The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 22

by Stephen Jones

  I will encounter my son, though when that moment occurs, he will be the only one of us aware that he is my son. We will meet not because I will have gone looking for him – that will not be a part of my plan, if the restless urge that motivates me can even be said to be a plan – but because he will have come hunting for me. Which means that during one of those future days, as I will be moving slowly forward in search of her, sensing the growth of my wife’s presence in my stilled heart and my shuttered brain, I will be tackled from behind and thrown to the ground. I will retaliate explosively, reacting to that collision with sudden, violent movements, but I will not be surprised, as I will be incapable of surprise. When I am allowed to stand once more, and begin to move toward this person to feed, the attack as forgotten as if it had never occurred, I will discover that I can only move in his direction so far, and no more, for I have been chained. I will stumble as I reach for this man who knows he is my son, because a loop around my ankle will extend tautly to a nearby telephone pole, tripping me. “I knew you would come looking for us,” he will say. “I knew you would be like that.” I will not understand either his words or his meaning. Speech, both the uttering of it and the understanding of it, will be gone. I will only know that this person is preventing me from reaching my destination, a goal beyond thought, beyond life and death. I will struggle wildly to break free, but it will avail me nothing, as my son will have planned well, and I will succeed only in wrapping myself tightly against the telephone pole, much like a dog that has run in circles around the tree to which he has been tethered. My son will watch me as I struggle without success, and he will smile. He will be glad that I will finally experience what it means to be trapped, not understanding that I am beyond the understanding of it. “Stay right there,” he will say, laughing. “I will see you later.” And then he will leave me there, where I will remain circling first in one direction, then the other, freedom and the object of my desire both apparently stripped from me.

  I will gnaw off my foot. There will be no other way to go on. I will have hurled myself repeatedly against my tethering, but I will not have the strength to shatter my restraint. Flesh will never be able to conquer steel, not even when that flesh is of the undead kind. I will sense the intended purpose of this chain, that it was designed to keep me from my wife, and I will realise quickly that it fulfils its function far too well. And so there will be no other way. After having orbited the pole dozens of times – maybe even hundreds of times, for the numbering of things is another concept which will be beyond me – to no end, I will finally sit, and raise the fettered ankle to my mouth, and begin to chew. But unlike with my other feedings, no satiation of hunger will be found there. There will be no reward for this act of autocannibalism other than the restoration of my freedom. When I will continue on, it will be with a lopsided shamble, for I will be limping from my loss. I will move slowly, but I will still move, and that is all that will matter. Nothing will be able to stop me from achieving my intended reunion, not when I have come so far, and will be so close.

  I will find her. I will have no doubt then that it will happen because there will no longer be any doubt to me, only determination, and I have no doubts now as I write these words, because, even through a thing such as this, I know that my wife and I are meant to be together, and because we are meant to be together, we will be together. Our story can end no other way. That final meeting will occur before our son can find me again. He will not be beside her when I at last stumble toward her with a ragged gait, so he will at that moment probably be back at the telephone pole where he will have bound me, staring down in horror at what I will have left behind. My wife will be in the front yard of the house which had once belonged to her mother, and her back will at first be turned to me. As I approach her, it will not be with the kind of hunger you’d expect. It will be a hunger of a different species. I know that now, that one kind of hunger, even in the end times, can still triumph over the other. I will see, during my final approach, that she carries a gun. I will also see that, as she turns and notices my presence, she does not immediately aim it at me as a stranger would. She instead will merely cradle it against her chest. Her expression will not be one of horror, though based upon the damaged countenance I will present to her, it should be. The gaze from anyone else certainly would be. There will be tears in her eyes. I will be driven to my knees before her at the sight of them. I will not be capable of knowing then, as I pause in adoration, but I know right at this moment, what I would do if our roles had been reversed and I had been placed in her position, if I had been the one waiting and she had been the one to come back to me as I will be. The choice would seem inescapable; that is, there will be no choice. But as our lives, or rather, her life and my undeath, will play out, that decision will end up being hers. I will know, even though I will be beyond knowing, even though the electrical impulses in my brain slog instead of race, even though the functioning of my body’s cells will have faded, exactly what she will do, and so I will take no further action, and simply wait there, bowed before her, even though I will be overcome by a hunger greater than I will have ever known.

  The last time I will see my wife on this Earth, it will be over a shotgun barrel. She will raise her weapon, and will point it at me, but I will ignore it, and instead fix my gaze upon her eyes. I will have returned to where I am meant to be, with the woman for whom I was intended, am intended, will be intended. She will take a single step toward me, the gun shaking slightly in her trembling hands, and then her grip will become steady, and she will fire. And as my brain turns to a fine mist, and my shackled undead consciousness is set free, I will be aware in my final moments of the inevitable second shot, as she brings our story to its inevitable and loving conclusion.

  MICHAEL MARSHALL

  SMITH

  Substitutions

  MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH is a novelist and screenwriter. Under this name he has published seventy short stories and three novels – Only Forward, Spares and One of Us – winning the Philip K. Dick Award, International Horror Guild Award, August Derleth, and the Prix Bob Morane in France. He has also won the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction four times, more than any other author.

  Writing as “Michael Marshall”, he has also published five international best-selling thrillers, including The Straw Men, The Intruders, Bad Things and, most recently, Killer Move. The Intruders is currently under series development with BBC TV.

  He is currently involved in screenwriting projects that include a television pilot set in New York and an animated horror movie for children. The author lives in North London with his wife, son, and two cats.

  As Smith recalls: “This story came about in the simplest way, the way I always enjoy most – something happening in real life that makes you think ‘What if?’

  “Our household gets a lot of its food via an online delivery service, and one day when I was unpacking what had just been dropped at our house I gradually realised there was something . . . not quite right about the contents of the bags.

  “There’s two things that are strange about that experience. The first is that – given that every household is likely to buy at least some things in common – you don’t realise straight away that you’ve been given the wrong shopping. You don’t immediately think ‘This is wrong’, more like . . . ‘This is weird’. The second is how personal it is, gaining accidental access to this very tangible evocation of some other family’s life. You can’t help but wonder about the people the food was really destined for.

  “In real life, I just called up the delivery guy and got it sorted out: but in fiction, you might tackle things slightly differently . . .”

  HALFWAY THROUGH UNPACKING THE second red bag I turned to my wife – who was busily engaged in pecking out an email on her Blackberry – and said something encouraging about the bag’s contents.

  “Well, you know,” she said, not really paying attention. “I do try.”

  I went back to taking items out and laying t
hem on the counter, which is my way. Because I work from home, it’s always me who unpacks the grocery shopping when it’s delivered: Helen’s presence this morning was unusual, and a function of a meeting that had been put back an hour (the subject of the terse email currently being written). Rather than standing with the fridge door open and putting items directly into it, I put everything on the counter first, so I can sort through it and get a sense of what’s there, before then stowing everything neatly in the fridge, organised by type/nature/potential meal groupings, as a kind of Phase Two of the unloading operation.

  The contents of the bags – red ones for stuff that needs refrigeration, purple for freezer goods, green for everything else – is never entirely predictable. My wife has control of the online ordering process, which she conducts either from her laptop or, in extremis, her phone. While I’ve not personally specified the order, however, its contents are seldom much of a surprise. There’s an established pattern. We have cats, so there’ll be two large bags of litter – it’s precisely being able to avoid hoicking that kind of thing off supermarket shelves, into a trolley and across a busy car park which makes online grocery shopping such a boon. There will be a few green bags containing bottled water, sacks for the rubbish bins, toilet rolls and paper towel, cleaning materials, tins of store cupboard staples (baked beans, tuna, tinned tomatoes), a box of Diet Coke for me (which Helen tolerates on the condition that I never let it anywhere near our son), that kind of thing. There will be one, or at the most two, purple bags holding frozen beans, frozen peas, frozen organic fish cakes for the kid, and so on. We never buy enough frozen to fill more than one purple carrier, but sometimes they split it between a couple, presumably for some logistical reason. Helen views this as both a waste of resources and a threat to the environment, and has sent at least two emails to the company about it. I don’t mind much as we use the bags for clearing out the cats’ litter tray, and I’d rather have spares on hand than risk running out.

  Then there’s the red bags, the main event. The red bags represent the daily news of food consumption – in contrast to the contextual magazine articles of the green bags, or the long-term forecasts of the purple. In the red bags will be the Greek yoghurt, blueberries and strawberries Helen uses to make her morning smoothie; a variety of vegetables and salad materials; some free-range and organic chicken fillets (I never used to be clear on the difference between the non-identical twin joys of organic and free range, but eleven years of marriage has made me better informed); some extra-sharp cheddar (Helen favours cheese that tastes as though it wants your tongue to be sad), and a few other bits and pieces.

  The individual items may vary a little from week to week, but basically, that’s what gets brought to our door most Wednesday mornings. Once in a while there may be substitutions in the delivery (when the supermarket has run out of a specified item, and one judged to be of near equivalence is provided instead): these have to be carefully checked, as Helen’s idea of similarity of goods differs somewhat from the supermarket’s. Otherwise, you could set your watch by our shopping, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor – and this continuity of content is why I’d turned to Helen when I was halfway through the second red bag. Yes, there’d been spring onions and a set of red, green and yellow peppers – standard weekly fare. But there were also two packs of brightly-coloured and fun-filled children’s yoghurts and a block of much milder cheddar of the kind Oscar and I tend to prefer, plus a family pack of deadly-looking chocolate desserts. Not to mention a six-pack of thick and juicy-looking steaks, and large variety pack of further Italian cured meats holding five different types of salami.

  “Yum,” I said.

  I was genuinely pleased, and a little touched. Normally I source this kind of stuff – on the few occasions when I treat myself – from the deli or mini-market which are both about ten minutes’ walk away from the house (in opposite directions, sadly). Seeing it come into the house via the more socially condoned route of the supermarket delivery was strangely affecting.

  “Hmm?” Helen said. She was nearing the end of her email. I could tell because the speed of her typing increases markedly as she approaches the point when she can fire her missive off into space.

  She jabbed SEND and finally looked up properly. “What’s that you said?”

  “Good shop. Unusual. But I like it.”

  She smiled, glad that I was happy, but then frowned. “What the hell’s that?”

  I looked where she was pointing. “Yoghurts.”

  She grabbed the pack and stared with evident distaste at the ingredient list. “I didn’t order those. Obviously. Or that.” Now she was pointing at the pile of salamis and meats. “And the cheese is wrong. Oh, bloody hell.”

  And with that, she was gone.

  I waited, becalmed in the kitchen, to see what would unfold. A quick look in the other bags – the greens and purples – didn’t explain much. They all contained exactly the kind of thing we tended to order.

  Five minutes later I heard the sound of two pairs of footsteps coming down the stairs. Helen re-entered the kitchen followed by the man who’d delivered the shopping. He was carrying three red bags and looked mildly cowed.

  “What it is, right,” he muttered, defensively, “Is the checking system. I’ve told management about it before. There are flaws. In the checking system.”

  “I’m sure it can’t be helped,” Helen said, cheerfully, and turned to me. “Bottom line is that all the bags are correct except for the red ones, which both belong to someone else.”

  When I’d put all the items from the counter back into the bags I’d taken them out of, an exchange took place. Their red bags, for ours. The delivery guy apologised five more times – somehow making it clear, without recourse to words, that he was apologising for the system as a whole, rather than any failure on his part – and trudged off back up the stairs.

  “I’ll let him out,” Helen said, darting forward to give me a peck on the cheek. “Got to go anyway. You’re alright unpacking all this, yes?”

  “Of course,” I said. “I always manage somehow.”

  And off she went. It only took a few minutes to unpack the low-fat yoghurts, sharp cheese, salad materials and free-range and organic chicken breasts.

  A funny thing happened, however. When I broke off from work late morning to go down to the kitchen to make a cup of tea, I lingered at the fridge for a moment after getting the milk out, and I found myself thinking:

  What if that had been our food?

  I wasn’t expressing discontent. We eat well. I personally don’t have much of a fix on what eating healthily involves (beyond the fact it evidently requires ingesting more fruit and vegetables per day than feels entirely natural), and so it’s a good thing that Helen does. If there’s anything that I want which doesn’t arrive at our door through the effortless magic of supermarket delivery, there’s nothing to stop me going out and buying it myself. It’s not as if the fridge or cupboards have been programmed to reject non-acceptable items, or set off a siren and contact the diet police when confronted with off-topic foodstuffs.

  It was more that I got a sudden and strangely wistful glimpse of another life – and of another woman.

  I was being assumptive, of course. It was entirely possible that the contents of the red bags I’d originally unpacked had been selected by the male of some nearby household. It didn’t feel that way, however. It seemed easier to believe that somewhere nearby was another household rather like ours. A man, a woman, and a child (or perhaps two, we’re unusual in having stopped at one). All of the people in this family would be different to us, of course, but for the moment it was the idea of the woman which stuck in my head.

  I wondered what she’d look like. What kind of things made her laugh. How, too, she’d managed to miss out on the health propaganda constantly pushed at the middle classes (she had to be middle class, most people in our neighbourhood are, and everyone who orders online from our particular supermarket has to be, it’s the law)
– or what had empowered her to ignore it.

  We get steak every now and then, of course – but it would never be in the company of all the other meats and rich foods. One dose of weapons-grade animal fats per week is quite risky enough for this household, thank you. We live a moderate, evenly balanced life when it comes to food (and, really, when it comes to everything else). The shopping I’d seen, however foolishly, conjured the idea of a household which sailed a different sea – and of a different kind of woman steering the ship.

  I was just a little intrigued, that’s all.

  A couple of days later, I was still intrigued. You’d be right in suspecting this speaks of a life in which excitement levels are low. I edit, from home. Technical manuals are my bread and butter, leavened with the occasional longer piece of IT journalism. I’m good at it, fast and accurate, and for the most part enjoy my work. Perhaps “enjoy” isn’t quite the right word (putting my editing hat on for a moment): let’s say instead that I’m content that it’s my profession, am well paid and always busy, and feel no strong desire to be doing anything else, either in general or particular.