The Best New Horror 6 Page 17

  “Press 9,” he advised me. “Then call an ambulance.”

  He glanced down at Isobel. He said:

  “It would have been better to take her straight to a hospital.” I put the phone down.

  “I fucked up a perfectly good car to get here,” I said.

  He kept looking puzzledly at me and then out of the window at the BMW, half up on the pavement with smoke coming out of it.

  I said: “That’s a Hartge H27–24.”

  I said: “I could have afforded something in better taste, but I just haven’t got any.”

  “I know you,” he said. “You’ve done work for me.”

  I stared at him. He was right.

  I had been moving things about for him since the old Astravan days; since before Stratford. And if I was just a contract to him, he was just some writing on a job sheet to me. He was the price of a Hartge BMW with racing suspension and seventeen inch wheels.

  “But you did this,” I reminded him.

  I got him by the back of the neck and made him look closely at Isobel. Then I pushed him against the wall and stood away from him. I told him evenly: “I’m fucking glad I didn’t kill you when I wanted to.” I said: “Put her back together.”

  He lifted his hands.

  “I can’t,” he said.

  “Put her back together.”

  “This is only an office,” he said. “She would have to go to Miami.”

  I pointed to the telephone.

  I said: “Arrange it. Get her there.”

  He examined her briefly.

  “She was dying anyway,” he said. “The immune system work alone would have killed her. We did far more than we would normally do on a client. Most of it was illegal. It would be illegal to do most of it to a laboratory rat. Didn’t she tell you that?”

  I said: “Get her there and put her back together again.”

  “I can make her human again,” he offered. “I can cure her.”

  I said: “She didn’t fucking want to be human.”

  “I know,” he said.

  He looked down at his desk; his hands.

  He whispered: “Help me to fly. Help me to fly!”

  “Fuck off,” I said.

  “I loved her too, you know. But I couldn’t make her understand that she could never have what she wanted. In the end she was just too demanding: effectively, she asked us to kill her.”

  I didn’t want to know why he had let me have her back. I didn’t want to compare inadequacies with him.

  I said: “I don’t want to hear this.”

  He shrugged.

  “She’ll die if we try it again,” he said emptily. “You’ve got no idea how these things work.”

  “Put her back together.”

  You tell me what else I could have said.

  “Here at the Alexander Clinic, we use the modern ‘magic wand’ of molecular biology to insert avian chromosomes into human skin-cells. Nurtured in the clinic’s vats, the follicles of this new skin produce feathers instead of hair. It grafts beautifully. Brand new proteins speed acceptance. But in case of difficulties, we remake the immune system: aim it at infections of opportunity: fire it like a laser.

  “Our client chooses any kind of feather, from pinion to down, in any combination. She is as free to look at the sparrow as the bower bird or macaw. Feathers of any size or colour! But the real triumph is elsewhere –

  “Designer hormones trigger the ‘brown fat’ mechanism. Our client becomes as light and as hot to the touch as a female hawk. Then metabolically induced calcium shortages hollow the bones. She can be handled only with great care. And the dreams of flight! Engineered endorphins released during sexual arousal simulate the sidesweep, swoop and mad fall of mating flight, the frantically beating heart, long sight. Sometimes the touch of her own feathers will be enough.”

  I lived in a hotel on the beach while it was done. Miami! TV prophecy, humidity like a wet sheet, an airport where they won’t rent you a baggage trolley. You wouldn’t think this listening to Bob Seger. Unless you are constantly approaching it from the sea, Miami is less a dream – less even a nightmare – than a place. All I remember is what British people always remember about Florida: the light in the afternoon storm, the extraordinary size and perfection of the food in the supermarkets. I never went near the clinic, though I telephoned Alexander’s team every morning and evening. I was too scared. One day they were optimistic, the next they weren’t. In the end I knew they had got involved again, they were excited by the possibilities. She was going to have what she wanted. They were going to do the best they could for her, if only because of the technical challenge.

  She slipped in and out of the world until the next spring. But she didn’t die, and in the end I was able to bring her home to the blackened, gentle East End in May, driving all the way from Heathrow down the inside lane of the motorway, as slowly and carefully as I knew how. I had adjusted the driving mirror so I could look into the back of the car. Isobel lay awkwardly across one corner of the rear seat. Her hands and face seemed tiny. In the soft wet English light, their adjusted bone structures looked more rather than less human. Lapped in her singular successes and failures, the sum of her life to that point, she was more rested than I had ever seen her.

  About a mile away from the house, outside Whitechapel tube station, I let the BMW drift up to the kerb and stop. I switched the engine off and got out of the driving seat.

  “It isn’t far from here,” I said.

  I put the keys in her hand.

  “I know you’re tired,” I said, “but I want you to drive yourself the rest of the way.”

  She said: “China, don’t go. Get back in the car.”

  “It’s not far from here,” I said.

  “China, please don’t go.”

  “Drive yourself from now on.”

  If you’re so clever, you tell me what else I could have done. All that time in Miami she had never let go, never once vacated the dream. The moment she closed her eyes, feathers were floating down past them. She knew what she wanted. Don’t mistake me: I wanted her to have it. But imagining myself stretched out next to her on the bed night after night, I could hear the sound those feathers made, and I knew I would never sleep again for the touch of them on my face.

  IAN MacLEOD

  The Dead Orchards

  IAN MACLEOD LIVES in Sutton Coldfield with his wife Gillian and daughter Emily. After working for ten years in the Civil Service, he quit his job to become a full-time writer. The first story he sold, “1/72nd Scale” (published in Best New Horror 2), was nominated for a Nebula Award in 1990.

  Since then, he has written a science fiction novel (“which the world, his publisher and his horse don’t seem to be leaping over each other to buy”) and he is currently working on another one, set in past and present-day Scotland about the world’s last witch. Recent stories have appeared in Weird Tales, Asimov’s and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Arkham House is preparing a collection of his short fiction.

  “I seem to be making reasonably regular appearances in Best New Horror,” observes the writer, “which surprises me a little because, although I occasionally write horror fiction, I never actually think of myself as a ‘horror writer’.

  “I recall that I had H.P. Lovecraft broadly in mind when I wrote ‘The Dead Orchards’. Re-reading it now, I think it comes across as a mix between his earlier, more fantastic work and the way the horror genre has developed since. There are visceral things in it that HPL would never have been able – or wanted – to include. So why, I find myself wondering, did I want to include them?

  “Although I hadn’t worked it out in my head at the time I wrote the story, the specific answer is probably that I’ve always found the Lovecraft/Clark Ashton Smith school of horror essentially reassuring, dealing as it often does with horrors from far-off imagined places that are so weird that I at least end up thrilling and marvelling at them rather than shivering.

  “Having decided t
hat I wanted to write a story of that ilk that actually aimed to be disturbing, I guess I was bound to try to go that little bit further. But as to why the story came out the way it did, and where the City and Caitlin and her captor came from – and where they have gone to since – I’m, thankfully, at a loss to explain . . .”

  I USED TO LIVE in a house made from the bones of the City. Stones plundered from the dreams of palaces peered from every wall. It was too big for me alone, yet I rarely sought any company other than that of my servants. Forgotten rooms reached into tunnels, doorways opened on rotting boards. But there was still a core where a tarnished kind of luxury flourished. This was my home, and the living was as easy as it could be in this City, which is to say that my suffering was less than that of many others.

  Sometimes when my solitude became a burden I used to wander the streets searching for some female from whom the City had yet to drain the last dregs of grace. A difficult quest, but I had my successes. I would draw my guest back to my house with the necessary threats or promises, filling it with the silvered clash of china, the fragile aromas of good food. And when the feast had ended and contentment played on the air, when my guest sat on her golden chair and all past life was an ugly dream, I would offer her one last luxury: a glass of the clearest water drawn from a well deep in the foundations of my house. Pure water in this City where the sewers foul the river and the river feeds the wells. Crystalline water in a crystal glass.

  The goblet would rise in hands I had scented and cleansed, the water would tremble on the bevelled rim. And after it had touched those delicate lips, after the shapely throat had moved to swallow, the hand would fall, the glass would shatter, the eyes would blink once, then widen forever. For the clear water was invisibly polluted by the mutterings of some ancient spell. It caused a living paralysis for which, in all my experiments, I could discover no release, least of all death.

  Once, I used to take endless pleasure in seeing my guest sitting motionless, clothed in whatever fairness youth had granted her, with every muscle down to heart and lungs magically stilled, yet her mind alert, her senses singing. After weeks of slow study, I would take a knife to her flesh, blowing the dust from her unblinking eyes that she might better see the riches she contained. Each organ within was a gleaming jewel, strung like a wet necklace on the bones beneath. Once, towards the end of my explorations, I found another life enclosed within the first. A child. I cut the burden from its ropes of flesh and lifted it into the candlelight. But the eyes of the half-finished thing seemed to stare at me, and I replaced it hurriedly in its mother’s belly.

  Inevitably – and as with life itself – my guests didn’t keep their freshness forever. The spell allowed them to retain thoughts, sensation and life, but putrescence is an unavoidable fact even amongst the truly living in this city. Maggots eventually began to burrow the warm flesh. Gazing into the sockets of eyes that had run like tears, I used to wonder if death ever came to my guests. Did they sense every moment of decay? Was there ever an end to their pain? But I could find no answer from those rotting lips, and eventually I would call my servants to take the stinking burden from my sight and carry it to the dead orchards, there to dispose of it in the traditional way.

  Eventually, such diversions began to bore me. I found that although the human body is a rich and ornate vessel, its variety is far from infinite. I came to treasure only the moment when the lips moistened and moved. When the delicate throat swallowed. When the glass fell. When the eyes widened with that last moment of knowledge. That was all: when the shadow passed, and when certainty began.

  There came a time when I had not left my home in months. But boredom brought restlessness, and the horrors of the City beyond my door sometimes seemed less than the atrocity of my own company. One day, in the bland depths of my discontent, I went out. I had been long away from this City. I was surprised that life still passed so busily in these streets filled with mud. My senses clogged with the smell of it, with the separate ugliness of every face. I shook my head when the beggars offered me their blood in bowls. I kicked and stamped at the little creatures that crawled towards me from the gutters.

  I took a path that led by the fringes of the dead orchards, passing many on the way who pulled, dragged or carried burdens in that same direction. I went that way without thinking, but as the hovels gave way to grey-green grass and the little hill reared up before my steps, I wandered on amid the stained and sapless boughs. They were sharp as spears, and similarly blackened with the blood of their victims. The trees were a deathly army, proffering trophies for the delectation of whatever Gods gaped down from the dismal sky. Some of the corpses were still fresh enough from their impaling to have kept a trace of character in their sunken eyes, or at least to make their sex and age discernible. But the majority had shrivelled to leathery anonymity, preserved by the parasitic tendrils of the trees as withered sketches of humanity. The branches pierced rags of flesh. Arms lifted and waved in the stinking breeze. Here, somewhere amid the leafless avenues, were the remains of my guests, doubtless roughly pinioned by my servants with their usual lack of care . . . perhaps dead, perhaps dreaming, perhaps still screaming voicelessly with pain.

  I found a corpse that somehow still retained a shabby parody of young femininity. Several tumescences were thriving on it, green, apple-like parasitic growths of the tree itself, one a grey parody of a breast, another swelling on the shrivelled remains of the tongue, forcing apart the jaw. The wind struck up a keener note, dipping the branches all around, setting limbs clicking and bobbing, heads nodding. The woman-corpse tilted up, her mossy backbone curving as though still tormented by whatever agonies had brought her to this place. I turned and quickly made my way back through the trees, towards the life of the market.

  The market awnings flapped their damp wings. Those who lived and needed jostled with those who had forgotten all but the fears and habits of life. The smell of rotting meat and vegetables was heavy. That day, in what passed, I think, for the season where there is more cold and less rain, I had already eaten and the food had lodged in my stomach, an unwelcome but tolerated guest. Everywhere there were shouts and squabbles. I was swept along and almost off my feet as a fresh basket appeared, dripping mud and the offal of white-eyed fish from the river. The crowds were almost as sickening as what was on offer. I felt glad of my wealth, my gold, my servants. I smiled at the thought, remembering why I had come. And as I smiled my eyes settled on a face that was part of the crowd, yet separate from everything. My shock was immediate and intense. Even under the grime and rags, I could hardly believe that chance had brought me this close to beauty.

  She had a basket wrapped around her filthy arm. In it, as I drew close, tumbling rickety stalls and people aside, I saw the remnants of a loaf of bread, grey green with mould. She turned with slow and perfect wonder towards me. Heart shaped face, eyes of tremulous green. She could almost have been a child, had the city not forgotten true childhood in the age before it remembered death.

  Determined that she would be my guest that night, I stopped her and offered money, grasping an oily sleeve that went slick though my fingers, grasping tighter and again. Her delicate arms scrabbled in fear, weak claws reaching for my face. I drew out coins and pushed them towards her fluttering palms, not caring how they fell. They fountained from my hands. Those around us began to scramble in the mud, raking the gold from the ooze. At last she caught a coin in her palm and drew it to her lips, touching it to her perfect teeth. I offer this, I said, and more. Her eyes widened and blinked, clear pools in a world of mud. She nodded. She understood. I kept my hand on her in case she should run, but in truth I sensed within her that fatalism that is part of this City. I never bothered to enquire about her background. No doubt others knew her but were too blind or ignorant to see her beauty. So be it; this City has withered everything down to a single moment of need, endlessly repeating itself. I took her hand and she let me lead her away under the leaning walls. Through the tunnel of a toppled tower where
dark things whispered to the echo of our breath. To the place that was my home.

  My servants pointed and shivered excitedly as they gathered for a sight of my prize. I chased them away with curses and threats and led her quickly up the wide stairs past rotting tapestries and green statues, along corridors streaked with decay. Some emotion caused her to cry. The tears washed bands down her face. I asked her name and she sobbed it through the bars of clear skin: it was a thing that fell uselessly between us. I changed it to Caitlin.

  Caitlin. I drew water from the purest butts of rainwater, straining the soup of spiders and leaves. I warmed it with magics to fill a rusted marble tub. I stripped her of her rags and bathed her. As the water clouded, she grew glistening white. Touching the wonder of her flesh with my own ragged claws, I could hardly believe that we shared humanity. As I dried her, I saw that Caitlin was like none of my guests who had gone before. She was perfection. I anointed her with scents and oils. I seated her before the brightest, warmest fire and combed the knots and lice from her wet hair, working through and through until it sparked and glowed to the touch. And I dressed her in the best fabric I could muster. Velvet that still retained its colour in patches, seams of lace that the damp hadn’t yet unravelled. I stood her before a mirror, and once again she cried. And as I gazed upon her my own eyes stung as though with the touch of flames.

  My Caitlin smelled of apples and sunlight. She made me weep with a long-interred memory of a happy interval in my otherwise cheerless youth. Of lying on sap-scented grass to drown in snow flurries of blossom, of the broken certainty of waiting for the one-who-loved, the one who never came.

  Amid the unavoidable pathos of decay, I tried to give our feast solemnity. My efforts exceeded everything that had gone before, just as Caitlin herself outshone all the past. In the great hall, I sat her down on the gilt chair raised on a stone above the moss-carpeted floor. I cleaned silver and china with my own hands, ransacked ancient chests to find a ragged tablecloth that was almost white. I polished a glass until its facets were like knives and drew on the whispering darkness of my secret well until I was sure that the poisoned water would match Caitlin’s purity. I even discovered an old machine from the time beyond the City’s memory that wove melodies in voices that were neither human nor drum.