The Best new Horror 4 Page 27

  He stared hard at the orange spiral, mesmerised by it. It wasn’t just a bad memory. The shape meant something to him. It both attracted and repelled him without him knowing why.

  Carl took the photocopied map to bed with him and fell asleep clutching it.

  Carl became obsessed with the map and discovering the place it was based on. He thought about it constantly while serving customers and sorting through boxes of old singles people brought in to sell. He was bored with their mewling complaints and saw the map as an escape route.

  An original ’76 punk with bad teeth said he wanted £25 for The Skids’ “Into the Valley” on white vinyl and £30 for the “Wide Open” EP, twelve-inch on red. Carl suggested wearily he’d do better to advertise in the music papers. He’d already got two copies of one and three of the other in the shop and no one seemed to want to buy them.

  “What about Roxy Music ‘Viva!’ on Island? Forty quid.”

  “I’ve got three in stock.”

  “Not on Island,” the punk argued. “It’s rare.”

  “It’s rare but I’ve got three of them.”

  Two French students asked if he’d got anything by Michel Petrucciani. Carl directed them to the jazz shop a couple of blocks away, then began to wonder if the map was of Paris and he was supposed to use it to find Christine. He discounted this quickly, feeling certain that he was the last person Christine wanted to see. To lift his spirits he stuck “Kiss Them for Me” on the turntable. He took the map out of the back pocket of his jeans and lit a cigarette. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed two young girls playing peek-a-boo with him from behind the soundtracks section. Did they know anything about it? Was it a deliberate plant?

  He stepped forward to the till to serve a boy buying a clutch of house singles and when he looked up again the girls had gone. When he gave it some thought, he realised a great many people passed through his shop, trailing their lives and their secrets. Did some of what they carried get left behind? When he shut the shop at night the atmosphere always seemed a little bit richer. The secondhand records contained so many memories, different memories for different people, but each record would reek of the particular recollections of its previous owners. Had he bought the Skids’ singles off the punk, he would have taken part of the punk into his shop to stay after the doors were locked. Perhaps that was why he had said no.

  He lit another cigarette and held the map up to the light to see if that revealed any clues. It didn’t. So he slipped his cigarettes down his boot, locked up and drove home.

  The flat was quiet. When the downstairs tenant was in, Carl’s life felt like a film with a soundtrack. A heavy metal soundtrack. Which meant you knew it was a crap film. He slung his leather jacket on a chair in the kitchen and took a bottle of Peroni beer from the fridge. He was running low. There were only six boxes left. Lighting a Camel he wandered into the moonlit living room and trailed his finger along rows of singles. He filed them alphabetically by artist. Hundreds had been bought new, but most were second-hand. He thought about what had occurred to him in the shop and wondered if he would be able to sense someone else’s memories by playing their single.

  He turned his attention to the shelf that held twelve-inch singles and took down “IV Songs” by In Camera. He switched everything on and played the first track. Spidery guitar, deliberately flat vocals, a spiny bass line and chattering cymbals. But no atmosphere. It was a depressing record but only because of the music. He took it off and looked at the words scratched into the runout groove. “Thanks Ilona.” Inscribed on to the original acetate by the cutting engineer at his lathe, these messages fascinated Carl because they were like clues to a whole world of secrets and relationships behind the record. He put back the In Camera single and crossed the room to the C section of his LPs and proudly took out Elvis Costello’s “This Year’s Model”. Inscribed on the runout groove was “Special Pressing No. 003. Ring Moira on 434 3232 For Your Special Prize.” He had bought the record the day it came out and, noticing the inscription, found a phone box and dialled the number, winning free tickets to a Costello concert. The message had been intended to appear on the first 500 copies, but it overran by about 20,000 and a lot of people got very pissed off. But it was a good gig and now the record felt like a trophy.

  He slid the LP back in its sleeve and went and lit another Camel from the electric ring because he’d forgotten his lighter again. The orange spiral burned into his brain and he reflected on how pathetic it was to be going through his record collection trawling for memories, his own and other people’s.

  He dragged on the cigarette and blew smoke rings. He watched them uncoil and re-form, a series of loops and twists. From his back pocket he took out the map and traced its streets with his eye. He shut his eyes and ran his fingers over the paper to see if that would yield anything. But all he felt were the slight ridges of toner from the photocopier.

  He pressed play on the Siouxsie video and lit another cigarette from the stub of the old one. When it finished he rewound and played it again. While he was aware of how they could ensnare and reduce life to a series of repeats, Carl found some comfort at times of stress in following routines and resorting to icons. He fancied Siouxsie like mad and loved the song but he was still restless. Prowling down the shelves into the hallway he came across his huge collection of white labels. At the shop he bought a lot of white label promos in blank sleeves from collectors and if there were any he wanted to keep he just took them home. It was all the same money, whether it was at the shop or at home. Many of the promo copies in his collection had the artist’s name scrawled across the white label in felt tip, but some were blank and these he liked best because if there were no distinguishing marks he could forget who the record was by and playing it was always a surprise.

  He fell asleep on the sofa and woke with a start when his cigarette burned right down and stung his finger. He sucked it as he drew his legs off the table and stood up. In the bathroom he ran his finger under the cold tap and examined it under the light over the mirror. There was a tiny patch where the whorls of his fingerprint had been smoothed over. He stared fascinated at the pattern of parallel lines. On the third finger of his right hand the lines seemed to fan out in a spiral from a central point, like hair growing from the crown. But Carl realised that when you’d got down to examining your own fingerprints it was time to say goodnight.

  He played a random selection of singles at the shop and listened with one ear to the lyrics. He looked carefully at the records he had bought during the morning in case their titles revealed anything. But there was nothing. He knew he could make something up out of all the material at his fingertips, but he would know he’d invented it. If a genuine message were to stand out from the dross he’d know it because he’d feel it.

  By the end of the day he felt saturated by voices and longed for silence. The roads were refreshingly empty. His tyres hissed on wet tarmac and he cruised with the radio off. The red lights in the distance became a cascade of reflections in the puddles as he knocked the gear lever into neutral and coasted down to meet them. He rolled into position behind a girl in a Mini who like him was waiting for the lights to change. She had shoulder-length black hair like Siouxsie Sioux and was bobbing up and down on her seat and moving from side to side, tapping her fingers on the steering wheel and banging the dash.

  What was she listening to?

  Carl suddenly felt his stomach twist as he realised that whatever music the girl was listening to was a clue. If only he could hear it he would share a secret with her and perhaps he’d know the way to drive to the streets on the map. Maybe she’d let him follow her. He wound his window down but her window was up and he couldn’t hear anything. She bounced on her seat and the little car moved like a cocoon when she did. He couldn’t pull alongside because there was only one lane.

  The lights changed and she was off. He jerked into first and followed, reaching across to switch on the radio to see if she was listening to a station he could tune
into. The gap between the two cars lengthened as he slewed across the dial, stopping to catch fragments of music. But there was nothing that spoke to him as clearly as the girl’s movements. It must have been a tape. She was a long way ahead now. He jumped a red light to keep her in sight but she turned into a side street and although he followed suit she had vanished into a warren of crescents he barely knew.

  He was smoking and reading a thriller in bed when the front door rattled in its frame. With a clear view of the door from his bed, Carl looked up and put his book down beside him. When the door opened he wasn’t altogether surprised to see the girl from the car. Her black hair framed a face that was Siouxsie’s, except that it wasn’t. Because it was Christine’s. She was like a composite of both of them. The only two women in his life, both now very much on the fringes of it, synthesised into this one girl.

  She walked in and turned past his doorway to enter the living room. He noticed as he got out of bed to follow her that she was carrying a long knife in the back pocket of her jeans, the same pocket he kept his map in. He felt in his own pocket and was relieved to find it still there. The girl went over to Carl’s stereo equipment and slipped a single from inside her denim jacket on to the turntable. She stood back and Carl came forward to see what she’d brought him. A white label disc spun at 45 and the needle cut into it. He looked up but the girl had gone. He whirled round and ran to the door but it was shut and there was no sound in the stairwell. He bent over the record player again and saw that as the needle travelled round the groove towards the centre it left a fine spiral of blood in its wake.

  Carl jumped and woke up. His cigarette had burnt a hole in the duvet cover. He smothered it quickly with a pillow, but there was no need: the cigarette was cold. He shivered and felt sick. Brushing the curtain behind his head to one side he looked down into the street for a Mini, but there was only his Escort and one or two other familiar cars.

  He stomped out of his bedroom and checked the front door—undisturbed—and the stereo. There was no record on the turntable and no blood but the power was on. He never left the power on. Groaning, he flicked the switch and went to make as much and as many different uses of the bathroom as his body would let him.

  In bed once more he tossed and turned but sleep eluded him. Got to get up, got to get up, he thought over and over. He pulled on a pair of boxer shorts and went through to the living room. A cigarette and the Siouxsie video. They had a placebo effect but he was neither completely relaxed nor did he feel sleepy. Yet his body was exhausted. At dawn he was thinking of taking the car for a run down to the crescent where he’d lost the girl in her Mini when he finally fell asleep in front of the TV.

  Driving to the shop a couple of hours later he felt like a jigsaw that had been put together wrongly. Someone had tried to force pieces into each other and they held but only just. He had a craving for pure orange juice but made do with a cigarette instead. He pushed in the dashboard lighter and waited for it to pop out. He withdrew it and brought it up to his mouth. While driving he looked down to align the end of the cigarette with the lighter and was shocked by the sight of the burning orange element. He lost his grip on the steering wheel and went the wrong way round a set of bollards. Feeling sick, he righted the car and coasted in to the kerb. He got out, threw the cigarette in the gutter and leaned against the bonnet for a few minutes. The shop would have to open late for once.

  He kept seeing the image from his dream of the needle cutting into the record and drawing blood. He got back in the car and set off for the shop again. Every Mini turned his head. He’d never noticed them before but now it seemed like the city streets were full of them. He couldn’t remember what colour the hybrid Siouxsie/Christine girl had been driving. It had, after all, been dark when he’d seen it.

  During the hours of daylight he imagined it was parked up in one of the nameless streets on his map. Only by night, when there wasn’t any, did she venture into the light of the real world.

  Carl struggled to concentrate on the business of running the shop. The jigsaw feeling had faded but he still wasn’t on top form. He chainsmoked and played randomly selected singles back to back all morning. Customers brought him boxes of records and he bought them all with the briefest examinations and without haggling over the amount he would pay for them. The shop seemed infested with Siouxsie clones but they were all years out of date, painted birds and scarecrows, their faces plastered with the Hallowe’en makeup Siouxsie herself now did without. Over the years, as the masks had been slowly stripped away she had become more and more beautiful to the point where her beauty was now a dangerous, provocative thing, like the music had always been.

  Carl slipped ‘Superstition’ into the CD player and pressed repeat. The album played for the rest of the day.

  In a stream of people offering him their old picture discs and limited edition gatefold sleeves a girl’s hand pushed a white label single on to the counter. Carl gave a small cry and immediately looked up but the floor was crowded with customers. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the door close but it could have been anybody. Nevertheless, he squeezed under the counter and pushed through the crowd to the door. He craned his neck and looked in all directions but she had disappeared. There was no sign of a Mini parked nearby. His heart pounding, he re-entered the shop and returned to his place behind the counter.

  Word must have got round that he was throwing money away today: it seemed as if the whole teenage population of the city had descended on his shop. “Whose is this?” he asked, holding up the white label. No one claimed it. “Is it yours?” he asked the next girl in the queue. She nodded. Someone behind her cackled like a hyena and he felt foolish, but for all he knew it could really have been hers and she’d been too shy to stick her hand up. The colour of the label could have prompted him to imagine someone who hadn’t been there at all. He took the other stuff the girl clearly hadn’t been expecting to sell, then lit a cigarette and put the white label underneath a stack of CDs to look at later.

  It was with enormous relief that he locked the door and flipped the open/closed sign. He didn’t need all this unrest. He stood and watched the rain through the glass as he lit a cigarette and put the lighter away in his jacket pocket. Cars squealed softly as they braked for the red light. Carl smoked nervously, unhappy about acknowledging his fear of the unknown girl and the white label she’d brought him. In the brightness of the afternoon it had been easier to rationalise. But in the shadowtime of dusk it seemed indisputable that his obsession was based on fact. He watched car headlamps dazzle and melt into wet reflections like silver waterfalls. Taking a deep drag that caused his head to spin he turned away from the window and went back to the counter. He felt like a bug in a killing jar. They could be watching him through the windows from across the street. They would want to see how he reacted when he listened to the white label. Well let them!

  He picked it up and slipped it out of its blank sleeve, holding it by the edges and angling it so that the light fell across it. There was nothing written on the label, but on the runout groove he made out the inscription “It’s a gas.” It meant nothing to him. It just seemed like the kind of throwaway remark that cutting engineers sometimes went in for.

  He placed the record on the turntable with great care and positioned the needle before pressing release. It landed with that satisfying clunk he had heard a million times. It didn’t matter how new a vinyl record was, you always heard something apart from the music, even if it was only the hiss of dust. He wondered what he would hear as the needle wound its way towards the music.

  But none came. He checked the amp controls. Everything was on and the volume was turned up. He looked at the needle. It was a third of the way into the record and still there was no sound.

  He turned the volume higher and listened harder. He heard the usual rumble of ticks and bumps you got at the beginning and end of records. When it finished he repositioned the needle and played it again. With the volume full up he fancied he could hear t
he needle itself scoring the groove a fraction deeper. He found himself becoming quite drawn to the sound. Without the distraction of music it was somehow purer, more elemental. He played the flip side and it was the same. The more he played it and the harder he listened, the more it sank into him. He noticed also that his forehead had begun to hurt where the skin stretched tightly across it. A sharp irritating pain like a paper cut.

  Pain or no pain he was in thrall to the record. He loved its silence just as he soon came to need the sounds that were there to be heard if you listened hard enough. He played it again and again until he entered a state approaching rhapsody.

  Towards midnight he locked up and walked to the car. The white label was in a padded envelope under his arm. He laid it carefully on the passenger seat and started the engine. He drove like an automaton, unblinking eyes sweeping the road ahead in search of the hybrid’s car. He knew what she’d been dancing to and now he’d been there himself. In the shop. Listening to the record over and over again. The walls and ceiling had receded and he had felt himself at the centre of a huge spiral which descended upon him from the sky.

  Waiting at a red light, rain lightly stippling the windscreen, Carl pressed in the cigarette lighter and reached into his boot. He stuck a cigarette between his lips. The lighter popped out and he withdrew it. He stared fixedly at the burning spiral for a few moments before sticking the third finger of his left hand inside the lighter and pressing the tip against the element. He didn’t blink. Rain fell more heavily on the car, beating a tinny tattoo on the roof. The light went green but he didn’t move. The smell of burning flesh infused the air in the car.

  Deep inside Carl, in a small part of him, a tiny scream caught like a flame in a tinderbox, then flickered and died.

  He only pulled his finger away when he felt his nail grating unpleasantly against the metal coil.