The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Dark Terrors 05]

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  He picked up a meat cleaver from her kitchen counter and used it to dismember the graceful lines of the bedstead, the side table, the dresser. He slashed through the bed clothes and started on the contents of her closet. He arranged the mannequin within the destroyed womb of her bed, then began hacking on it as well, imprinting it with all his secret signatures. Then seeing himself in the mirror of the dressing table, the glittering blade in his upraised hand, he started smashing his own image in the mirror.

  * * * *

  Jane felt a heightened self-consciousness leaving the movie theatre. She thought they must see her awkwardness, the wrongness in her. The crowd seemed subdued, as was often the case when people departed this sort of entertainment, as they attempted to extricate their thoughts and eyes from the webs and tendrils of fantasy. She felt as if she herself were too well-defined today, her terror too palpable against the crowd’s backdrop of oh-so-grey emotion. It made her too-involved, vulnerable, an easy target.

  A dark murmuring in the crowd off to her left, but Jane was determined not to look. She and the others around her crunched through powdered glass on the sidewalk, no doubt the remains of some wino’s refreshment.

  Soon she was at the edge of the park, an unusually bright streetlight mounted on the entrance above her. The sharp edges of light dropped painfully through the narrow, dark tree branches. In the distance, she could see women running away from the park. Beyond the sharp sculptures, Jane thought she could hear women screaming in windows.

  * * * *

  He saw her stumbling through the park towards him, drawn along like a fly in the web of his personality, her face contorted as if from some massive, internal noise. He enjoyed the feel of insects blown against his skin, scratching across his arms and face, dancing. He withdrew the tableknife from his pocket, its blade sharpened to a thin blue edge. He stroked it slowly, ready to make contact, ready to make love to her.

  * * * *

  Jane saw him standing in front of the sculptures, their metal edges surrounded by clouds of dark insects as they attempted to tear holes in the sky. People were fleeing the park. Why was she just standing there? It was the dapper older man from the restaurant, the one who had stolen her tableknife, the one who had been pursuing her. She wondered if perhaps a kiss, or even just a hug, might satisfy him and make him leave her alone.

  His teeth gleamed. She turned and ran. Away from her apartment, away from the park, and as he pursued her, running ahead of her here, heading her off there, she realized she could only go where he wanted her to go.

  She ran down an alley with the man pacing steadily behind her. She barked her left knee against a torn metal drum; dampness spread rapidly down her leg. Cats scattered madly as she escaped the alley, as she crossed one street and then another, as she entered a shattered block of buildings, all condemned for the cinema complex to be erected there soon, a third of the buildings already gnawed into submission by the parked machinery.

  She made her way through the jumbles of debris which filled the ruins, tormented by wood splinters and insect bites. Nails protruded from raw wounds in the wood, anxious to match their scars with her own.

  She stopped, staring into the night in front of her. Suddenly his eyes peered from two holes carved out of the darkness. She spun right and broke through a flimsy door, into a building with dim yellow lights in its cracked windows, the only such lighting on the block.

  Mannequins littered the hallway. Pieces of clothing hung from scattered plastic arms and heads. A battered hat. A leather glove. A red rain coat. A stocking mask.

  She ran through an open door, into a bedroom. Several lamps affixed with coloured bulbs burned before a mirror on the large dressing table. A cat moved listlessly across piles of broken plaster towards her. It seemed to have unusually short hair; then she realized it had been shaved down to tissue-thin skin. Under the coloured lights the shaved cat’s skin looked blood-red. She leaned over and stroked it - it was too drugged to purr. She could see veins labouring just under the surface of the skin. A diagram had been drawn in black permanent marker under its torso, like a butcher’s chart.

  Four naked cats lay near the dusty red bed (a bed for lovers, she thought), their tiny throats cut.

  And then she heard him out in the hallway, whispering his love for her.

  She crashed through the next door into an old kitchen with its piles of rusted silverware and broken plates and cups -smeared with dark, blood-like stains - littering the grey linoleum floor. Her feet, now bare, scraped across the shattered edges. The walls echoed complexly. She imagined them riddled with secret doors and passages, but more likely it was the effects of generations of rot.

  She passed through another door into a hall slightly more barren than the first. Most of the ceiling bulbs in the hall were broken, their curved jigsaw pieces crunching under her bare feet like deadly eggshells, barbed edges gleaming under the remaining yellow light.

  A loud noise behind her and she fell into agony. She scrambled up and stared at her left arm: a sharp shaft of bone jutted from her broken skin.

  She leapt back across the hall and slammed the door into the kitchen, painfully turning the old-fashioned latch. A knife blade suddenly appeared in the crack between the door and the jamb, working its way down towards the latch. The man laughed softly, whispering love songs as he worked.

  She jerked her head around, searching for the next escape. A staircase led downwards. She hobbled over and stumbled down the steps.

  Animal teeth scattered on the floor, rats in the corners, nesting. A Polaroid of a sliced eyeball had been nailed to the wall beneath a precisely mounted spotlight. Below this was the body it had been taken from: she thought she recognized him as the man who had sold her a comb earlier that day.

  Another body lay at the end of the short, subterranean hallway: maggots had blunted the sharp planes of the face and made a curlicue border along the dark hairline, but it still bore a startling resemblance to a woman who used to sell tickets at the movie theatre.

  In a small, clean room she found another woman’s body, razor blades embedded in cheeks and neck tendons. A scratching at the small window near the ceiling made her turn her head. The glass broke, as if in slow motion, across her face. It showered down before her like frozen, glittering, magical tears.

  First arms, then a head, burst through the rainbow-sheened glass. The man from the restaurant grinned at her through the blood washing over his face. He looked down at the cement floor, where he had dropped his knife.

  She stooped and picked up the knife off the floor. She stroked its smooth handle. She imagined using it, slipping it through clothing into flesh and beyond. She imagined making love to the man’s body with it, kissing him all over with it, until he cried. It made her feel strange, imagining a man’s tears, imagining a man’s submission.

  * * * *

  Maxwell stared at his lover through a dull red filter. Her constant screams of passion had receded as they blended with the loud music in his head, until eventually he could not distinguish the two melodies. He desperately wanted her to join him with the knife, to make of them one creature, to blend their blood streams until they were, finally, one single, gaping wound.

  But then he found himself falling the rest of the way through the basement window, glass and blood descending with him as he flew away to regions of dream.

  * * * *

  Only when her voice finally gave out into a raw, bleeding whisper did she realize she had been screaming constantly since her discovery of the first body. The scream joined the frantic music which still filled her head.

  She struck out against him even as he crashed into her, but in the course of their struggles dropped the knife. She was surprised to find him naked but for his bright red uniform of blood - at some point he had stripped away all pretension. His toenails felt like metal against her body, but his fingernails were so sharp she did not feel them at all when they slid beneath the surface of her skin.

  He brought the ed
ge of his hand down on her cheekbone, filling her vision with bright, blinding flashes of light. He grinned at her, and dipped his finger into the blood covering his face, and drew a bright red line across her neck.

  She rose on to her knees and rolled, and he rolled with her, his teeth biting her ear as he whispered her name. They crashed into the door, closing it firmly on the hall and the little light it had provided.

  A glint in the dark, a flat surface catching any available light. His hand was on it, and raising it high above her head.

  The knife passed through her hand, nailing it to the door. She spat into his face and he pulled the knife out and thrust it at her again. The point passed through the surface of her right cheek. She stretched out her arms to ward off the blows: the blade bit at the fleshy areas of her palms, her fingers, releasing exclamations of blood. She jerked forward, catching him off-guard, jamming the webbing of her damaged hand into his throat. He fell back and she was on her feet again, slamming open the door and running back into the hall. She turned and scrambled up a pile of crates to a screened window, her hands leaving red prints on everything she touched.

  Then he was behind her, pushing her face roughly into the large squares of wire mesh. She could feel the chequerboard pattern etching into her soft skin. Getting her feet beneath her, she pushed back against a crate launching them both backwards through the air. She could feel something breaking beneath her, something in the man’s body, as they slammed into the floor. But he simply groaned and said, ‘Darling.’

  Across the hall there was the open door to a dingy bathroom. She crawled up off the man and scrambled through the door on her hands and knees, locking it behind her. She stood up. The bathroom was brightly lit by six huge incandescent bulbs mounted in the ceiling. Judging from the heat they gave off she imagined they had been burning for some time. Blood like red greasepaint smeared the fixtures. On the other side of the door a high-pitched man’s voice - imitating a woman - began chanting her name.

  She screamed back at him, ‘What did I do? I’m a nice person!’ Then she laughed huskily, the laughter bringing bile up her raw throat.

  A knife blade slipped through a crack in the door panel, moving back and forth first in a sawing motion, then a chiselling one. She grabbed a piece of broken pipe off the floor and started swinging at the blade, finally snapping it off. She released a strained whoop of victory. ‘What kind of lover would you be?’ she screamed through the door.

  ‘I loved you!’ the man shouted on the other side.

  Jane collapsed into bleating laughter. The loud music faded from her head, exhausting her. ‘No one can make love to me,’ she said, finally, quietly. ‘I am too afraid of all these sharp edges.’

  A thundering on the other side of the door, and then the door disintegrated in rage around her. Clouds of dust floated in brilliant crimson light.

  * * * *

  Maxwell saw himself in the bathroom’s mirrored, bloodstained wall. Jane’s face floated at his knees, gazing up at his reflection in a way which resembled longing, but which he knew might be any emotion at all. He realized, now, that he could never know what Jane really felt about anything. With a scream he plunged the blade into his own belly. He looked down at what he had done to himself, examining the knife handle curiously, as if it were his umbilical cord suddenly reappeared after all these years.

  He sank to his knees behind her, touching her torn shoulder with one hand.

  ‘I am too afraid,’ she said.

  ‘We’re all afraid,’ he said.

  ‘Am I going to die now?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ he replied, gazing down at the blood seeping from his belly. She did not move away. He would always be thankful for that, as he closed his eyes, and in his long dream carried her back upstairs and into his bed.

  * * * *

  Steve Rasnic Tem is the award-winning author of ‘The Rains’, published in the previous volume of Dark Terrors. His tales have appeared in numerous major horror anthologies, including The Best New Horror, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Forbidden Acts and MetaHorror. More recently his work has been published in Darkside, Palace Corbie, A Nightmare Dozen, and he has seven pieces in the anthology 365 Scary Stories. The inspiration for ‘Sharp Edges’ is succinct: ‘It came out of my love, and admiration for, the films of Dario Argento,’ says the author. ‘It was written under the influence of a driving Goblin soundtrack.’

  <>

  * * * *

  This Is Your Life

  (Repressed Memory Remix)

  PAT CADIGAN

  By the time she was on the flight back to Massachusetts, Renata had grown weary of condolences. You’re forty years old, your father dies. If you haven’t been close to him for most of your life, you’re not going to suddenly discover a deep well of emotion connected to him.

  Of course, she had to remind herself, it wasn’t that way with a lot of people. A good many of her co-workers, for example, would not have had to fly to get home for a family funeral, and they’d have been pretty torn up about it. But that was how you felt when you lost someone who had been one of the mainstays of your life.

  Her friend Vinnie had been nonplussed to know that she didn’t consider her father one of the mainstays of her own life. Brought up in a large extended Italian family, Vincenza Maria Fanucci was a curious mix of highly independent, uncompromising professional and Old World filial piety. Vinnie regarded her own father as a big kid ensconced in the body of a flawed minor deity who permeated, even now, the lives of his five children with his paternal . . . oh, hell, Renata didn’t even know what to call it. Paternal existence. Paternal paternity. Daddyish-ness. Staring down unseeing at the inflight magazine in her lap, Renata thought that she probably knew more of the substance of Vinnie’s father than she ever had of her own.

  It wasn’t that her father hadn’t loved her, or that he had rejected her. She could remember times when she was little when her father had taken her to the movies or to the circus, or even just out to the playground on Saturday. Just her alone - in those days, her brother Jules had been only a baby. Her father had dutifully pushed her on the swings, spun the merry-go-round for her till she had got dizzy almost to the point of nausea, caught her at the bottom of the slide.

  No, not just dutifully. That was unfair. He had been pleasant. She had even believed that he’d been having fun, but no child could believe that anyone wouldn’t have fun in a playground. Any more than, she supposed, any child - any very young child - could believe that she wasn’t the only thing of any real importance in her parents’ world.

  Eventually, you’d know better. By then, however, you had usually achieved adolescence and if you gave that sort of thing any thought at all, it was probably more with satisfaction than anything else, maybe a fleeting sense of relief as you left the house to go meet friends. As Renata had always understood it, this was called flying the nest. Except some people worked out some kind of compromise, where they left but acceded to a kind of placeholder that marked a bit of territory that they would always belong to, rather than vice versa.

  My, but our thoughts are heavy today, for someone claiming not to be terribly affected by her father’s death.

  She turned a page and frowned down at a photo of an impossibly plush hotel in some ridiculously inaccessible vacation region. Perhaps that was because, instead of mourning her father, she was mourning the profound and lasting connection they had failed to achieve. As she got older, he’d just had less and less time for her, or her brother Jules. She thought now that probably he’d barely had time for their mother. But that had just been the way things were back then. His draftsman’s job consumed more of his time and attention. The company he’d worked for had been switching over to Computer Aided Design, trying to keep up with the rest of the corporate Joneses, and her father had had to re-train himself almost from scratch in a job that he had been proficient in - had thought he’d been proficient in - for almost twenty years. New developments had eaten up his time an
d hadn’t left much in the way even of bare bones behind.

  And hadn’t it been that way for a lot of other families as well? Sure. We can’t all be jolly Italian dynasties, now, can we? No, we sure can’t.

  What sadness there was for her in the occasion had much more to do with the absence of the man’s effect on her rather than the absence of the man himself. Maybe that was sadder than his death, she thought, and actually felt her throat begin to tighten.

  Now, now. Let’s not go to pieces just because it’s an occasion that usually calls for it, she thought, sneaking a look at her seat-mate on the right as she pretended that she wasn’t dabbing tears from her eyes. No worries there; the woman had dozed off with her mouth open and her reading glasses a centimeter from the end of her prominent nose. She was a plump, middle-aged blonde made even plumper by masses of hair extensions artfully braided into her natural hair. Naturally-grown hair, Renata amended to herself; the colour was as acquired as the extra tresses. It wasn’t a bad job. Renata wouldn’t have known except that one tiny connection knot was peeking out at her near the woman’s left temple. She smiled at it, absently patting the greying brown hair fluffing over the back of her own collar.