The Mammoth Book of Nightmare Stories Read online

  Half an hour from the station he called Alison and arranged for her to come and collect him. He knew it was false, but she sounded virtually back to normal, more in control. She said she had already ordered a Chinese takeaway and bought a bottle of wine. He could barely imagine sitting at home, eating and drinking and chatting—one of their favorite times together—with Molly lying dead less than two miles away. He would see her passing in every movement of Alison’s head, every twitch of her eyelids. She would be there with them more than ever. He was heading for strange times.

  As the train pulled into the station, his cell phone rang. It was Maggie.

  “Adam, when are you coming back? Come on, artistic tempers are well and good when you’re not getting anywhere, but that was plain rude. These guys really have no time for prima donnas, you know. Are you at your hotel?”

  “I’m back home,” Adam said, hardly believing her tone of voice. “Didn’t you hear what I said, Mags? Alison’s Mum is dead.”

  “Yes, yes …” she said, trailing off. “Adam. The guys at the gallery have made another offer. They’ll commission the artwork for the same amount, but they’ll also—”

  “Mags, I’m not interested. This is not … me. It’ll change me too much.”

  “One hundred thousand.”

  Adam did not reply. He could not. His imagination, kicked into some sort of overdrive over the past few weeks, was picturing what that sort of money could do for his family.

  He stood from his seat and followed the other passengers toward the exit. “No Mags,” he said, shaking his head. He saw the woman who had sat opposite him; it was obvious that she had already spotted him, because her head was down, frantically searching for some unknown item in her handbag. “No. That’s not me. I didn’t do any of it.”

  “You didn’t do those paintings?”

  Adam thought about it for a moment as he shuffled along the aisle: the midnight awakenings when he knew he had to work; the smell of oils and coffee as time went away, and it was just him and the painting; his burning finger and hand and arm muscles after several hours’ work; the feeling that he truly was creating in fire.

  “No Mags,” he said, “I didn’t.” He turned the phone off and stepped onto the platform.

  Alison and Jamie were there to meet him. Alison was the one who had lost her mother, but on seeing them it was Adam who burst into tears. He hugged his wife and son, she crying into his neck in great wracking sobs, Jamie mumbling, “Daddy, Daddy,” as he struggled to work his way back into his parents’ world.

  Adam picked Jamie up, kissing his forehead and unable to stop crying. You’ll lose them, Howards had said. How dare he? How dare he talk about someone else’s family like that?

  “I’m so sorry,” he said to Alison.

  She smiled grimly, a strange sight in combination with her tears and puffy eyes and gray complexion. “Such a bloody stupid way to go,” she managed to gasp before her own tears came again.

  Adam touched her cheek. “I’ll drive us home.”

  As they walked along the platform toward the bridge to the car park, Adam looked around. Faces stared at him from the train—one of them familiar, the woman who had been rubbing him with her foot—but none of them were Amaranth. Some were pale and distant, others almost transparent in their dissatisfaction with their lot, but all were human.

  The open girders of the roof above were lined only with pigeons.

  The waste-ground behind the station was home to wild cats and rooks and rusted shopping trolleys. Nothing else.

  Around them, humanity went about its toils. Businessmen and travelers and students dodged each other across the platform. None of them looked at Adam and his family, or if they did they glanced quickly away. Everyone knew grief when they saw it, and most people respected its fierce privacy.

  In the car park Alison sat in the passenger seat of their car and Adam strapped Jamie into his seat in the back. “You a good boy?” he asked. “You been a good boy for your Mummy?”

  “Tiger, tiger!” Jamie hissed. “Daddy, Daddy tiger.” He smiled, showing the gap-toothed grin that never failed to melt Adam’s heart. Then he giggled.

  He was not looking directly at Adam. His gaze was directed slightly to the left, over Adam’s shoulder.

  Adam spun around.

  Nothing.

  He scanned the car park. A hundred cars, and Amaranth could be hiding inside any one of them, watching, waiting, until they could touch him once more.

  He climbed into the car and locked the doors.

  “Why did you do that?” Alison asked.

  “Don’t know.” He shook his head. She was right. Locked doors would be no protection.

  They headed away from the station and into town. They lived on the outskirts on the other side. A couple of streets away lay the small restaurant where Adam had talked with Howards. He wondered where the old man was now. Whether he was still here. Whether he remained concerned for Adam’s safety, his life, his luck, since Adam had stormed out and told him to mind his own business.

  Approaching the traffic lights at the foot of the river-bridge, Adam began to slow down.

  A hand reached out of the seat between his legs and clasped onto the wheel. He could feel it, icy-cool where it touched his balls, a burning cold where it actually passed through the meat of his inner thighs.

  “No!” he screamed. Jamie screeched and began to cry, Alison looked up in shock.

  “What? Adam?”

  “Oh no, don’t you fucking—” He was already stamping hard on the brakes but it did no good.

  “Come see us again,” Amaranth said between his ears, and the hand twisted the wheel violently to the left.

  Adam fought. A van loomed ahead of them, scaffold poles protruding from its tied-open rear doors. Terrible images of impalement and bloodied, rusted metal leaped into his mind and he pulled harder, muscles burning with the strain of fighting the hand. The windscreen flowed into the face of one of the things, still expressionless but exuding malice all the same. Adam looked straight through its eyes at the van.

  The brakes were not working.

  “Tiger!” Jamie shouted.

  At the last second the wheel turned a fraction to the right and they skimmed the van, metal screeching on metal, the car juddering with the impact.

  Thank God, Adam thought.

  And then the old woman stepped from the sidewalk directly in front of them.

  This time, Amaranth did not need to turn the wheel. Adam did it himself. And he heard the sickening crump as the car hit the woman sideways on, and he felt the vehicle tilting as it mounted the pavement, and he saw a lamp-post splitting the windscreen in two. His family screamed.

  There was a terrible coldness as eight unseen hands closed around his limbs.

  The car gave the lamp-post a welcoming embrace.

  “I’m dead,” Adam said. “I’ve been dead for a long time. I’m floating in the Atlantic. I know this because nothing that has happened is possible. I’ve been dreaming. Maybe the dead can dream.” He moved his left hand and felt his father’s lost watch chafe his wrist.

  A hand grasped his throat and quicksilver nails dug in. “Do the dead hurt?” the familiar voice intoned.

  Adam tried to scream, but he could not draw breath.

  Around him, the world burned.

  “Keep still and you will not die … yet.”

  “Alison!” Adam began to struggle against the hands holding him down. The sky was smudged with greasy black smoke, and the stench reminded him of rotten roadkill he had found in a ditch when he was a boy, a dead creature too decayed to identify. Something wet was dripping on him, wet and warm. One of the things was leaning over him. Its mouth was open and the liquid forming on its lips was transparent, and of the same consistency as its body. It was shedding pieces of itself onto him.

  “You will listen to us,” Amaranth said.

  “Jamie! Alison!”

  “You will see them again soon enough. First, listen.
You pledged to believe in us and to never deny us. You have reneged. Reaffirm your pledge. We gave you a gift, but without faith we are—”

  “I don’t want your gift,” Adam said, still struggling to stand. He could see more now, as if this world were opening up to him as he came to. Above the heads of the things standing around him, the ragged walls and roofs of shattered buildings stood out against the hazy sky. Flames licked here and there, smoke rolled along the ground, firestorms did their work in some unseen middle-distance. Ash floated down and stuck to his skin like warm snow. He thought of furnaces and ovens, concentration camps, lime pits …

  “But you have it already. You have the good luck we bestowed upon you. And you have used it … we have seen … we have observed.”

  “Good luck? Was that crash good luck?”

  “You avoided the van that would have killed you. You survived. We held you back from death.”

  “You steered me!”

  Amaranth said nothing.

  “What of Alison? Jamie?”

  Once more, the things displayed a loathsome hint of emotion. “Who knows?” the voice said slowly, drawing out the last word with relish.

  At last Adam managed to stand, but only because the things had moved back and freed him. “Leave me be,” he said, wondering if begging would help, or perhaps flattery. “Thank you for saving me, that first time … I know you did, and I’m grateful because my wife has a husband, my son has a father. But please leave me be.” All he wished for was to see his family again.

  Amaranth picked him up slowly, the things using one hand each, lifting and lifting, until he was suspended several feet above the ground. From up there he could see all around, view the devastated landscape surrounding him—and he realized at last where he was.

  Through a gap in the buildings to his left, the glint of violent waters. Silhouetted against this, dancing in the flickering flames that were eating at it even now, a small figure hung crucified.

  “Oh, no.”

  “Be honored,” Amaranth said, “you are the first to visit both places.” They dropped him to the ground and stood back. “Run.”

  “What? Where?” He was winded, certain he had cracked a rib. It felt like a hot coal in his side.

  “Run.”

  “Why?”

  And then he saw why.

  Around the corner, where this shattered street met the next, capered a horde of burning people. Some of them had only just caught aflame, beating at clothes and hair as they ran. Others were engulfed, arms waving, flaming pieces of them falling as they made an impossible dash away from the agony. There were smaller shapes among them—children—just as doomed as the rest. Some of them screamed, those who still had vocal chords left to make any sound. Others, those too far gone, sizzled and spat.

  Adam staggered, wincing with the pain in his side, and turned to run. Amaranth had moved down the street behind him and stood staring, all their eyes upon him. He sprinted toward them. They receded back along the rubble-strewn street without seeming to walk. Every step he took moved them further away.

  He felt heat behind him and a hand closed over his shoulder, the same shoulder the bug lady had grasped. Someone screaming, pleading, a high-pitched sound as the acrid stink of burning clothes scratched at his nostrils. The flames crept across his shoulder and down onto his chest, but they were extinguished almost immediately by something wet splashing across him.

  He looked down. There were no burns on his clothing and his chest was dry.

  Adam shook the hand from him and ran. He passed a shop where someone lay half-in, half-out of the doorway, a dog chewing on the weeping stump of one of their legs. They were still alive. Their eyes followed him as he dashed by, as if coveting his ability to run. He recognized those eyes. He even knew that face, although when he had first seen her, the bug lady had seemed more alive.

  “Let me back!” he shouted at the figures receding along the decimated street ahead of him. From behind, he heard thumps as burning people hit the ground to melt into pools of fat and charred bone. He risked a look over his shoulder and saw even more of them, new victims spewing from dilapidated doorways and side alleys to join in the flaming throng.

  Someone walked out into the street ahead of him, limping on crutches, staring at the ground. They looked up and the expression that passed across their face was one of relief. Adam passed her by—he only saw it was a woman when he drew level—and heard the feet of the burning horde trample her into the dirt.

  “Let me back, you bastards!” The last time he was here—although he had been on the other side of the lake, of course, staring across and pitying those poor unfortunates on this side—he had not known what was happening to him. Now he did. Now he knew that there was a way back, if only it was granted to him.

  “You are really a very interesting one,” the voice said as loud as ever, even though Amaranth stood in the distance. “You will be … fun.”

  As Adam tripped over a half-full skull, the burning people fell across him and a voice started shouting again. “Tiger! Tiger!” It went from a shout to a scream, an unconscious, childish exhalation of terror and panic.

  The world was on its side, and the legs of the burning people milled beyond the shattered windscreen. One of them was squatting down, reaching in, grasping at his arms even as he tried to push them away.

  Something still dripped onto him. He looked up. Alison was suspended above him in the passenger seat, the seatbelt holding her there, holding in the pieces that were still intact. The lamp-post had done something to her. She was no longer whole. She had changed. Adam snapped his eyes shut as something else parted from her and hit his shoulder.

  Heat gushed and caressed his face, but then there was a gentle ripping sound above him, and coppery blood washed the flames away from his skin like his wife brushing crumbs from his stubble. The flames could never take him. Not when he was such a lucky man.

  You are the first to visit both places, Amaranth’s voice echoed like the vague memory of pain. You will be … fun.

  “Tiger!”

  Jamie?

  “Jamie!”

  Flames danced around him once more. Fingers snagged his jacket. A hand reached in bearing a knife and he crunched down into shattered glass as his seatbelt was sliced. Something else fell from above him as he was dragged out, a final present, a last, lasting gift from his Alison. As he was hauled through the windscreen, hands beating at the burning parts of him, his doomed son screaming for him from the doomed car, he wondered whether it was a part of her that he had ever seen before.

  He was lying out on the lawn. It had not been cut for a long time, because his sit-on lawnmower had broken down. Besides, he liked the wild appearance it gave the garden. Alison had liked wild. She had loved the countryside; she had been agnostic, but she had said the smells and sounds and sights made her feel closer to God.

  Adam felt close to no one, certainly not God. Not with Amaranth peering at him from the woods sometimes, following him on his trips into town, watching as good fortune and bad luck juggled with his life and health.

  No, certainly not God.

  Alison had been buried alongside her mother over a year ago. He had not been to the cemetery since. He remembered her in his own way—he was still painting—and he did not wish to be reminded of what her ruined body had become beneath the ground. But he was reminded every day. Every morning, on his bus trip into town to visit Jamie in the hospital, he was reminded. Because he so wanted his son to join her.

  That was guilt. That was suffering. That was the sickest irony about the whole thing. He’s a lucky lad, the doctors would still tell him, even after a year. He’s a fighter. He’ll wake up soon, you’ll see. He’ll have scars, yes … And then Adam would ask about infection and the doctors would nod, yes, there has been something over the last week or two, inevitable with burns, but we’ve got it under control, it’s just bad luck that …

  And so on.

  His wife, dead. His son in a coma fr
om which he had only awakened three times, and each time some minor complication had driven him back under. He was growing up dead. And still Adam went to him every day to talk to him, to whisper in his ear, to try and bring him around with favorite nursery rhymes and the secret Dad-voices he had used on him when things were good, when life was normal. When chance was still a factor in his existence, and fate was uncertain.

  He looked across at the house. It was big, bought with Alison’s life insurance, their old home sold for a good profit to the couple who had wanted it so much. This new property had an acre of land, a glazed rooftop studio with many panes already cracked or missing, a Mercedes in the driveway—a prison. A Hell. His own manufactured Hell, perhaps to deny the idea that such a grand home could be seen as fortunate, lucky to come by. The place was a constant reminder of his lost family because he had made it so. No new start for him.

  The walls of the house were lined with his own portraits of Alison and Jamie. Some of them were bright and full of sunshine and light and positive memories. Others contained thoughts that only he could read—bad memories of the crash—and what he had seen of Alison and heard of Jamie before being dragged out from the car. The reddest of these painting hung near the front door for all visitors to see.

  Not that he had many visitors. Until yesterday.

  Howards had tracked him down. Adam had let him in, knowing it was useless to fight, and knowing also that he truly wanted to hear what the old man had to say.

  “I’ve found a way out,” he had whispered. “I tried it last week … I injected myself with poison, then used the antidote at the last minute. But I could have done it. I could have gone on. They weren’t watching me at the time.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Well … I’ve come to terms with it. Life. As it is. I just wanted to test the idea. Prove that I was still in control of myself.”

  Adam had nodded, but he did not understand.

  “I thought it only fair to offer you the chance,” Howards had said.

  Now, Adam knew that he had to take that chance. Whether Jamie ever returned or not—and his final screams, his shouts of Tiger! Tiger!, had convinced Adam that his son had been the twitching shape on the burning cross—he could never be a good father to him. Not with Amaranth following him, watching him. Not when he knew what they had done.