The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 23 (Mammoth Books)

by Jones, Stephen

  “No, holy vagina, technically,” said Parry and Mandeville was about to ask why when he saw it too. The lengthening shadows reached a point where they combined with the lines of carving and the image changed, danced into something new, a stylised picture of a woman’s legs, curved and invitingly open. As Parry kept moving the torch, the image wavered and then vanished, collapsing back in on itself and reforming into waves and sea creatures.

  “There,” he said triumphantly. “Even out here, this place is about being surrounded by femininity, by procreation. By sex. By life.”

  “We have got to recommend that they re-etch these,” said Yeoman, laughing.

  “Absolutely,” said Parry without pause, “and don’t tell them why,” and Mandeville could only nod in amused agreement.

  Already, a plan was forming for the report, where he would recommend that restoration of the hotel back to its original state, and the use of modern artists to fill in the gaps. He was thinking about how to word and present his proposals as they walked back down to the restaurant, his head filled with the possibilities of this place, and it was only later he remembered about the children.

  The thought actually pulled him back to consciousness as he was drifting off to sleep, lying wrapped in his sleeping bag on his travel cot. In all the excitement of Yeoman’s fingers, and then eating and catching up, he had completely forgotten the intruders. Now he remembered them, though, the thought that they hadn’t checked the hotel for obvious entry points wouldn’t leave him alone.

  The Grand had survived its locked-up years surprisingly well, with little damage apparently done by vandalism. There was definitely evidence that people had broken in, he had seen it: a pile of old food cartons in the kitchens, a blackened circle in one of the bedrooms that might have meant a small fire had burned there, but there was no real damage. Most of what had broken or collapsed had done so as a result simply of time and the coastal atmosphere, of dampness and neglect and air closed in on itself, trapped and rotting. But still, he should check. Kids, once they found an entrance could be persistent and destructive.

  Sighing, he clambered out of his sleeping bag and slipped on his boots and a thick jumper; he was sleeping in his jeans and shirt anyway, to ward of the chill air. His breath misted in front of his face as his tied his laces, and he wondered about waking Yeoman and Parry up to help him, but both were snoring and he decided against it.

  Yeoman had been weary by the time he fell asleep, and his fingers clearly causing him pain. Parry, he knew from uncomfortable experience, was terribly grumpy if woken before he thought he ought to be. He would scout around himself and if he found anything, they could call the security service tomorrow and get them to deal with it.

  In the almost complete darkness, Priest’s flooring seemed to shift and swirl under him in shades of luminal grey as he walked from the makeshift camp to the entrance to the foyer, tracking him. His footsteps were gritty, fractured things, his breathing loud, and there was someone standing in the sun corridor.

  They were only a shape in the darkness, pressed against the glass with their arms stretched out as though supplicant to the grey swathe of beach and sea beyond. Surprised, Mandeville stopped. The figure did not move. After a moment, he began to approach it cautiously, listening; they were singing, low and wordless, crooning something that might have been a lament or a lullaby, and they were scratching their fingers against the glass. The sound of it was carrying descant to the song, setting Mandeville’s teeth on edge.

  The figure was female, he thought, certainly long-haired and curvaceous around the buttocks and thighs, and wearing some kind of long dress or coat that swayed as she moved.

  Standing in the entrance to the sun corridor, perhaps fifteen feet from the intruder, Mandeville stopped again and watched her. She was pressed up against the glass, flattened against it, her hair hanging down the sides of her face so that he couldn’t make out her features, just a veil of thick tangles that seemed to be catching distant lights from outside and glittering a myriad colours.

  Her outstretched arms were fully extended, reaching above her, and her hands were splayed out, hooking against the pane, and she was still singing.

  Close to, he could almost hear words in the song, muffled and lost. Her lips and nose had to be pressed hard against the glass as well, he realised. Perhaps that was why her voice was so muffled, seemed to be coming from so far away. This didn’t seem like normal vandal behaviour, he thought. Perhaps she was ill? If so, she might need help. “Hello,” he said quietly.

  The girl fled, spinning away from Mandeville and running down the sun corridor at high speed. Startled, it took him a moment to follow, wondering fleetingly as he did how she had managed to leave an image of herself printed on the glass and why it was so smeared and shot through with wide sweeps of colour.

  The girl darted down the sun corridor and Mandeville went after her.

  When she reached the far end, she ran through a second doorway into, if Mandeville remembered rightly, a games room off the lower corridor. By the time Mandeville reached it, the girl was nowhere to be seen, but he instinctively ran through the room and out into the corridor, turning back towards the reception area.

  Something skittered through the shadows ahead of him, telling him that he had guessed correctly, and then he was into the reception, its floor crossed by the weak light falling through the iron lattice of the glass roof far above him. He expected to find the girl here, but there was no sign of her.

  Mandeville slowed, confused. The nearest staircase started at the far side of the reception area, and even if she’d made it there, the girl should have still been visible on the stairs. There was nowhere for her to hide except behind the reception desk, but a quick check told him that she wasn’t there. The main door was still shut and locked; he checked it with a shake. Turning, he peered up the stairs and saw movement in the murky depths of the bar.

  How did she make it up there without me seeing? he wondered as he started to climb the stairs. She must have moved like a fucking gazelle!

  Whatever it was he had seen, it wasn’t there now. The bar was deserted, the floor space empty of chairs and tables as it had been for years. As he cast his torch beam around, the only movement was the warped wooden panel that hung loose from the wall, rocking slightly as though moved by a breeze.

  Mandeville peered behind the bar, but the mirrored walls reflected only dust and empty shelves. The wooden panel swayed again, leaning drunkenly out from the wall, held by two of its fittings, the other two dangling loose, the screw-threads clenching torn shreds of wood and plaster.

  It was the panel that Yeoman had caught his fingers on, Mandeville saw, that he had said had bitten him. Parry had ribbed him mercilessly about it after binding his fingers, particularly when they found a torn string of skin caught in the lion’s mouth on the front of the panel. Dried blood was still crusted around its wooden teeth, dribbling down its chin and the rest of the panel in long, clotted strings.

  Mandeville went back across the bar, flicking the torch around him as he went. Nothing. The girl had either gone further down the corridor, which he doubted as all the doors along it were locked except the very furthest, an exit to the fire stairs which squealed violently as it opened, or she had gone higher, to the second or third floor.

  This was becoming annoying and complicated, and he would have to wake the other members of the Crew to help look for her.

  As he reached the doorway, a noise came from behind him, a throaty, hoarse growl that stretched for seconds, and as he turned a dark shape came across the floor at him with a rapid, ferocious clatter.

  Yeoman woke to find himself staring a warped wooden lion, blood flaking from its mouth in dark red drifts.

  “It fell off the wall last night,” said Mandeville by way of explanation, “and nearly fucking gave me a heart attack. Maybe it’s got it in for us, what do you think? By the way, we’ve got an intruder, or at least, we did last night. Somewhere there’s a place to g
et in that we don’t know about, and first job today is to find it.”

  It was colder that morning, and even dressed and with coffee and breakfast (cooked on the tiny camping stove) inside him, Yeoman shivered.

  Outside the temperature was even lower, and as he walked the perimeter of the Grand smoking and looking for potential entry points, Yeoman tried to see the hotel as it might be in the future.

  Architecturally, it was generally sound, so most of his work was done. He had some suggestions to make about the use of the lower floor rooms and about how some of the walls could be altered to make a more open space, but he knew that his role here had become one of support rather than leading. This job would bear Parry’s and, especially, Mandeville’s stamp rather than his own. He was fine with that, knowing that he would get equal credit anyway; Mandeville was strict about the fact that the Save Our Shit Crew were partners. Whatever fortune they shared, they shared in equal proportion.

  There were no obvious entry points that Yeoman could see, and Parry told the same story from his search of the hotel’s insides. Mandeville himself didn’t look convinced, but didn’t argue, telling them instead to keep an eye out and to be alert. He was distracted, Yeoman knew, because once the search was done they could reveal the third floor’s secrets.

  “The rooms are intact,” said Parry, unnecessarily. They had discussed this already, but he looked as nervous as Mandeville. “Whatever other idiocies the various owners inflicted on this places, they knew that keeping the suites on the third floor as close to their original state was important.

  “The carpets have gone, of course, but we have the patterns for them in Priest’s records so they can be recreated, the wall hangings likewise. The taps, the window latches, the door handles, the bath feet and the fittings for the showers and toilets are all original except for one or two replaced items, but they can be easily sorted out.

  “The carpet in the corridor has been replaced as well, and we don’t have a pattern for it, but we do have photographs and descriptions, so recreating it might be complex but it’s achievable. The theme is all there, waiting for the new owners to agree it, but it only works if the art itself still exists. It’s the thing that ties it together, gives the guests the language to understand what their rooms were telling them.”

  Parry spoke like this when he got excited, Yeoman remembered, talking about art’s “language”, its “voice”, its “pulse” and its “heartbeat”.

  “If it’s survived, we can recommend that the top floor is recreated in its entirety, that the new guests can be as surrounded by Gravette’s and Priest’s beliefs in God and nature as interchangeable beauties as their predecessors were. If it’s damaged, irreparable, then it doesn’t matter, the heart will be gone.”

  As he spoke, Parry was levering the first of the cheap panels from wall. The screws came unwillingly from the wood with a noise like cats in the darkness. The panel, a composite of some sort, bowed out damply, splintering apart as Mandeville took hold of it.

  “Shit,” said Mandeville quietly; the panel was so damp his fingers were leaving denting grooves in it, “they didn’t even use decent fucking wood. In this atmosphere . . .” He voiced tailed off, miserable in the silence, as Parry removed the last screw and then the first of Gravette’s pieces was revealed.

  It was a picture of a woman standing on the edge of a great sea. She was naked, her back to the canvas, her buttocks and shoulders clearly delineated by Gravette’s loving brush, her hair long down her back. Although there was nothing obvious, something in the way the brushstrokes, still visible in the thick paint, formed the sea and the sky hinted at things below the surface or just beyond vision, things that swirled and glided and floated.

  Around the woman, by her feet on the sand, pieces of machinery lay glittering with oily life, cogs and levers and panelling and rivets forming a platform that looked like a vast mechanical hand upon whose edge the woman was precariously balanced.

  The picture was, despite the damp affecting the panel covering it, in remarkably good condition. Apart from a small amount of blackly-furred moss just creeping along a part of the picture’s bottom edge, there was no obvious damage; the colours were bright, vibrant, the detailing astonishing. The woman’s muscles were distinct beneath her skin, her outstretched hands seeming to grasp at the whole of the scene beyond her.

  “Beautiful,” breathed Mandeville, and Parry simply nodded.

  Yeoman, less moved by the artwork but still appreciating the skill that had rendered the picture, said, “Is that Priest then? Nice arse.”

  “It’s not Priest,” said Parry, ignoring the obvious provocation, “it’s woman, an archetype, a feminine ideal.”

  “It’s an ideal arse,” agreed Yeoman, grinning at Parry.

  Parry, shaking his head disgustedly but unable to prevent himself grinning back, said, “Let’s do the others.”

  All fourteen pictures were in similar condition, having survived far better than Mandeville could have hoped. Collectively, the pictures were called The Stations of the Way, and if you followed their story, up one side of the corridor and then back down the other, right side along and left back, they told the story of Gravette and Priest’s beliefs as surely as any bible or philosophical tract.

  Across the pictures, the woman waded into the ocean, leaving the machinery behind, swimming and dancing with vast and unnameable creatures under the green surface before being lifted out and hauled into the sky by flying versions of the same creatures.

  The figure of the woman became smaller and smaller in the pictures, surrounded by winged and tentacled and finned creatures with fierce and unforgiving faces, but who robed her and held her as, in the distance, small and insignificant, machines ploughed the surface of the water and left tiny trails across the sky.

  Despite her size, the woman remained the absolute focal point in each picture, and every one of the creatures in the picture laid their full attention upon her.

  The Inhabitants of the Grand; The End of the Crew

  Although they hadn’t finished the job of assessing the Grand, Mandeville went out for champagne, and the three men drank it that night from plastic cups after they had finished another takeaway meal.

  They had spent the evening photographing the pictures, making careful notes of any damage they found, and then had re-covered them, this time with plastic sheeting. As they had covered the last of the pictures, Parry had said, “Sorry, ma’am, but you can come out again soon.”

  Mandeville had never seen Parry so excited. “Do you understand how important this is, that they’ve survived? Gravette and Priest, they were both fine artists in their own right, but this was considered by both to be their crowning glory, and it’s still here, and we can make it public again!

  “As you move up through the levels of the hotel, you pass from the mechanised glories of the man-made world on the ground floor, through human pastimes, hunting and drinking and sunbathing, on the first floor.

  “If the second floor had been left alone and not torn apart, we’d have found art that showed men and women abandoning their earthly pursuits, their clothes, work, so that by the time we hit the third floor we’re returning to an understanding that all of life is about the worship of nature and a recognition of its power, its supremacy.

  “Do you know that through most of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, the pictures on the third floor had other pictures hung in front of them? That they were considered ‘old-fashioned’ and ‘outdated’? What a fucking travesty, all that beauty and life trapped behind crappy prints and photographs of misty fucking landscapes and Victorian watercolours, desperate to be free, and we can do it, we can free it, let it out, let it be loved again!”

  “Well, the owners can, if that’s what they want to do. All we can do is make the suggestion and try to persuade them,” said Mandeville.

  “Persuade them?” said Parry. “They have to. We have to make them! It can’t stay hidden any more, it was made to be looked at, created to be se
en. They have to.”

  “We’ll try,” said Mandeville. “Trust me, we’ll try.”

  Mandeville was woken by footsteps. Bleary, champagne-heavy, he forgot he was wrapped in a sleeping bag and on a cot and tried to roll, falling heavily to the floor. The shock jolted him fully alert, and as he struggled to his knees, he listened.

  They weren’t footsteps, not exactly; they were too rapid, too light, and seemed to come from all around the room, from two or three places at once.

  It was dark, the only light the digital glow from the clock and the glimmer from the extension cable’s unblinking LED eye. At the edge of the pale illumination, a darkness shifted, bled out into the shadows around it and formed again, low and cautious. Another patch moved on the far side of the room, easing in through the entrance from the sun corridor.

  Mandeville freed his arms from his sleeping bag and unzipped it, stepping out and fumbling for his boots. As his hand found them, one of the patches moved again, slinking around the edge of the room.

  Now the noise was slower, still light, like pencil tips tapping a wooden desk. Mandeville risked looking down for a second to slip his boots on, Priest’s patterned floor turning sinuously beneath his soles, and when he looked up, the two patches had been joined by a third.

  Parry’s cot was empty, but Yeoman was sleeping soundly on his.

  Mandeville hissed at him, leaning over to shake him when he didn’t wake. Even as he leaned, the flowing, creeping patches of darkness, somehow blacker than the shadows around them, began to come in closer, still circling.

  “What?” mumbled Yeoman.

  “Be quiet,” said Mandeville softly, “and wake up. Now. There’s something in here.”