The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 16 Read online

  “I’m bloody—” Jason paused to reclaim some of his temper. “I was on my way,” he complained.

  “Aren’t you still?”

  “Would I be talking to you if I was? You know what I think of these clowns that talk on their phones while they’re driving.”

  “Not the ones that sell them, I hope.”

  “There ought to be a law that says you have to tell your customers how to use them. You know that’s what I think. Save it, all right? I don’t need an argument just now.”

  She could miss Russell’s politeness after all. “You still haven’t told me where you are.”

  “Some bloody place in the middle of nowhere. I’ve come off the road.”

  “Are you lost, do you mean?”

  “Off the side. In a bloody snowdrift and a ditch. I’m waiting for a tow.”

  “You sound as if you’re blaming me.”

  “I wouldn’t have been going so fast if you didn’t get in a panic whenever I’m a minute late.”

  “Hold on, I don’t panic. I haven’t been panicking now.”

  “A huff, then. You make me feel I’ve let you down and it’s a major insult even if you don’t say anything.”

  “Well, please don’t feel obliged to meet me tonight.”

  “You’re doing it now. I don’t know if I can,” Jason added less apologetically than she thought the conversation warranted. “I’ll let you know what’s happening.”

  “Don’t put yourself to any extra trouble. I’m going home.”

  “I’ll call you there, then.”

  She didn’t quite advise him not to bother. She broke the connection and was stowing the phone when it stirred, a vibration muffled by her glove. As the disco melody began to tick she blinked at the digits through the whitish glow with which a streetlamp coated the display. It was Russell’s number.

  For an instant she was tempted to agree to dinner at a restaurant or a chat over drinks, except that he would end up pleading gently for more, every plea primed with the expectation of refusal. She might have given him the option of leaving a message, but she wanted to deal more decisively with him than she had with Jason. “Kerry,” she said, turning along the path between the huddled mounds.

  “Russell.”

  He sounded uncertain, presumably of her response. “I can see that,” she told him.

  “Can you?”

  She took his surprise as a joke not much less feeble than he was making his voice. “On the call display,” she explained nonetheless.

  “You’re up on these things, not like us oldsters. That’s why I came to you.”

  “Haven’t you charged your battery?” she said or, if she was honest, hoped. “You’re starting to break up.”

  “Oh, don’t say that.” His voice surged, hissing and fragmenting in her ear, then subsided. “What would do that? Would the cold?”

  “This much might. Why were you calling, Russell? I’m outside and I don’t want mine to die on me.”

  “Mustn’t.” He might have been talking to himself until he said “I think it’s even colder up here.”

  Kerry’s gaze was drawn beyond the shops to the darker streets that climbed increasingly steeply to the glimmering ridge a thousand feet above the town. “Where’s that?” she felt required to ask.

  “Home.”

  She had no more idea where he lived than she had let him have about her; she’d found him a little too eager for that information. “Then I should do something about it,” she said.

  “Oh, will you? I knew you’d still be kind. Anything you feel you can. Just come and see me if you like.”

  “I’m sorry, Russell, but it’s over. You must know that.” Kerry hadn’t finished when she heard a rattle and a sprinkling of static that put her in mind of a shower of ice. “Are you still there?” she said and, convinced of the opposite, shut the mobile in her handbag.

  She’d reached the end of the shops without encountering a solitary person. She might as well have called in sick like several of her colleagues; the shop had hardly seen a customer all week, and none in the last three hours despite staying open late. Kerry heard the distant clatter of a garage door, and somewhere else uphill a woman was shouting to a child or a dog. Whatever the name was, it seemed to shatter on the sharpness of the air. The low moan that had occupied the pauses in Russell’s speech must have been the note of Harvey’s car as it laboured up into the dark.

  Since the pavements of the first road homewards had been turned into slides by children or less wilfully by adults, she kept to the middle of the road. The light of the floppy-capped streetlamps fell short of her path, and it was only by treading gingerly on it that she established which of the blackness was ice. All the windows of the cars parked on both sides of the slope were either encased in frost or spread with the local newspaper, every visible page of which mentioned someone’s death. The windows of the staggered houses were hermetically curtained even if dark, and Kerry felt as though the entire town apart from her was hiding from the weather. She’d tramped as far as the lowest crossroad when her phone began to clamour.

  Was it wearing out, or had it caught a chill? Once she managed to fumble it out of her bag she was unable to read the faltering digits in the greenish window. She halted on the intersection, pinning down the hour hand of her shadow and a less distinct minute one while she located the key with a clumsy finger. “On the way?” she said.

  “I think you are.”

  Before he spoke she knew he wasn’t Jason, from a rush of static like an effort to breathe. “Russell, can you please stop. I’m expecting a call.”

  “Anyone but me.” For as long as it took him to say this he seemed hardly even to be talking to himself. “I wasn’t asking what you think,” he said.

  To begin with he always had; it had been much of his appeal. “Don’t you care about that now?” she was disappointed enough to retort.

  “Didn’t mean that. Don’t confuse me,” he protested so harshly that his voice grew almost shapeless. “I meant all I want is for us to see each other.”

  “I told you once, Russell. I’m sorry if it was rude of me not to answer all your messages, but you did leave a lot after I kept telling you I couldn’t meet you. And now I’ve told you it’s over.”

  “Don’t say that.” His voice sounded close to disintegrating altogether. “Once more is all I ask. You can see me at least.”

  “Find someone else, Russell. I’m sure you will. You deserve someone more—”

  “More my own age?” he said, not so much interrupting as filling the pause. “There’s nobody. I only know your number.”

  Perhaps he’d stored none except hers. Empty roads loomed on both sides of her vision, and she was aware of another at her back. She was making for the street ahead and trying to find words that would be as civil as final when he spoke. “If it’s something I said, please say. Just remember I’ve never met anyone like you.”

  He’d ended up repeating that too often and too intensely, along with exhorting her not to waste herself on her job or on such of his friends as he’d met, but his insistence on introducing himself as her uncle had been worst of all. It had started as a joke, then turned into a plea for her not just to contradict him but to reassure him that everyone knew he was teasing. Although striving to hearten him exhausted her, she made a last effort. “You will,” she said. “You’ll meet someone better, you’ll see. Now I’m—”

  “Never.” Before she could tell him not to be silly he said “No time.”

  “Look, Russell, is something really wrong? Because if there is you should call—”

  “I just need you. You’re coming. I can hear.”

  Kerry closed her fingers around the mobile and strained her ears until they ached with more than the temperature. The phone muttered in her fist – she even seemed to feel it wriggling feebly – but she couldn’t hear him in any of the houses. He must be pretending to locate her, unless he was deluding himself. When the crushed voice stopped trying
to slip through her fingers she returned the mobile to her bag. She quickened her pace uphill, and a whitish figure peered around a hulking gatepost at her. The token face had fallen askew on its way to leaving the head.

  At least half a dozen other snowmen were lying in wait as she toiled up the road. She was in danger of feeling surrounded by them and very little else, as if the townsfolk had been replaced with frozen snow. Of course she was simply nervous that the glazed silence might be interrupted by the shrilling of her phone, but the knowledge didn’t help. At least there was a pub across the intersection at the top of the slope she was conquering. Even if she didn’t go in, its presence would be company for her. The drinkers beyond the lit windows must be keeping their voices down; perhaps just a few would have ventured out of their houses on a night like this. She was sure that she was hearing muted conversation until she stepped onto the level crossroad and saw that ice had transformed the windows into marble slabs. Their light was borrowed from the nearest streetlamp.

  Now that she was denied the chance she couldn’t avoid realising she would have liked to be among people if she received another call. She could only make for home as fast as was safe. The rest of the route was yet steeper, and she crossed to the pavement, which consisted of giant steps with a railing to help her climb.

  Despite her glove, the rail felt like a handful of ice. To her right, lumps of snow had been gouged out of the crests of the hedges for snowballs or by someone’s desperate clutch. Beyond the hedges on both sides of the road, pale figures no more shapely than a child’s first drawing appeared to mark her progress. She might almost have fancied they were watching her, even those that had least with which to do so. When a phone jangled, she was near to imagining that it related to a dim hunched shape with the sloughed remains of a face. The sound was in the house belonging to the snowman. She hauled herself past it in a rage at her nerves. It fell silent, and her phone rang.

  She snatched it out so furiously that she was barely able to keep hold of it. A few indecipherable scraps of digits like traces of a fossil glimpsed through moss were visible in the window. She poked the key and clapped the mobile to her face. “Who’s there?”

  “Don’t go too fast. Don’t hurt yourself.”

  “I’m not going to.” This wasn’t enough of a retort or a challenge. “You can’t see me,” she said in case that made Russell betray he could.

  “I don’t need to. We’ve got a rapport, you and I.” If that seemed to bring his voice closer, she wasn’t about to let it persuade her of anything; he must be holding the mouthpiece against his lips to blur his words so much. Before she could deny his claim he said “We aren’t as different as some people like to think.”

  By people, did he mean her? She shouldn’t care; if she kept him talking, perhaps she could locate him. She hung her bag on her left arm and gripped the railing as she forged uphill. “Why are you saying that?” she had to ask.

  “We both stayed where our roots are, didn’t we? We never sought our future elsewhere.”

  “I stayed for my parents.”

  “So did I.”

  Could they still be alive? Kerry doubted it, given how much older than she’d taken him to be he’d finally owned up to being. “I thought you were going to write some more books about the countryside,” she said.

  “That was the plan.”

  “Why, have you given up?”

  “I wouldn’t be talking to you if I had.”

  This sounded more like a plea than she welcomed. “You don’t need me, Russell. You were writing long before we met.”

  A whisper of restlessness made her think she’d scored a point until he said “Why did you start going out with me?”

  His voice was disintegrating so much that she could hardly detect the tone, never mind the relevance. “Because you asked me,” she said and didn’t add “Because you kept asking.”

  “You took pity on me, you mean. Couldn’t you again?”

  “No, Russell, because you had class. Can’t you have some now?”

  “There isn’t much to me any more.”

  “You know that isn’t true. You write books people want to read. I’ve seen them all over the place.”

  “If we’re finished, so are they.”

  Was he saying anything that came into his head? As she clambered up the next step, through a tree’s sparkling shadow that felt like the threat of being buried under an avalanche, she said “I don’t believe you mean that. You must have got over me by now. It’s been months.”

  “Is that all? I can’t tell.”

  Was this another bid for sympathy? Presumably it was the transmission rather than his voice that sounded near to shivering to pieces, but it dismayed her. “Russell, if you’re truly feeling so bad you ought to call—”

  At once the phone was dead as ice. If he’d given up pestering her, she would let that be enough. She fumbled the mobile into her bag and flexed her stiff fingers before entrusting the bag to them. A dozen clutches at the rail, and twice as many paces as there were slippery steps, brought her to her road.

  It stretched left, iced with light under three streetlamps partly masked with snow. The scene might have been embedded in the amber of the night sky. Perhaps it was the silence that rendered it unreal as a Christmas card. The house where she lived was part of the emptiness, since the couple on the ground floor had gone abroad for the winter. She would be happy just to switch on the fires and draw the curtains and have nothing else that she absolutely had to do, she vowed, and was heading left when her mobile came to life.

  It could have been Jason, but when she succeeded in wielding the phone her voice felt cold and heavy as the spiked caps of the roofs. “Yes,” she said.

  “Not far now.”

  Russell’s voice made her feel as if his lips were trying to keep their shape against her ear. “So tell me where,” she said.

  “Up here.”

  Suppose he was unable to be any more specific and nervous of admitting it? “Just talk as you walk. I’ll hear you,” she gathered he was saying despite shedding several consonants.

  She couldn’t leave the situation unresolved. If he needed help, she ought to find out where to send it. She turned away from her house and grasped the uphill railing. “Just talk,” he repeated, though the first word almost dissolved into a hiss.

  This street was even steeper. She had to keep hold of the rail, though her gloved hand ached with its iciness. At the end of every pace the handbag on her wrist blundered like a blind but affectionate creature against her hip. Beyond their plots of white the houses appeared to be holding themselves still for fear of inundation by the burdens on their roofs. A wind like the essence of the frozen dark groped at her face as though searching for the bones. She licked her stiff lips to release her voice. “What do you want to talk about?”

  “Can’t you think of anything?”

  His voice must be shivering with static, not with panic. “The weather,” she said less than wholly as a joke.

  “About us. Times we had together.” The silence that ensued might have signified exhaustion or a wordless plea until he said “When we went dancing. I did enjoy myself, you know.”

  It had been the beginning of their end. Once he’d finished shouting above the disco uproar that he was her uncle, he’d set about dancing with a violence that seemed designed to compete with everyone else in the room. She could almost see the thin figure jigging and jerking as if he’d borrowed all the artificial vigour of the strobe light, his sleeves and trousers flapping like flags in a gale. When he’d panted to a standstill he had subsided into a chair and watched her dance, his eyes flickering with resignation that might have concealed a plea. Now she could have hoped he would ask anything other than “Didn’t you?”

  “I’m remembering. I don’t do everything aloud.”

  “Don’t you want to talk about it?”

  “I thought it didn’t matter what I talk about as long as I keep talking.”

  “It does
n’t,” he might have finished saying if his voice hadn’t collapsed into a flood of static.

  In a moment the phone was lifeless. A wind drifted down from the white ridge that was gnawing the black sky. The gust lingered behind a hedge to disturb a newspaper or a bank of loose snow – something white that whispered, at any rate. As the wind fastened on her, Kerry shivered and nearly dropped the mobile, which had twitched in her hand. That was a preamble to playing the tune she might have heard at the disco with Russell. “I’m here,” she told the blank phone.

  “I know. You’re outside.”

  The house beyond the gate to her right seemed to advance from the rank, although it was no taller or thinner than any of its neighbours. A few sets of footprints smudged by last week’s brief false thaw led to a front door unconcerned with any colour. The house was beetle-browed with icicles, and as far as she could see, it was unlit. “Well, are you going to let me in?” she said.

  “Sorry.” He sounded worse than that. “If you could find your own way,” he said, dropping several consonants.

  Kerry fumbled to thumb the key and then to snap her bag shut on the mobile. As she ventured up the path she felt as if the ill-defined prints were directing her course. If he didn’t answer the doorbell she would certainly phone for help. She planted one foot on the doorstep bloated with snow and poked the bellpush in the middle of the door. It rattled more than rang, and at once the door swung inwards.

  Light fanned along the hall in time to catch the white mass that swelled into her face. Could the house be colder than the street? The enervated glow through the puffy branches of a tree revealed half of the hall, the lower reaches of a staircase, two open doorways with a light switch between them. On her way to the switch a shiver overwhelmed her. She thought this and her glove were hindering her fingers until she saw that the switch wouldn’t budge because it was encased in ice.

  She was distracted by the notion that the house was somehow less defined than it ought to be. She peered into the rooms on either side of the switch and saw why. The first would be a sitting-room, the second for dining, but the furniture was close to unidentifiable. Though the windows were shut now, they had been open to the blizzard; the rooms and their contents were deep in snow. As she gazed at the dim pallid heaps, which barely referred to the shapes of a chair and a table and sideboard, Russell said “Up here.”