. Once it was gone he hoped Jenny would forget it and be his again.

  But he never had a chance. Jenny was quite obsessive about the thing, as if it were too valuable to be left unguarded for a single minute. Even when she took a bath, or went to the toilet, the creature was with her, behind the locked door of the bathroom. When he offered to look after it for her for a few minutes she just smiled, as if the idea was manifestly ridiculous, and he didn’t dare insist.

  So he went to work, and went out for drinks with colleagues, and spent what time he could with Jenny, although they were never alone. He didn’t argue with her, although he wasn’t above trying to move her to pity if he could. He made seemingly casual comments designed to convince her of his change of heart so that eventually, weeks or months from now, she would trust him and leave the creature with him—and then, later, perhaps, they could put their marriage back together.

  One afternoon, after an extended lunch break, Stuart returned to the office to find one of the senior editors crouched on the floor beside his secretary’s empty desk, whispering and chuckling to herself.

  He cleared his throat nervously. “Linda?”

  She lurched back on her heels and got up awkwardly. She blushed and ducked her head as she turned, looking very unlike her usual high-powered self. “Oh, uh, Stuart, I was just – ”

  Frankie came in with a pile of photocopying. “Uhhuh,” she said loudly.

  Linda’s face got even redder. “Just going,” she mumbled, and fled.

  Before he could ask, Stuart saw the creature, another crippled bat-without-wings, on the floor beside the open bottom drawer of Frankie’s desk. It looked up at him, opened its slit of a mouth and gave a sad little hiss. Around one matchstick-thin leg it wore a fine golden chain which was fastened at the other end to the drawer.

  “Some people would steal anything that’s not chained down,” said Frankie darkly. “People you wouldn’t suspect.”

  He stared at her, letting her see his disapproval, his annoyance, disgust, even. “Animals in the office aren’t part of the contract, Frankie.”

  “It’s not an animal.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “I don’t know. You tell me.”

  “It doesn’t matter what it is, you can’t have it here.”

  “I can’t leave it at home.”

  “Why not?”

  She turned away from him, busying herself with her stacks of paper. “I can’t leave it alone. It might get hurt. It might escape.”

  “Chance would be a fine thing.”

  She shot him a look, and he was certain she knew he wasn’t talking about her pet. He said, “What does your boyfriend think about it?”

  “I don’t have a boyfriend.” She sounded angry but then, abruptly, the anger dissipated, and she smirked. “I don’t have to have one, do I?”

  “You can’t have that animal here. Whatever it is. You’ll have to take it home.”

  She raised her fuzzy eyebrows. “Right now?”

  He was tempted to say yes, but thought of the manuscripts that wouldn’t be sent out, the letters that wouldn’t be typed, the delays and confusions, and he sighed. “Just don’t bring it back again. All right?”

  “Yowza.”

  He felt very tired. He could tell her what to do but she would no more obey than would his wife. She would bring it back the next day and keep bringing it back, maybe keeping it hidden, maybe not, until he either gave in or was forced into firing her. He went into his office closed the door, and put his head down on his desk.

  That evening he walked in on his wife feeding the creature with her blood.

  It was immediately obvious that it was that way round. The creature might be a vampire—it obviously was—but his wife was no helpless victim. She was wide awake and in control, holding the creature firmly, letting it feed from a vein in her arm.

  She flinched as if anticipating a shout, but he couldn’t speak. He watched what was happening without attempting to interfere and gradually she relaxed again, as if he wasn’t there.

  When the creature, sated, fell off, she kept it cradled on her lap and reached with her other hand for the surgical spirit and cotton wool on the table, moistened a piece of cotton wool and tamped it to the tiny wound. Then, finally, she met her husband’s eyes.

  “He has to eat,” she said reasonably. “He can’t chew. He needs blood. Not very much, but . . .”

  “And he needs it from you? You can’t . . .?”

  “I can’t hold down some poor scared rabbit or dog for him, no.” She made a shuddering face. “Well, really, think about it. You know how squeamish I am. This is so much easier. It doesn’t hurt.”

  It hurts me, he thought, but couldn’t say it. “Jenny . . .”

  “Oh, don’t start,” she said crossly. “I’m not going to get any disease from it, and he doesn’t take enough to make any difference. Actually, I like it. We both do.”

  “Jenny, please don’t. Please. For me. Give it up.”

  “No.” She held the scraggy, ugly thing close and gazed at Stuart like a dispassionate executioner. “I’m sorry, Stuart, I really am, but this is nonnegotiable. If you can’t accept that you’d better leave.”

  This was the showdown he had been avoiding, the end of it all. He tried to rally his arguments and then he realized he had none. She had said it. She had made her choice, and it was nonnegotiable. And he realized, looking at her now, that although she reminded him of the woman he loved
, he didn’t want to live with what she had become.

  He could have refused to leave. After all, he had done nothing wrong. Why should he give up his home, this flat which was half his? But he could not force Jenny out onto the streets with nowhere to go; he still felt responsible for her.

  “I’ll pack a bag, and make a few phone calls,” he said quietly. He knew someone from work who was looking for a lodger, and if all else failed, his brother had a spare room. Already, in his thoughts, he had left.

  He ended up, once they’d sorted out their finances and formally separated, in a flat just off the Holloway Road, near Archway. It was not too far to walk if Jenny cared to visit, which she never did. Sometimes he called on her, but it was painful to feel himself an unwelcome visitor in the home they once had shared.

  He never had to fire Frankie; she handed in her notice a week later, telling him she’d been offered an editorial job at The Women’s Press. He wondered if pets in the office were part of the contract over there.

  He never learned if the creatures had names. He never knew where they had come from, or how many there were. Had they fallen only in Islington? (Frankie had a flat somewhere off Upper Street.) He never saw anything on the news about them, or read any official confirmation of their existence, but he was aware of occasional oblique references to them in other contexts, occasional glimpses.

  One evening, coming home on the tube, he found himself looking at the woman sitting opposite. She was about his own age, probably in her early thirties, with strawberry blond hair, greenish eyes, and an almost translucent complexion. She was strikingly dressed in high, soft-leather boots, a long black woolen skirt, and an enveloping cashmere cloak of cranberry red. High on the cloak, below and to the right of the fastening at the neck, was a simple, gold circle brooch. Attached to it he noticed a very fine golden chain which vanished inside the cloak, like the end of a watch fob.

  He looked at it idly, certain he had seen something like it before, on other women, knowing it reminded him of something. The train arrived at Archway, and as he rose to leave the train, so did the attractive woman. Her stride matched his. They might well leave the station together. He tried to think of something to say to her, some pretext for striking up a conversation. He was after all a single man again now, and she might be a single woman. He had forgotten how single people in London contrived to meet.