Best New Horror: Volume 25 (Mammoth Book of Best New Horror)

by Неизвестный

  “No,” said the figure.

  It was a gentle, ashy voice. Neither male nor female, just as the form of it seemed quite asexual.

  “Well, it hardly matters,” said Folscyvio who, in the waking world, would have been extremely put out.

  “But the death,” said the figure, “all deaths that have been deliberately caused, they do matter.”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” Folscyvio agreed, unconcerned yet amenable to the logic of it.

  “Even,” said the figure, “the death of things.”

  Folscyvio was intrigued. “Truly? How diverting. Why?”

  “All things are constructed,” the figure calmly said, and now, just for a second, there showed the most lucent and mellifluous gleam of eyes, “constructed, that is, from the same universal, partly psychic material. A tree, a man, a lion, a wall – we are all the same, in that way.”

  “I see,” said Folscyvio, nodding. They were walking on together, over the shore, the waves melting in about their feet, and every so often a fiery cresset passing, as if it walked in the other direction, casting out splinters of volcanic tangerine glass on the wrinkles of the water.

  “You are an animist,” said the figure. “You do not understand this in yourself, but you sense a life-force in every instrument on which you set your hands. And being sufficiently clever to recognize the superior life in them, you are jealous, envious and vengeful.” There was no disapproval, no anger in the voice, despite what it had said, or now said. “To a human who is not a murderer, the destruction of life is crucially terrible, whether the life of a man, a woman, or a beast. To an animist these events are also terrible, but, too, the slaughter of so-called objects is equally a horror, an abomination – a tree, a wall – and especially those objects which can speak or sing. And worse still, which have spoken and sung – for the one who kills them. A piano. A violin.”

  “A violin,” repeated Folscyvio, and a warm and stimulating pleasure surged up in him, reminiscent, though physically unlike, the sparkle of erotic arousal. “A violin.”

  Then he noticed they had reached the end of the shoreline. How strange: nothing lay beyond, only the gigantic sky, scattered with stars, and open as the sea had seemed to be moments before. Although the sea, evidently, had been contained by a horizon. As this was not.

  Folscyvio worked with the doll-mermaid-violin, mostly sticking to his routine, where departing from it then compensating with a fuller labour in the day or night which followed. (During this time he discovered no secret marks, Masonic or otherwise, on its surface. But of course, the shopkeeper had lied.)

  Three, then four months passed. The weather-control that operated along the coast maintained blissful weather, only permitting some rain now, at the evening hour of the aperitivo.

  He ordered Uccello to cancel a single concert he had been due to give in the city. Uccello was appalled. “Oh never fear, they’ll forgive me. Change the venue of my next one, to make room for those worshippers who missed out.” Folscyvio knew he would be forgiven. He was a genius. One must allow him room to act as he wished. Only those who hated and despised him ever muttered anything to the contrary. And they – and Folscyvio knew this also well – would be careful what they said, and where. It was well known, Folscyvio’s fanatics did not take kindly to his defamation.

  *

  Without a doubt, beyond all question, he had mastered her. It was the beginning of the fifth month. He stood in front of a wide mirror (his habitual act prior to a performance) and put him self, in slow motion, through his various flourishes, emotives, intensities, particularly those that were intrinsic to the new and extraordinary instrument. Already he had formulated the plan for her deployment and display before he should – finally, and after prevarication – take hold of her. She was to preside, to start with, at the off-centre front stage. She would then be upright, that was when the doll appearance of her would be the most obvious. Her hair would pour from the gold tiara, carefully arranged about and over her breasts, her face smooth and glowing from preparatory days of polishing, her emerald eyes (also polished), shining and her pomegranate lips inviting. She would be standing on her aquatic tail, in which all the missing scales by now were replaced. The fan-tail base of it would balance on a velvet cushion of the darkest green. Magnetic beams would hold her infallibly in position. (The insurance paid for this, not to mention the threats issued, both legal and otherwise, would make certain all was well.)

  After posing and scrutinizing all his moves and postures, Folscyvio played to the mirror the selected pieces on the viosera, as he proposed to at the forthcoming concert now only two weeks away. Everything went faultlessly, of course.

  Sometimes he would be assisted, during a concert, by an accompanying band, comprising percussion, certain stringed instruments, a small horn section, and so on. All these accoutrements were robotic; he never employed human musicians. The Maestro himself always checked the ensemble over, tuned and – as a favourable critic had expressed it – “exalted” them for a show. However, on this occasion, when he reached the moment that he accessed the viosirenalino (the “Mermaid”, as she had been billed), the exquisite little robot band would fall quite silent. At which, being non-human, no flicker of envy would disturb any morsel of it.

  Then, and only then, at a signal from the Maestro, ultra protective rays would spin the mermaid violin, whirling her to her true position, upside down.

  Folscyvio, amid the crowd’s predicted applause and up roar, would lift her free. Like a heroine in some swooning novel of the 19th, 20th, or early 21st century, she would lie back upon his shoulder, her hair drifting in a single silken, burnt-sienna wing down his back (the hair had been refurbished, too). In this fainting and acquiescent subjection of hers he would hold her, and bring the slender bow to bear upon her uptilted, supine body, stroking, spangling, making love to her, breasts to tail.

  In the wide mirror he could see now, even if he had already known, the eroticism of this act. How gorgeously perverse. How sublime. How they would love it. And oh, the music she could make …

  For her tones were beautiful. They were … unique. And only he, master of his art, had brought her to this. Even that dolt Uccello, hearing a brief example, a shred of Couperin, a skein of Vivaldi, and of Strarobini, played, recorded and audioed through the speaker, had exclaimed, “But, Folscy-mio, never did I hear you play anything with quite this … vividity. What enchantment. Folscyvio, you have found your true voice at last!” And at this, unseen since the viewer was not switched on, the Maestro had scornfully smiled.

  The concert was quite sold out. Beyond even the capacity of the concert stadium. Herds had paid, therefore, also to stand and listen in the gardens outside, where huge screens and vocaliani were to be rigged. It was to be a night of nights, the Night of the Mermaid. And after that night? Well.

  She was a doll. A toy. An aberration and a game – which he had played and won.

  One night for her, then, the best night of her little wooden life. That would be enough. Live her dream. Who should aim at more?

  *

  The venue for the concert was two miles inland of the city and the Laguna, up in the hills. This stadium was modern, a curious sounding-board of glazing, its supporting masonry embedded with acoustic speakers. The half-rings of seats hung gazing down to the hollow stage. They would be packed. Every place taken, the billionaire front rows to the craning upper roosts equipped with magnifying glasses. Amid the pines and cypresses outside, the huge screens clustered. Throughout the city too others would be peering at the Teleterra, watching, listening. And beyond the Laguna, the city, in many other regions all across the teeming and disassembled self-absorption of the planet, they too, whoever was able and had a mind to, they too glued to the relay of this performance.

  Unusually the concert was to begin rather early, the nineteenth hour of that light-enduring mechanically-extended summer night. Sunset would commence just before twenty-one. And the dusk, prolonged by aerial gadgets, would last ne
arly until the twenty-second hour.

  Almost everyone had learned about the new and special instrument – though not its nature. A mermaid? They could barely wait. Speculation had been rife in the media for weeks.

  So they entered the stadium. And when first they saw – it – during that vast in-gathering, startled curses and bouts of laughter ran round the hall. What was it? Was it hideous or divine, barbaric or obscene? Unplayable, how not? Some joke.

  Eventually the illumination sank and the general noise changed to that wild ovation always given the Maestro Folscyvio. And out he came, impeccably clad, his lush dark hair and handsome face, his slender, strong hands, looking at least a third of a metre taller than he was due to his lean elegance, and the lifts in his shoes.

  Hushing them benignly, he said only this: “Yes. As you see. But you must wait to hear. And now, we begin.”

  From the nineteenth almost to the twentieth hour, just as, muted and channelled through the venue’s glassy top the sun westered, Folscyvio performed at his full pitch of stunningly brilliant (and heartless) mastery.

  As ever, the audience were stirred, shaken, opened out like fans – actual fans, not fanatics – gasping, weeping, tranced slaves caught in the blinding blitzkrieg of his glare; they slum ped or sat rigid until the interval. And after it, fuelled by drink, legal drugs, and chat, they slunk back nearly bonelessly for another heavenly beating.

  And Folscyvio played on, assisted by his little robot orchestra. He took to him a piano, a mandolino. But all the while, the mermaid doll stood upright on her green cushion, with her green tail, her green eyes, her smallness – dumb. Obscure and … waiting.

  Some twenty minutes before twenty-one, the sunset swelled, then faded. The ghostly dusk ashed down. It was the Silver Hour, when the shadows fall. And tonight, here, it would last an hour.

  The penultimate acts of the show were done. The orchestra stopped like a clock. Folscyvio put aside the mandolin. Then, stepping forward quite briskly, he gave the signal, and the mermaid was whirled upside down – whereupon he seized her. And as the crowd faintly mooed in suspense he settled her, in a few well-practised moves, her head upon his shoulder, the hair flowing down his back like a wing. He lifted the bow out of its sword-like sheath, which until then had been hidden in a cleverly-spun chiaroscuro.

  Silences had occurred in history. The city knew silences. This silence however was thicker than amalgamating concrete. In a solid silver block it cased the concert hall.

  Folscyvio played to them, within this case, the mermaid violin.

  High and burningly sweet, the tone of the strings. Peltdeep and throbbing with contralto darkness, the tone of the strings. A vibrato like lava under the earth, a supreme updraught like a flying nightingale. A bitter pulsing, amber. A platinum upper register that pierced – a needle – to conjure an inner note, some sound known only at the dawn of time, or at its ending. Consoling sorrow, aching agony of joy.

  Never, never had they heard, nor anyone ever conceivably, such music. Even they could not miss it. Even he – even Folscyvio – could not.

  He had not mastered the instrument. It had mastered him. It played him. And somehow, far within the clotted blindness and deafness of his costive ego – he knew. The Maestro, mastered.

  Perhaps he had dubiously guessed when practising, when planning out this ultimate scene upon his rostrum of pride.

  Or perhaps even, at that watershed, he had managed to conceal the facts from himself. For truth did not always set men free. Truth could imprison, too. Truth could kill.

  On and on. Passing from one perfect piece to the next, seamless as cloth-of-Paradise, Folscyvio the faultless instrument, and the violin played him. All through that Silver Hour. Until the shadows had closed together and not a mote of light was left, except where he still poised, the violin gleaming in his grip, the bow fluttering and swooping, a bird of prey, a descending angel.

  But all-light melted away and all-quiet came back. The recital was over.

  How empty, that place. As though the world had sunk below the horizon as already the sun’s orb had done.

  The artificial lights returned like fireflies.

  There he stood, straight and motionless, frowning as if he did not, for a second or so, grasp where he was, let alone where he had been during the previous hour.

  But the audience, trained and dutiful, stumbled to its feet. And then, as if recollecting what must come next, began to screech and bellow applause, stamping, hurling jewels down on to the stage. (It had happened before. Folscyvio had even, in the past, graciously kept some of them; the more valuable ones.)

  After the bliss of the music, this acclaiming sound was quite disgusting. A stampede of trampling, trumpeting things – that had glimpsed the Infinite, and could neither make head nor tail of it, nor see what should be done to honour it.

  Seemingly unceasing, this crescendo. Until it wore itself out upon itself. The hands scalded from clapping, the voices cracked with overuse. Back into their seats they crumbled, abruptly old, even the youngest among them. Drained. Mistaken. Baffled.

  Inevitably, afterwards, there would be talk of a drug – illegal and pernicious – infiltrated into the stadium, affecting everyone there. But that rumour was for later, blown in like a dead leaf on the dying sigh of a hurricane.

  Probably Folscyvio did suspect he was not quite himself. Some minor ailment, perhaps. A virus, flimsy and unimportant. Nevertheless he felt irritated, dissatisfied, although realising he had played superbly. But then, he always did. Nothing had changed.

  Now he would swiftly draw this spectacle to a close. And in the favourite way: theirs. His.

  He said, very coldly (was he aware how cold?), “We will finish.”

  No one anymore made a noise. Sobered and puzzled, they hung there before him, all their ridiculous tiers of plush seats, like bits of rubbish, he thought, piled up in rows along gilded and curving shelves, in the godforsaken fucking cupboard of this mindless arena.

  He must have hesitated a fraction too long.

  Then, only then, a scatter of feeble voices called out for the auction.

  Folscyvio smiled, “wintry and fastidious” as it was later described by an hysterical critic. “No. We will not bother with the auction. Not tonight. Fate is already decided. We will go directly to the sacrifice.” For once some of them – a handful among the masses there – set up loud howls for mercy. But he was adamantine, not even looking towards them. When the wailing left off, he said, “She has had her night. That is enough. Who should aim for more?”

  And after this, knowing the cue, the stadium operatives crushed the lights down to a repulsive redness. And on to the stage ran the automatic trolley which, when all this had begun those years ago, had been designed for the Maestro by his subordinates.

  Again, afterwards, so much would be recalled, accurately or incorrectly, of what came next. All was examined minutely.

  But it did no good, of course,

  They had, the bulk of this audience, witnessed “The Sacrifice” before. The sacrifice, if unfailingly previously coming after an auction, when invariably the majority of the crowd bayed for death, and put in bids for it (the cash from which Folscyvio would later accommodate), was well known. It had been detailed endlessly in journals, on electronic sites, in poems, paintings and recreated photoimagery. Even those who had never attended a Folscyvio concert, let alone a sacrifice, knew the method, its execution and inevitable result. The Maestro burned his instruments. Sometimes after years of service. Now and then as on this night, following a single performance.

  Pianos and chitarras, such larger pieces, would tend to sing, to shriek, to call out in apparent voices, and to drum like exploding hearts in the torment of the fires. But the viosirenalino – what sound could she make, that miniature Thing, that doll-mermaid of glass, enamel and burnished wood and hair?

  Despite everything, many of them were on the seats’ edges to find out.

  She leaned now, again upright in the supporti
ng rays of the magnetic beams. When he poured the gasoline, like a rare and treacly wine, in a broad circle all about her, saturating the green cushion, but not splashing her once, a sort of rumbling rose in the auditorium. Then died away.

  Folscyvio moved back to a prudent distance. He looked steadily at the mermaid violin, and offered to her a solitary mockery of a salute. And struck the tinder-trigger on the elongated metal match.

  Without a doubt there was a flaw in the apparatus. Either that, or some jealous villain had rigged the heavily security-provided podium. Or else – could it be? – too fast somehow for any of them to work out what he did – did he, Folscyvio, somehow reverse the action? As if, maybe, perceiving that never in his life after that hour would he play again in that way, like a god, he wished to vacate the stage forever.

  The flame burst out like a crimson ribbon from the end of the mechanical match. But the mermaid violin did not catch fire. No, no. It was Folscyvio who did that. Up in a tower of gold and scarlet, blue and black, taller even than he had been – or seemed – when alive, the Maestro flared, and was lost at once to view. He gave no sound either, as perhaps the violin would not have done. Was there just no space for him to scream?

  Or was it that, being himself very small, and cramped and hollow and empty, there was no proper crying possible to him?

  In a litter of streaming and luminous instants he was obliterated, to dust, a shatter of black bones, a column of stinking smoke. And yet – had any been able to see it? – last of all to be incinerated were his eyes. Narrow, long-lashed, grey-mauve, and – for the final and first time in Folscyvio’s existence – full of fire.

  CLIVE BARKER

  A Night’s Work

  CLIVE BARKER HAS been described as a visionary, fantasist, poet and painter. As a novelist, director, screenwriter and dramatist, he has left his artistic mark on a range of projects that reflect his influence on contemporary media.

  He began his career in the London theatre, scripting original plays for his group The Dog Company, including The History of the Devil, Frankenstein in Love and Crazyface. Soon, Barker began publishing his influential Books of Blood short fiction collections; but it was his debut novel, The Damnation Game, that widened his already growing audience.