The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 16 Page 14

  The night after his grandfather came back, Alex’s father took the boy for a walk in the long field. They said nothing until they reached the river. The night was cold and clear, and Alex stood and looked at the stars which gleamed hard in the sky, pins pushed through black velvet. He could hear his father breathing hard beside him.

  “You know that he’s not back for ever,” he said at last. “You remember what I told you.”

  “One week,” Alex said.

  “Right, lad. One week.”

  “That’s not a very long time, father.”

  “Not long enough son, not long enough.” A silence stretched out between them, and they thought words that were snatched away by the dark water of the river, carried off before they could say them. At last his father sighed, and spoke. “But one week is what God has given us, and we must be thankful for that, a chance to say our goodbyes, fix your grandfather in our minds. It’s our way, and we must be thankful and respect it. It’s one of the things that sets us apart from the godless filth on the other side of the mountains.”

  “I thought the dead came back everywhere?”

  “They do son, they do.”

  “So why don’t they—”

  “They stop them.”

  “How?”

  He stared out into the darkness, shuffled his feet. “There are ways, son. There are ways.” Alex knew from his tone of voice that he should drop the subject.

  “And after a week, will granda go away again?”

  “That he will, to the day, to the same hour he rose again.”

  “And where will he go then?”

  His father turned and walked away across the field, back towards the house, one hand up at his face. Halfway across, he stopped and waited for Alex to catch up. He put a hand around his son’s shoulders, and they walked back to the house together. A week later he was in his room, lost worlds away in a book, when his mother cried out. Alex never saw his grandfather again.

  Days passed, the last few leaves fell from the trees, and the lonely routine of Alex’s work took him back into its arms and made everything outside it seem unreal. He felt that it was a city of shadows that at times only existed street by street, that the graceful terraces that lined whatever street he was walking down were all that there was, and beyond them there was nothing. From the window of a tram halted at a stop he saw a dark-haired woman waiting to cross the road. The simple beauty of her face was the only thing in that whole time that felt real to him. Then the tram juddered back into motion and she was gone. One night he dreamt of her, pale skin framed by falls of black hair, and even in the dream she had more substance than anything else he saw when awake. The war went on in the hills, the guns still rumbled, and everywhere Alex went he saw the distracted stares of the dead, as they stumbled lost along misty streets.

  The sky was bruising with evening when he returned to the office from his last assignment. There was no-one else there but the sergeant, who sat next to the stove smoking one of his stinking cigarettes.

  “No more today. You’re done.”

  Alex sat on a stool, warmed his hands, rested his aching legs. “I’ll get away in a minute. Think I’ll just sleep the whole night through.”

  The sergeant twisted the stub of his cigarette out on the dark iron of the stove. “I’d get out if I were you. Get out, get drunk, spend your wages on some whore.”

  “Don’t have that much to spend, not if I’m going to eat the rest of the week.”

  “Don’t worry about the rest of the week, son, live for today. I been talking to an old mate of mine, works as a valet to one of the generals. Rumour is, any day now they’re going to pass this work on to some civil servants—” he spat, and it sizzled on the hot coals – “and send you poor bastards back to the front. Count yourself lucky, you’ve had it good here, thanks to whoever pulled the strings for you – no bastard trying to kill you apart from the tram drivers, private room, not in some flea-ridden barracks. You’ve escaped the front this long, must have known you’d end up back there one day, fit young lad like you. They’re running out of fit young lads. They’d send me, if I had two legs. Get out, son. Live life, while you have one.”

  Alex walked back to his small room. He thought about the mud and the terror and the choir of the dying who lay sobbing in no man’s land, he thought about the sergeant’s missing leg, he thought about the dead. He considered desertion for a while, melting away into the city, but he knew that he would be caught. And if he was caught, he would be taken to the moor to the west of the city, shot by a bored soldier no older than himself, and thrown in a pit of lime. No resurrection, no chance for his parents to say their sad goodbyes. He had hardly lived life, how could be accept that it could soon be over? He sat on his hard bed for a while, head in his hands, grieving for his future. Then he left, not bothering to lock the door.

  All the light had seeped out of the sky, and the night was still and cold. It felt as if the whole world was waiting, holding its breath, because something important was about to happen. Thin fingers of fog wavered up from the motionless dark water of the canals. Alex walked towards the heart of the city. He didn’t know where he was going, but the sergeant’s suggestions held little attraction for him. What was the point of getting drunk in an anonymous bar, sliding slowly down a rough wooden counter as the night went on? What was the point in spending the night with a woman who found only his money attractive? Alex had never been with a woman, his head was full of the things he had read in books and poems, stories about passion and love set in worlds that seemed so much more real than that of the cold streets, the quiet small rooms with a bed and a chair and the silence of despair.

  As Alex reached a square near the centre of the city, the streets became busier. Soldiers on leave, the officers of the general staff in their never-seen-blood finery, the prostitutes and petty thugs who preyed upon them, the ordinary men and women of the city, trying to lead a normal life amidst the chaos, putting on a pretence of peacetime in a city at war. Alex felt a stranger to them, a stranger to them all. There was so much that he wanted to do in life, so many places he wanted to visit, so many things he wanted to feel, and because a man he had never met had signed a piece of paper he would end up wandering the streets of the city, one of the slow-witted dead, looking in vain for the family that lived two day’s journey away by train. A tram sparked through the square, metal grinding on metal. As it passed him, it slowed, and Alex jumped on to the footplate at the back, not knowing where it was going, not caring.

  He bought a ticket to the last stop on the line, and settled back on the hard seat, content to let the sway and rattle take him to the place that he always went to while travelling, a place that was neither where he had come from nor where he was going. The tram jolted its way out from the centre of the city, heading for the suburbs. People got on, people got off, Alex paid them no attention. They stopped at a railway station, and all of the passengers left the tram apart from Alex and a short man who flapped and rustled at his newspaper. After a few moments the tram jerked and moved a few feet, and then stopped again. The back door of the tram opened and closed and Alex felt a gust of cold night air on the back of his neck. A dark-haired woman brushed past him, and the tram started moving again. As she passed, Alex smelt her scent. He could not identify it, but it made him think of falling leaves and the embers of bonfires and all the autumnal thoughts of things that he had meant to do and never done, things he meant to say but had left unsaid.

  She sat facing Alex, a few seats in front of him on the other side of the tram. It was the woman he had seen a few days earlier. Even though he had only seen her for a few seconds, her face had stayed in his mind like a picture in a locket. She was more beautiful than any woman he had ever seen, even though if looked at part by part her features were no more than conventionally attractive. She had a fragile quality, translucent, like delicate china lit from within. The woman turned her head slightly to look out of the window, and the collar of her coat fell away to rev
eal her neck, slightly arched, a perfect curve. Alex felt a regret that made his fears seem an irrelevance. What happened tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after that, was immaterial. What mattered now, more than anything ever would matter, was that he had seen beauty, and in another stop or two the woman would get off the tram and walk into the darkness. By luck he might survive the war, live his life, meet a thousand other people, and then die an old man knowing that he had lost something in his youth which he had never been able to find again.

  She looked back in Alex’s direction, and he dropped his gaze. After a while, he looked up again. She was watching him, and he wanted to turn away again in embarrassment but for a few seconds he could not do so. Then he looked out of the window beside him, his mouth dry, his hands clenched. The shadows of the city flickered past. He could see her reflection in his window. She was still watching him. He found the courage to look at her again, but as he did, she looked away. Alex thought that she in turn was now watching his reflection, that they both looked not at each other, but at an image of the other.

  The tram slowed and came to a halt. The woman stood up, and walked towards the door at the front. As the door opened, she looked back down the tram. Alex looked back at her. Then she walked down the steps of the tram and out onto the street. The door closed and the tram started off again.

  Alex jumped up, ran to the back of the tram, threw open the door, and jumped down to the street from the footplate, nearly falling flat on his face. They were in an old part of the city, close to the river, where the streets narrowed and sloped down towards the dark water. The woman had crossed the road, but she must have heard him jump from the tram because she stopped and turned, looked at him crouching in the road between the cold metal tramlines. The warm red lights of the tram receded into the mist, then it turned a corner, and was gone. She looked at him, said nothing.

  “Don’t be scared, please,” he stammered. “I don’t mean – I just – I had to talk to you.”

  She stayed on the other side of the street, but didn’t walk away, didn’t look around in alarm for help. He crossed the road towards her, hands held wide, making trembling circles in the air.

  “Please, you must be freezing. Let me just walk with you, wherever you’re going. Just – just let me just walk with you a little while, and then I’ll go, I promise.”

  She smiled, a slow sad smile, and nodded. Alex knew that whatever happened in the next few days, whether he was sent to the front or not, whether he lived or not, he would remember that smile until he had memory no longer. She began to walk, and he fell in beside her, talking more than he knew he ought to, but desperate to try and say in a few minutes what it could take a lifetime to tell.

  The road came to an end facing the high brick wall of a warehouse that overlooked the river. An alley ran off alongside the warehouse. The woman hesitated, as if she were uncertain of the direction to take. She turned towards the alley, and then stopped, and looked at Alex for a moment. Her perfection made him want to cry. The autumn air was cold on his face, the night was still, everything was quiet and perfect. Everything was sharp, the world more real than Alex had ever known it, beauty and meaning in every damp brick, in every tree that reached dark fingers towards the night. She held out her hand to him, and he took it. Her skin was like the most delicate statue carved from ivory, unblemished, pale, cold as stone.

  Alex wasn’t sure if he had known that she was dead when they were on the tram, or whether he had realized in the moments that they had walked together. He did not know, he did not care. In this city, amongst the rotting leaves and the distant thundering of the guns, the difference between the dead and the living did not seem very important to him any more.

  “Let’s walk,” he said to her, “I’ll help you find them. Your family. I’ll help you find them.” Her fingers tightened on his, and they walked on together. Halfway down the alley, Alex heard footsteps behind them. He turned, and saw three men. One of them carried a large knife, the sort a butcher would use to cut joints of meat. Another swung something in his hand, something that was white and indistinct in the soft mist that rose from the river. As they came closer, Alex saw that it was a bunch of lilies.

  He looked around the alley. If they ran, the men would catch them before they reached the end. A yard or two away, a solid door was set into the brick of the warehouse. It was padlocked and barred, there was no way through, but leaning in the doorway was an old iron shovel, its edges corroded and half-eaten away with rust. Alex picked it up.

  “Go,” he said to the woman. “Go. Find your family. Be as quick as you can. Do you understand? And thank you. Do you understand? Thank you.”

  She looked at him and he could not tell if she knew what he was saying or not. Then there was a slight squeeze of her fingers on his, and his hand was holding nothing but air and she was walking away down the alley.

  “We’re going to pass,” the man with the knife said in a conversational voice. “Whether you stand there or not. You know what she is. Move.”

  “Who is he?” the man carrying the lilies said, sounding nervous. “I don’t know him. He’s not her family, I told you, I know the family, that’s how come I knew she’d be coming back. They’re all waiting for her in the house. It’s only on the next street, if we don’t take her now, here . . .”

  The three men kept walking towards Alex. The man with the knife was slapping it gently against his free hand.

  “Get out of the way,” he said. “We’ve got no quarrel with you. Walk away and let us put nature back how it ought to be. It’s the new way. Way things ought to be. Soon the war will be over and it will all be like this. You’re either with us, and the future, or you’re with them, and the past. Stay where you are, and we’ll make you like her. What do you care anyway? Why are you bothering? She’ll be dead inside a week.”

  Alex thought of his grandfather, of the way that the river at home curved between the fields and shone secret and silver in the light of the moon, of the trains full of soldiers that rattled off up into the hills towards the mud and the fear, of the dead that walked the city, and he thought about the gentle curve of her neck and the feel of her hand upon his.

  “So will I,” he said, and raised the shovel.

  RAMSEY CAMPBELL

  Breaking Up

  RAMSEY CAMPBELL IS A REGULAR contributor to the Best New Horror series. Described by The Oxford Companion to English Literature as “Britain’s most respected living horror writer,” he has been named Grand Master by the World Horror Convention and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writers Association.

  Campbell’s most recent novels include Secret Stories and The Overnight, while a new edition of his Arkham House collection The Height of the Scream was recently reissued by Babbage Press. The author is currently at work on a new novel, The Communications.

  “I’d already written one macabre tale about a mobile phone,” reveals the author, “and then it occurred to me that there could be another. I suspect all this is my mental preparation for owning one of the things.”

  AS KERRY GLANCED THROUGH the display window at the street that was bony with frozen snow, a mobile rang. “Will that be him?” Harvey said.

  At first she wasn’t certain it was hers – more than one of the thousands of phones they sold might play that disco tune – and then she realized the sound was muffled by her handbag on the counter. It stayed a little indistinct when she slipped the phone out of the bag. She read the displayed number and terminated the call. “Not him,” Harvey said as if she needed to be told.

  “Just a customer,” she almost said, remembering how Russell had waited for her to be free so that he could ask whether she thought he was too old for a mobile. “Just someone I used to know,” she said.

  “Never a stalker, is it? Would you like me to stick with you till Jason picks you up?”

  “I’m sure he would have rung if he wasn’t nearly here.”

  “I’d be happy to, all the same. Then if
he doesn’t show up I could run you wherever you like.”

  She suspected the manager had somewhere that he liked in mind. His hair was dyed a shade too black, and a sunbed and a gym also kept up his appearance, but his jowls were starting to bag his age. “I thought you had someone to go home to,” she said.

  “Nowt wrong with being friendly as well, is there?”

  “I normally am, I think.” His voice had taken on some of the edge he used for second warnings to staff, and she didn’t want to be alone with that either. She gave her scarf another turn around her throat and tugged her gloves on before picking up her bag. “You lock up,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

  The first thing she saw on stepping outside was her breath. The cold set about making a mask of her face at once. Along both sides of the deserted street the shop windows were dusty with frost, glass cases in an abandoned museum. The pale mounds with which the glittering pavements were heaped seemed to glow from within. A wind from somewhere even colder sent a shiver through her, which lent Harvey an excuse to look concerned as he withdrew the key from the door. “Really, I could—”

  “Really, don’t.” She was about to put some distance between them when her mobile intervened. As soon as she extracted it she was able to say “This is him.”

  She keyed the phone but didn’t speak until Harvey made for the car park, skidding as he reached the alley between the shops and righting himself with a penguinish flap of his arms. She heared his walled-in curse at a second tumble as she said “Where are you?”