The Best New Horror 3 Read online

  Dregler took all the notes he had received that day, paper-clipped them together, and put them into a new section of his massive scrap-book. He tentatively labelled this section: “Personal Confrontations with the Medusa, Either Real or Apparent.”

  III

  The address given to Dregler the day before was not too far for him to walk, restive peripatetic that he was. But for some reason he felt rather fatigued that morning; so he hired a taxi to speed him across a drizzle-darkened city. Settling into the spacious dilapidation of the taxi’s back seat, he took note of a few things. Why, he wondered, were the driver’s glasses, which every so often filled the rear-view mirror, even darker than the day? Did she make a practice of thus “admiring” all her passengers? And was this back-seat debris—the “L”-shaped cigarette butt on the door’s armrest, the black apple core on the floor—supposed to serve as objects of their admiration? Dregler questioned a dozen other things about this routine ride, this drenched day, and the city outside where umbrellas multiplied like mushrooms in the greyness; and he was now satisfied with his lack of a sense of well-being. Earlier he was concerned that his flow of responses that day would not be those of a man who was possibly about to confront the Medusa. He was apprehensive that he might look on this ride and its destination with lively excitement or as an adventure of some kind; in brief, he feared that his attitude would prove, to a certain extent, to be one of insanity. To be sane, he held, was either to be sedated by melancholy or activated by hysteria, two responses which are “always and equally warranted for those of sound insight.” All others were irrational, merely symptoms of imaginations left idle, of memories out of work. And above these mundane responses, the only elevation allowable, the only valid transcendence, was a sardonic one: a bliss that annihilated the visible universe with jeers of dark joy, a mindful ecstasy. Anything else in the way of “mysticism” was a sign of deviation or distraction, and a heresy to the obvious.

  The taxi turned onto a block of wetted brownstones, stopping before a tiny streetside lawn overhung by the skeletal branches of two baby birch trees. Dregler paid the driver, who expressed no gratitude whatever for the tip, and walked quickly through the drizzle toward a golden-bricked building with black numbers—two-o-two—above a black door with a brass knob and knocker. Reviewing the information on the crumpled piece of paper he took from his pocket, Dregler pressed the glowing bell-button. There was no one else in sight along the street, its trees and pavement fragrantly damp.

  The door opened and Dregler stepped swiftly inside. A shabbily dressed man of indefinite age closed the door behind him, then asked in a cordially nondescript voice: “Dregler?” He nodded in reply. After a few reactionless moments the man moved past Dregler, waving once for him to follow down the ground-floor hallway. They stopped at a door that was directly beneath the main stairway leading to the upper floors. “In here,” said the man, placing his hand upon the doorknob. Dregler noticed the ring, its rosewater stone and silver band, and the disjunction between the man’s otherwise dour appearance and this comparatively striking piece of jewelry. The man pushed open the door and, without entering the room, flipped a light-switch on the inside wall.

  To all appearances it was an ordinary storeroom cluttered with a variety of objects. “Make yourself comfortable,” the man said as he indicated to Dregler the way into the room. “Leave whenever you like, just close the door behind you.”

  Dregler gave a quick look around the room. “Isn’t there anything else,” he asked meekly, as if he were the stupidest student of the class. “This is it, then?” he persisted in a quieter, more dignified voice.

  “This is it,” the man echoed softly. Then he slowly closed the door, and from inside Dregler could hear the footsteps walking back down the hallway and up the staircase above the room.

  The room was an average understairs niche, and its ceiling tapered downward into a smooth slant where angular steps ascended upward on the other side. Elsewhere its outline was obscure, confused by huge bedsheets shaped like lamps or tables or small horses; heaps of rocking chairs and baby-chairs and other items of broken furniture; bandaged hoses that drooped like dead pythons from hooks on the walls; animal cages whose doors hung open on a single hinge; old paint cans and pale tarps speckled like an egg; and a dusty light fixture that cast a grey haze over everything.

  Somehow there was not a variety of smells imperfectly mingled in the room, each telling the tale of its origin, but only a single smell pieced like a puzzle out of many: its complete image was dark as the shadows in a cave and writhing in a dozen directions over curving walls. Dregler gazed around the room, picked up some small object and immediately set it down again because his hands were trembling. He found himself a solid carton of something to sit on, kept his eyes open, and waited.

  Afterward he couldn’t remember how long he had stayed in the room, though he did manage to store up every nuance of the eventless vigil for later use in his voluntary and involuntary dreams. (They were compiled into that increasingly useful section marked “Personal Confrontations with the Medusa”, a section that was fleshing itself out as a zone swirling with red shapes and a hundred hissing voices.) Dregler recalled vividly, however, that he left the room in a state of panic after catching a glimpse of himself in an old mirror that had a hair-line fracture slithering up its center. On his way out he lost his breath when he felt himself being pulled back into the room. But it was only a loose thread from his overcoat that had gotten caught in the door. It finally snapped cleanly off and he was free to go, his heart livened with dread.

  And he never let on to his friends what a success that afternoon had been for him, not that he could have explained it to them in any practical way even if he desired to. As promised, they did make up for any inconvenience or embarrassment Dregler might have suffered as a result of, in Gleer’s words, the “bookstore incident”. The three of them held a party in Dregler’s honor, and he finally met Gleer’s new wife and her accomplice in the “hoax”. (It became apparent to Dregler that no one, least of all himself, would admit it had gone further than that.) Dregler was left alone with this woman for only a brief time, and in the corner of a crowded room. While each of them knew of the other’s work, this seemed to be the first time they had personally met. Nonetheless, they both confessed to a feeling of their prior acquaintance without being able, or willing, to substantiate its origins. And although plenty of mutually known parties were established, they failed to find any direct link between the two of them.

  “Maybe you were a student of mine,” Dregler suggested.

  She smiled and said: “Thank you, Lucian, but I’m not as young as you seem to think.”

  Then she was jostled from behind (“Whoops,” said a tipsy academic), and something she had been fiddling with in her hand ended up in Dregler’s drink. It turned the clear bubbling beverage into a glassful of liquid rose-light.

  “I’m so sorry. Let me get you another,” she said, and then disappeared into the crowd.

  Dregler fished the earring out of the glass and stole away with it before she had a chance to return with a fresh drink. Later in his room he placed it in a small box, which he labelled: “Treasures of the Medusa.”

  But there was nothing he could prove and he knew it.

  IV

  It was not many years later that Dregler was out on one of his now famous walks around the city. Since the bookstore incident, he had added several new titles to his works, and these had somehow gained him the faithful and fascinated audience of readers that had previously eluded him. Prior to his “discovery” he had been accorded only a distant interest in critical and popular circles alike, but now every little habit of his, not the least of all his daily meanderings, had been turned by commentators into “typifying traits” and “defining quirks”. “Dregler’s walks,” stated one article, “are a constitutional of the modern mind, urban journeys by a tortured Ulysses sans Ithaca.” Another article offered this backcover superlative: “the most baroq
ue inheritor of Existentialism’s obsessions.”

  But whatever fatuosities they may have inspired, his recent books—A Bouquet of Worms, Banquet for Spiders, and New Meditations on the Medusa—had enabled him to “grip the minds of a dying generation and pass on to them his pain”. These words were written, rather uncharacteristically, by Joseph Gleer in a highly favourable review of New Meditations for a philosophical quarterly. He probably thought they might revive his friendship with his old colleague, but Dregler never acknowledged Gleer’s effort, nor the repeated invitations to join his wife and him for some get-together or other. What else could Dregler do? Whether Gleer knew it or not, he was now one of them. And so was Dregler, though his saving virtue was an awareness of this disturbing fact. And this was part of his pain.

  “We can only live by leaving our ‘soul’ in the hands of the Medusa,” Dregler wrote in New Meditations. “Whether she is an angel or a gargoyle is not the point. Each merely allows us a gruesome diversion from some ultimate catastrophe which would turn us to stone; each is a mask hiding the worst visage, a medicine that numbs the mind. And the Medusa will see to it that we are protected, sealing our eyelids closed with the gluey spittle of her snakes, while their bodies elongate and slither past our lips to devour us from the inside. This is what we must never witness, except in the imagination, where it is a charming sight. And in the word, no less than in the mind, the Medusa fascinates much more than she appalls, and haunts us just this side of petrification. On the other side is the unthinkable, the unheard-of, that-which-should-not-be: hence, the Real. This is what throttles our souls with a hundred fingers—somewhere, perhaps in that dim room which caused us to forget ourselves, that place where we left ourselves behind amid shadows and strange sounds—while our minds and words toy, like playful, stupid pets, with diversions of an immeasurable disaster. The tragedy is that we must steer so close in order to avoid this hazard. We may hide from horror only in the heart of horror.”

  Now Dregler had reached the outermost point of his daily walk, the point at which he usually turned and made his way back to his apartment, that other room. He gazed at the black door with the brass knob and knocker, glancing away to the street’s porchlights and lofty bay windows which were glowing like mad in the late dusk. From bluish streetlights hung downward domes: inverted halos or open eyes. Then, for the first time in the history of these excursions, a light rain began to sprinkle down, nothing very troublesome. But in the next moment Dregler had already sought shelter in the welcoming brownstone.

  He soon came to stand before the door of the room, keeping his hands deep in the pockets of his overcoat and away from temptation. Nothing had changed, he noticed, nothing at all. The door had not been opened by anyone since he had last closed it behind him on that hectic day years ago. And there was the proof, as he knew, somehow, it would be: that long thread from his coat still dangled from where it had been caught between door and frame. Now there was no question about what he would do.

  It was to be a quick peek through a hand-wide crack, but enough to risk disillusionment and the dispersal of all the charming traumas he had articulated in his brain and books, scattering them like those peculiar shadows he supposed lingered in that room. And the voices, would he hear that hissing which heralded her presence as much as the flitting red shapes? He kept his eyes fixed upon his hand on the doorknob as it nudged open the door. So the first thing he saw was the way it, his hand, took on a rosy dawn-like glow, then a deeper twilight crimson as it was bathed more directly by the odd illumination within the room.

  There was no need to reach in and flick the lightswitch just inside. He could see quite enough as his vision, still exceptional, was further aided by the way a certain cracked mirror was positioned, giving his eyes a reflected entrance into the dim depths of the room. And in the depths of the mirror? A split-image, something fractured by a thread-like chasm that oozed up a viscous red glow. There was a man in the mirror; no, not a man but a mannikin, or a frozen figure of some kind. It was naked and rigid, leaning against a wall of clutter, its arms outstretching and reaching behind, as if trying to break a backwards fall. Its head was also thrown back, almost broken-necked; its eyes were pressed shut into a pair of well-sealed creases, two ocular wrinkles which had taken the place of the sockets themselves. And its mouth gaped so widely with a soundless scream that all wrinkles had been smoothed away from that part of the old face.

  He barely recognized this face, this naked and paralyzed form which he had all but forgotten, except as a lurid figure of speech he once used to describe the uncanny condition of his soul. But it was no longer a charming image of the imagination. Reflection had given it charm, made it acceptable to sanity, just as reflection had made those snakes, and the one who wore them, picturesque and not petrifying. But no amount of reflection could have conceived seeing the thing itself, nor the state of being stone.

  The serpents were moving now, coiling themselves about the ankles and wrists, the neck; stealthily entering the screaming man’s mouth and prying at his eyes. Deep in the mirror opened another pair of eyes the color of wine-mixed water, and through a dark tangled mass they glared. The eyes met his, but not in a mirror. And the mouth was screaming, but made no sound. Finally, he was reunited, in the worst possible way, with the thing within the room.

  Stiff inside of stone now, he heard himself think. Where is the world, my words? No longer any world, any words, there would only be that narrow room and himself and the oldest companion of his soul. Nothing other than that would exist for him, could exist, nor, in fact, had ever existed. In its own rose-tinted heart, his horror had at last found him.

  JOEL LANE

  Power Cut

  JOEL LANE is the author of a number of disturbing short stories published in Ambit, Darklands, Skeleton Crew, Dark Dreams, Winter Chills, Exuberance, Fantasy Tales and The Year’s Best Horror Stories, amongst others.

  He works in educational publishing in Birmingham, and besides writing fiction, poems and critical articles (including a minute analysis of Ramsey Campbell’s early novels in Foundation), his interests include social theory, rock/folk music, ghost stories and the urban environment.

  The last two are certainly reflected in “Power Cut” which, like Kim Newman’s “The Original Dr Shade” in Best New Horror 2, paints a bleak and disturbing picture of contemporary Britain. The author points out that it was written in 1990, just after the Prime Minister’s resignation . . .

  THE PROCESSION STARTED IN CHAMBERLAIN SQUARE and moved along New Street, thinning out as the roadway narrowed. There were several hundred people, wearing overcoats against the iron wind; it was early December. Each of the marchers carried a lit candle in a glass jar or paper shield. Every so often, one of them would stop to relight a flame that had blown out. Above their heads, premature Christmas lights hung from wires strung across the roadway.

  At this time in the evening, there wouldn’t be much traffic for the procession to interrupt. As usual Lake felt he’d been singled out. He waited in a side road, watching the passing figures from his car. Candlelight gave their hands and parts of their faces a peculiar glow. Lake wished he could drive through them. Who were they trying to impress? There was nobody around to pay attention. Minutes passed, and the number of marchers began to unnerve him.

  His flat had been empty since the previous weekend. It was colder than he expected. There were only a few letters for him; but then, most of his correspondence went through his office in London. Not many people knew his private address. Lake put a take-away meal into the oven to warm up, and lit the gas fire in the living room. He was just in time for the local news round-up on Central TV. Sure enough, there was a mention of the candlelit procession; and similar events in other cities. The week before, they’d quoted Lake as saying that to spend public money on a local hospice for AIDS victims would be to betray the local community.

  The hold that the welfare state lobby seemed to have over the media didn’t impress Lake at all. Why shoul
d ordinary people have to shoulder the responsibility for AIDS? Besides, there were deeper issues at stake. To modernise the health service was an essential step towards the new society. The Midlands had to be dragged out of the mire of 1950s welfare state apathy, and brought to life the same way as was happening in the South. So many people just didn’t seem capable of understanding. Even his own party didn’t have the clarity of purpose it had had a few years back. Things weren’t making sense; the leadership had crumbled. But Lake refused to panic. He felt strangely calm, sitting in the silent flat and still cold, in spite of the gas fire; it was as though the blue flames were only for display.

  He tried calling Alan, but heard only a disembodied voice telling him to leave his name and number. Lake felt suddenly at a loss for words. Just before the machine cut out, he managed to speak. “It’s Matthew. Ring me.” They hadn’t seen each other in weeks, but Lake knew he could depend on Alan. The thought was a flicker of symbolic warmth.

  The next morning, he wondered if something had been wrong with the take-away; perhaps he shouldn’t have reheated it. But he didn’t have the normal symptoms of food poisoning—gut pains, nausea, diarrhoea. It felt more as though something inside him were coated with frost. He rubbed the mist from the bedroom window, then breathed it back in place. The room was chilly, but well above zero. Outside, the day was unexpectedly bright.

  After breakfast, which he couldn’t taste, Lake phoned his doctor. The receptionist took a message, but wouldn’t make him an appointment. “Dr Wilson will contact you as soon as possible, I’m sure.” Well, he’d intended to have a quiet weekend; he needed a break from work. It would be Christmas soon, and there were people he had to get in touch with—friends and family. He’d been head-butting the brick walls in Westminster for too long; he was lonely. Realising that made him feel paralysed. What if nobody was there?