The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 22 Page 17

  Eventually I found myself approaching the street in question, via another that met it at right angles. When I emerged from this I glanced up and down the road, scoping it out from a different perspective to it merely being part of the route to my morning latté purveyor.

  The road ended – or was interrupted – by one of the traffic-calming gates, and so was extremely quiet. There’d be very little reason for anyone to choose it unless they lived in one of the houses I could see.

  I stood on the opposite side of the street and looked at the house where the woman lived, about twenty yards away. A single light shone in the upper storey, doubtless a bedroom. A wider glow from the level beneath the street, however, suggested life going on down there.

  My heart was beating rapidly now, and far more heavily than usual. My body as well as my mind seemed aware of this break in usual patterns of behaviour, that its owner was jumping the tracks, doing something new.

  I crossed the street. When I reached the other side I kept going, slowly, walking right past the house. As I did so I glanced down and to my right.

  A single window was visible in the wall of the basement level, an open blind partially obscuring the top half. In the four seconds or so that it took me to walk past the house, I saw a large green rug on dark floorboards, and caught a glimpse of a painting on one wall. No people, and most specifically, not her.

  I continued walking, right the way up to the gate across the road. Waited there a few moments, and then walked back the same way.

  This time – emboldened by the continued lack of human occupancy – I got a better look at the painting. It showed a small fishing village, or something of the sort, on a rocky coast. The style was rough, even from that distance, and I got the sense that the artist had not been trying to evoke the joys of waterfront living. The village did not look like somewhere you’d deliberately go on holiday, that’s for sure.

  Then I was past the house again.

  I couldn’t just keep doing this, I realised. Sooner or later someone in one of the other houses would spot a man pacing up and down this short section of street, and decide to be neighbourly – which in this day and age means calling the police.

  I had an idea, and took my mobile out of my trouser pocket. I flipped it open, put it to my ear, and wandered a little way further down the street.

  If anyone saw me, I believed, I’d just be one of those other people you notice once in a while – some man engaged in some other, different life, talking to someone whose identity they’d never know, about matters which would remain similarly oblique. It would be enough cover for a few minutes, I thought.

  I arranged it so that my meandering path – I even stepped off into the empty road for a spell, just to accentuate how little my surroundings meant to me, so engaged was I with my telephone call – gradually took me back toward the house. After about five minutes of this I stepped back up onto the curb, about level with the house’s front path.

  I stopped then, taken aback.

  Someone had been in the lower room I could see through the window. She’d only been visible for a second – and I knew it was her, because I’d glimpsed the same long, brown hair from that morning – starting out in the middle of the room, and then walking out the door.

  Was she going to come back? Why would she have come into what was presumably a living room, then left again? Was she fetching something from the room – a book or magazine – and now settling down in a kitchen I couldn’t see? Or was she intending to spend the evening in the living room instead, and returning to the kitchen for something she’d forgotten, to bring back with her?

  I kept the phone to my ear, and turned in a slow circle. Walked a few yards up the street, with a slow, casual, leg-swinging gait, and then back again.

  I’d gone past the point of feeling stupid now. I just wanted to see. When I got back to the pavement, I caught my breath.

  The woman was back.

  More than that, she was sitting down. Not on the sofa – one corner of which I could just make out in the corner of the window – but right in the middle of the rug. She had her back to me. Her hair was thick, and hung to the middle of her back. It was very different in more than colour to Helen’s, who’d switched to a shorter and more-convenient-for-the-mornings style a few years back.

  The woman seemed to be bent over slightly, as if reading something laid out on the floor in front of her. I really, really wanted to know what it was. Was it perhaps The Guardian, choice of all right-thinking people (and knee-jerk liberals) in this part of North London?

  Or might it be something else, some periodical I’d never read, or even heard of? A book I might come to love?

  I took another cautious step forward, barely remembering to keep up the pretence with the mobile phone still in my hand.

  With my slightly-changed angle I could now see her elbows, one poking out from either side of her chest. They seemed in a rather high position for someone managing reading matter, but it was hard to tell.

  My scalp and the back of my neck were itching with nervousness by now. I cast a quick glance either way up the street, just to check no one was coming. The pavements on both sides remained empty, distanced pools of lamplight falling on silence and emptiness.

  When I looked back, the woman had altered her position slightly, and I saw something new. I thought at first it must be whatever she was reading, but then realised first that it couldn’t be, and soon after, what I was actually seeing. A plastic bag.

  A red plastic bag.

  Who unpacks their shopping in the living room? Other people do, I guess – and perhaps it was this connection to the very first inkling I’d had of this woman’s existence (the temporary arrival of her food in the kitchen of my own house, in the very same kind of bag) that caused me to walk forward another step.

  I should have looked where I was going, but I did not. My foot collided with an empty Coke can lying near the low wall at the front of the woman’s property. It careered across the remaining space with a harsh scraping noise, before clattering into the wall with a smack.

  I froze, staring down at her window.

  The woman wrenched around, turning about the waist to glare up through her window.

  I saw the red plastic bag lying on the rug in front of her, its contents spread in a semi-circle. She was not holding a newspaper or magazine or book. In one hand she held half of a thick, red steak. The other hand was up to her mouth, and had evidently been engaged in pushing raw minced beef into it when she turned.

  The lower half of her face was smeared with blood. Her eyes were wide, and either her pupils were unusually large, or her irises were also pitch black. Her hair started perhaps an inch or two further back than anyone’s I had ever seen, and there was something about her temples that was wrong, misshapen, excessive.

  We stared at each other for perhaps two seconds. A gobbet of partially chewed meat fell out of her mouth, down onto her dress. I heard her say something, or snarl it. I have no idea what it might have been, and this was not merely because of the distance or muting caused by the glass of the window. It simply did not sound like any language I’ve ever heard. Her mouth opened far too wide in the process, too, further accentuating the strange, bulged shape of her temples.

  I took a couple of huge, jerky steps backward, nearly falling over in the process. I caught one last glimpse of her face, howling something at me.

  There were too many vowels in what she said, and they were in an unkind order.

  I heard another sound, from up the street, and turned jerkily, saw two people approaching, from the next corner, perhaps fifty yards away. They were passing underneath one of the lamps. One was taller than the other. The shorter of the two seemed to be wearing a long dress, almost Edwardian in style. The man – assuming that’s what he was – had a pronounced stoop.

  In silhouette against the lamp light, both their heads were clearly too wide across the top.

  I ran.

  I ran away home.
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br />   I have not seen that supermarket man again. I’m sure I will eventually, but he’ll doubtless have forgotten the corned beef incident by then. Out there in the real world, it was hardly that big a deal.

  Otherwise, everything is the same. Helen and I continue to enjoy a friendly, affectionate relationship, sharing our lives with a son who shows no real sign yet of turning into an adolescent monster. I work in my study, taking the collections of words that people send me and making small adjustments to them, changing something here and there, checking everything is in order and putting a part of myself into the text by introducing just a little bit of difference.

  The only real alteration in my patterns is that I no longer walk down a certain street to get my habitual morning latté. Instead I head in the other direction, and buy one from the mini-market instead. It’s nowhere near as good, and I guess soon I’ll go back to the deli, though I shall take a different route from the one which had previously been my custom.

  A couple of weeks ago I was unpacking the bags from our weekly shop, and discovered a large variety pack of sliced meats. I let out a strangled sound, dropping the package to the floor. Helen happened to be in the kitchen at the time, and took this to be a joke – me expressing mock surprise at her having (on a whim) clicked a button online and thus causing all these naughty meats to arrive as a treat for the husband who, in her own and many ways, she loves.

  I found a smile for her, and the next day when she was at work I wrapped the package in a plastic bag and disposed of it in a bin half a mile from our house. There’s a lot you can do with chicken, and even more with vegetables.

  Meanwhile, we seem to be making love a little more often. I’m not really sure why.

  MARK VALENTINE

  A Revelation of Cormorants

  MARK VALENTINE LIVES IN North Yorkshire with his wife Jo and their cat Percy.

  He is the author of biographies of Arthur Machen and the fantasist “Sarban”. His series of tales about an occult detective, with John Howard, were assembled as The Collected Connoisseur from Tartarus Press in 2010, and his short stories have been collected recently in The Nightfarers, The Mascarons of the Late Empire and The Peacock Escritoire.

  He edited the Wordsworth anthology The Werewolf Pack and also edits Wormwood, a journal of the fantastic and supernatural in literature.

  “‘A Revelation of Cormorants’ first appeared in the excellent series of chapbooks published by Nicholas Royle’s Nightjar Press,” explains Valentine, “and I first encountered the dark grace of the cormorant while visiting Galloway with Jo.”

  CORMORANT, FROM THE LATIN for “sea-raven”. The Tudors saw the bird as a symbol for gluttony: Shakespeare refers to hungry Time as a cormorant. It may have gained this reputation because of its proficiency at catching fish. Milton, however, invested the bird with a dark glamour: he likened Lucifer sitting in the Tree of Life to a cormorant, no doubt because of the bird’s habit of standing with its black wings spread out to dry. The satanic image stuck. The occultist and poet Ludovic Horne wrote of his “Cormorant days/dark and sleek”. The atheist essayist Llewelyn Powys refers to the birds as “satanic saints” in Parian niches on the chalk cliffs of Dorset, but he celebrated them too as manifesting the ecstasy of the moment, as they plunge into the sea after the silver-scaled fish of their dreams. Conan Doyle alludes to an untold Sherlock Holmes case of “The Lighthouse Keeper and the Trained Cormorant”. Isherwood cites them in a nonsense poem. Folklore about them is much barer than the literary record.

  Crow. A 15th century Northern ballad tells of a Crow King who rules by magic. The title may involve a punning reference to the “croaking” of the birds. Scott records a Northumberland superstition which counted crows’ caws for purposes of divination. As carrion birds they were associated with gallows and gibbets. Ted Hughes . . .

  William Utter put down his pen upon his labours at A Flock of Myths: the Legends, Lore and Literature of the Birds of Britain, and rubbed his eyes, transferring some of the black ink from his fingers to his eyelids and giving them a bruised, shadowed look. This had the effect of accentuating the length and angularity of his face, which a disobliging acquaintance had once compared to a coffin-lid, with a brass-plaque brow. Utter was in fact quite proud of his brow, which he felt was of the sort once described as “lofty”. His hair had shrunk from it some years ago, leaving certainly a bare plate upon which Utter would sometimes write with frowns.

  He had taken white-walled Watchman’s Cottage, on the sea at a little haven in Galloway, for a quarter of the year, to write, or rather (he supposed he should say) compile this book, a commissioned work, which was really a gathering of greater men’s titbits, as if he were a tame bird being fed by hand. Contented: perhaps; replete, but unfree. He had been asked to do it, he knew, only because he was a competent cataloguer of facts who could be relied upon to deliver to deadlines. He longed for the time when he would have reached whatever bird it was that began with “Z”. Zanzibar finch? But that was a long way off, as he worked now through the “Cs”.

  He sighed heavily and the exhalation blew the white slips of paper containing his carefully garnered quotations into the air, where they fluttered for a moment before returning to the surface, in disarray. He muttered to himself and got up impatiently. They could stay like that. Even after just the few days of his stay, settling in, putting everything in proper order, getting in provisions, he felt the need already for some time away from the study lamp.

  The only person he had seen to talk to since his arrival was Mr Stair, the caretaker of the cottage, who had let him in and explained its (fairly basic) facilities. Utter had at first wondered if he might undertake a little original research with his new acquaintance. Having established, via a series of cautious pleasantries, that Mr Stair was a local man and had lived in the little fishing harbour most of his life, Utter had mentioned in passing the book he was intending to work on. Then he asked, as he hoped conversationally, if Mr Stair knew of any local sayings about birds. This attempted foray into folklore fieldwork had not proved a marked success.

  Mr Stair had lived up to the sound of his name, giving Utter a sombre glare. Then he had run his long fingers through his jackdaw hair – black streaked with silver – and slowly found his way to what proved to be quite a long speech, for him, in that it contained more than one sentence.

  “There would be some, I suppose,” he had conceded. “But myself I give them no heed. You would be better, I’d suggest, just watching what they do. That’s the way, I find, to learn about their habits.”

  He said this as if he imagined that the visitor really wanted to find out about the local bird-life rather than learning what it was people said about birds, but Utter decided not to pursue the distinction. Politely he had let the conversation run in the direction the caretaker had taken it. He had asked where on the shore might be best for watching the widest range of birds. Mr Stair had regarded him as if this was not a question he was minded to answer. But at length he had said: “If it’s the seabirds you are after, I would go over by the White Strand. But watch for the tides, mind. They come in fast there.”

  Now Utter turned over this piece of advice in his mind, like a gull examining a piece of litter for its edibility. As he gazed out of the window to the long grey skies and the hissing ripple of the murky waves, he admitted to himself that he already felt jaded: and now his quotations were all upset. A walk among the rocks on the shore would do him good. He might, indeed, observe some of the birds, as Mr Stair had suggested, though what quite he would be looking for he was not so sure. He supposed there would be crows, and cormorants, and there might be some glimmer of a point of interest about them that he could work into the entries he was writing. He looked at the illustrations of these two birds, and a few others, in a pocket guide he had bought, and got their shapes roughly fixed in his mind.

  Then, picking up a raincoat, the notebook containing his work so far from “Albatross” to “Crow”, and a black umbrella, he left the c
ottage. As he pulled the door to, his strips of other men’s sayings rose up once again for a brief flight above the desk.

  Often in Galloway the land only dwindles down to the shore, slowly descending in peterings-out of rocks and last gasps of grassy tussocks. But, following the caretaker’s directions, the pensive editor found that the path to White Strand rose from the cove where he was staying to higher ground, and he was walking among heather and dying bracken upon a sheep track above the sea. There was a keenness in the air, the way was lonely, and the calling of the seabirds (which ones he did not exactly know) was sharp and plaintive. The great grey clouds all at once struck him as like closed eyelids, and he frowned at the thought that he was now inventing his own quotations, which would not do at all. But perhaps, he reassured himself, he had merely remembered the image from some more notable source.

  After a half an hour’s quiet walking upon this ridge, Utter judged that he must have reached the region Mr Stair had described. And indeed down below the sands did seem to have a finer, creamier look to them than their tawnier counterparts of earlier in his wandering. Not white exactly, despite their name: more a wan yellow, they stretched, it seemed to him, like a palimpsest, a piece of wrinkled, blurred papyrus. And those grey rocks: they were surely the residue of ancient writings, all but unreadable now, the characters of some lost language. If one gazed long enough, Utter thought to himself, perhaps the script might be deciphered and the pale pages of the sands would yield up their secrets. And then the sturdier part of himself intruded and made his fingers clutch his raincoat more closely about him so that its flaps did not rise in the wind like fawn wings and carry him soaring off the cliff-top. Puckered up inside his mackintosh, and perched carefully upon a mossy rock, he let the fresh wind buffet him about a bit while he looked to see what birds there might be.