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

by Неизвестный

  “John,” he replied, in his courtly fashion.

  “Your rubbish. What happens to it?”

  Ron cast a droll eye around the bar, but the only other person sitting at it was already too drunk to provide much of an audience.

  “We throw it away,” Ron said. “Is that … wrong?”

  “But, I meant, at what time? First thing, or … ?”

  “Nah. We like to save it. The bloke comes round to collect, and we say ‘No, you’re all right mate, we’ll keep it until next week.’”

  “And what time does he come round?”

  Ron abruptly dropped the show, realising I was going to be dogged about it. “It’s still out the back. Why? You lost something?”

  “Few bits of paper I had with me last night. Forgot them when I left.”

  “Not surprised,” he said. “You was bladdered. Muttering to yourself like a twat, you were. Almost thought about not serving you the last four or five pints.”

  “Muttering?”

  “Yeah. Same thing, over and over. Couldn’t make it out. Sounded like a sodding poem, or something.”

  That sounded weird, but I didn’t want to risk being diverted from what I was driving at.

  I opened my mouth to ask the next question, but had to pause while I underwent a long coughing fit. Ron watched the process with some satisfaction.

  “Sounds nasty,” he said, when I’d finished.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It feels it.” The cough was harsh and glassy – a legacy, no doubt, of having spent a portion of a cold night crashed out on damp grass in a park. “Look, Ron – thing is, has your rubbish been taken, or not? I need those pages, is what it is.”

  He jerked his head toward the side door. “Help yourself.”

  I swallowed the rest of my pint, indicated I’d like another, and spent twenty minutes in the alley that ran down the side of the pub, sifting through bin bags. Cass used to call bin bags – especially when stacked in a black pile by the side of a building – “house poo”. I always liked that, and trust me, the bin bags of pubs deserve the term more than most. I wouldn’t have been rummaging through them at all, had Portnoy’s response to the pages being lost not been as strong as it was. He really was not happy about it at all, which made me all the more intrigued as to what the hell the story was behind this book.

  I found the photocopies, eventually, in about the eighth bag. I remembered bringing approximately six pages with me, and that’s how many I managed to dredge up. I’m not sure what most of them were covered in, but I hope to Christ it wasn’t on the pub menu – or, at least, that no one had eaten it. Especially me.

  I wiped the pages off as best I could, and in doing so saw that the second sheet contained the passage that had taken me to Portnoy’s that morning. The liquid in the gloop smeared over it had done something strange to the laser print, making it look as though it was standing off the page a little. I still thought I could determine some kind of consistent rhythm in the collections of letters, and it still meant nothing.

  In the end I folded the pages in half, and half again, and stuffed them in my pocket. I had a well-earned cigarette and then went back in the pub, where – after washing my hands in the gents – I took my place back at the bar.

  I didn’t know what to do next. I wanted (needed) the rest of the cash Portnoy had promised. I had no idea what else to try, however, and the combination of a hangover and whatever bug I’d picked up wasn’t making my head a place of clarity. Neither was the new beer entering my system, most likely, though it was at least making me feel slightly better. I decided I’d have one more pint then go back to the flat and … dunno. Try looking through the book some more.

  “You’re doing it again.”

  I raised my head to see both Ron and the nearly-comatose other bloke at the bar looking at me.

  “Doing what?”

  “The muttering.”

  I frowned. “Really?”

  Ron turned to the bloke. “Was he muttering?”

  “You was … muttering,” the man said, laboriously.

  I realized that I had been, and was again, that my lips were soundlessly shaping the same phrase over and over. It was as if, suddenly and after all this time, I could vocalize a foreign language after all. It just wasn’t one that I knew.

  I got off the stool without ordering another beer, and walked quickly home.

  IX

  Portnoy wasn’t in when I called, and he cleaved to the incredibly annoying habit of not having an answerphone. He’d been extremely insistent that I let him know immediately about the fate of the pages, however, so I remained where I was and waited to call him again.

  In the meantime I sat at the table, putting the book in front of me. After a moment I opened it, somewhat more cautiously than on previous occasions.

  It was just a book. Of course.

  But things get under your skin.

  I remembered the first time I’d met Cass, for example. It was in a pub, obviously. She’d been there with a couple of mates, as had I, and somehow over the course of many drinks the two groups wound up mingling. At the end of the evening, two new – and very temporary – couples disappeared off into the night. Cass and I were not one of them, though we did talk for hours and swap phone numbers.

  The next morning I woke with her in my head.

  I was alone on what serves for my bed, but bang in the centre of a head seared with hangover was this petite, red-haired girl. Not saying anything. Just there. She remained in vision for the whole of the day – sometimes right in front of me, sometimes glimpsed out of the corner of my internal eye. When I woke up the next morning and found that she was again my first waking thought, I bit the bullet and called her.

  I’m not sure we ever quite “went out with each other”, as such, though we did spend quite a lot of time together in pubs for a while, and took that one day-trip to France; and on days when I feel scratchy and crap, and put at least some of this down to the vague sensation of missing someone, I suspect it’s her that I miss.

  Portnoy’s book, or its contents, had started to feel the same way. Not as if I wanted to snog it, obviously. As if it had climbed into my head. This could just be for self-evident reasons: having pissed away the first half of the money, I needed the other six hundred even more urgently, and he clearly wasn’t going to give it up without due cause – which meant me getting to the bottom of this sodding tome. The cold, flu or whatever I had was getting worse too, making my head muddy and unclear. My cough had by now reached epic proportions. I was trying to unleash it as seldom as possible, on the grounds that it stirred reserves of phlegm so deep it felt like it was endangering the foundations of the house.

  I called Portnoy’s office again. He still wasn’t there. Then, maybe because she was in my head from remembering her being in my head, I called Cass’ mobile.

  “You’ve got a bloody nerve,” she said, before I’d even had time to say hello.

  “Have I?”

  “You don’t remember?” she said.

  X

  Two hours later I was back in the Southampton, sitting fretfully at a table and waiting for her. In the meantime I’d managed to get hold of Portnoy and reassure him about the missing pages. He sounded less scary afterwards, and listened to me wheeze and cough with something like paternal concern.

  “If I might make an observation,” he said, when I’d finished, “you’re bottling it up, my boy. Let it all go. Release it. Will you try doing that, John?”

  I said I would. I then spent a few minutes trying to position my lack of further ideas about his book as being an analysis worth six hundred quid. He heard me out with good grace, appeared to even think about it for a nanosecond, but then said he was confident I would have made more progress soon – and that he’d look forward to an update in his office on Monday … which was days and days away, so at least I didn’t have to sort it out right now.

  On the way to the pub I took his advice, however, and (when no one else was aroun
d) treated myself to a good old cough, a third-hangover-in-a-row and let-yourself-go-redin-the-face and double-up-and-really-go-for-it job.

  It felt like something important was coming loose inside, but then – bam: it was over, and I felt fine. Well, better, anyway. Head still fuzzy, but chest suddenly absolutely back to normal.

  I’d been in the pub half an hour, and was on my second pint, when I noticed that someone was standing in front of my table. I glanced up to find Cass looking down at me. You have to be sitting down for her to do that – she’s pretty tiny.

  I’ve always liked skinny, petite girls. There’s such a weird contrast between the amount of space they appear to take up, and their actual weight, both physical and psychic. It’s as if they extend beyond the range of their bodies. Because they look so small, it’s surprising, too, how much mass they actually contain. Someone so light on the planet still weighs in at over a hundred pounds, which is a lot to have in your arms, or on top of you – and the difference between the sight of them and their unexpected physical heft has a great attraction, not least because of the surprise and shock of them actually being there, voluntarily that close to you. This density also means that once encountered, the attraction continues, as a matter of their gravitational pull.

  This, I knew even as I was thinking it, was not the kind of thought that usually ran through my mind. It sounded rather grownup and brainy, in fact. I wondered about telling Cass some of it, but then realized she was frowning at me pretty severely.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Was all that supposed to mean something?”

  “Christ – was I talking out loud?”

  “You was saying something, but God knows what it was. Are you calling me fat?”

  As she sat down I saw she’d already got herself a drink, which made me feel a bit rubbish, because I knew she’d have done this on the assumption I might not have the cash to buy one for her, and that I might actually be intending to let her buy all mine.

  I realized suddenly that I was thirty-four and not making a very good job of it. “Thanks for coming.”

  “Haven’t got long,” she said, businesslike. “Me and Lisa is going clubbing.”

  “On a Wednesday?”

  “It’s Friday, you nutter.”

  “Really?” That explained why the pub was so full. It also meant that I had less time than I’d thought to come up with something sensible about Portnoy’s book. Christ.

  Cass sipped her bucket of chardonnay and looked at me pretty seriously. “You alright, babe?”

  “I think so,” I said. “Got flu, or something. Head’s a bit ropey, that’s all.”

  “Still hung-over, I should think.”

  “Look – what actually happened the other night?”

  “You was in here,” she said, briskly, as if reading back dictation. Do people still do dictation these days, sit there writing down the gist and rhythm of what people say? No idea. “You’d had a few already. You called me, said come over and have a beer. I wasn’t doing nothing, so I said okay. Got here about an hour later, which time you was three sheets and scribbling all over some bits of paper you had with you – but we had a laugh and I’m thinking, ‘Okay, he’s pissed as a fart but I do like him’, so, you know. We stayed for the lock-in, gave it some welly, an’ all. Then you said you’d walk me home.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad,” I said, relieved. I mean, by my standards, that’s like a week working for a charity in Rwanda.

  “But you didn’t, see.”

  “Oh.”

  “We got halfway there, and you suddenly said you wanted to show me something. I said ‘Yeah, right, and I bet I know what it is, an’ all,’ but you said no, it wasn’t that, and be honest I was so pissed by then I thought sod it, why not, even if it is a shag he’s after. So you start leading me down these side roads and it didn’t look like you knew where you were going, but then there’s this alleyway and at the end there’s a kiddie’s park or something. Locked up. And you said you used to play there when you was little, and why don’t we climb the fence and go have a look around.”

  “Right,” I said, feeling cold. Maybe Cass remembered that I’d grown up out in Essex, and had never even been to London before I was eighteen. Maybe she didn’t.

  “Nearly killed yourself getting over that fence. Nearly killed me, an’ all. But we get inside, and it’s cold enough that I’m feeling even more pissed, and I’m thinking, ‘Well, this is one to tell the grandchildren anyway,’ though not if we actually do shag, leave that bit out, obviously, but then …”

  She stopped talking. Her face went hard.

  “What?”

  “You went funny.”

  “Funny how?”

  “You’d been doing this muttering thing half the way there, saying something over and over really quietly. But now you’re standing in the middle of the park, and you don’t even look like yourself. You was … you was being really odd.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Dunno. You just didn’t look like yourself. And you was saying things, but it didn’t sound like you.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “I sat on a bench, had a ciggy. Thought ‘let him get on with it’. Then just as I’ve put out me fag, suddenly you make this weird sound, and fall down.”

  “What, just keeled over?”

  “Flat on your back. I laughed my head off until I realized you was out cold.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I pissed off home, didn’t I. Checked you was breathing and everything, but you know, bloody hell, babe, it was sodding freezing and I’d had enough.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I sat looking at her.

  She rolled her eyes. “You know you’re doing it again, don’t you?”

  “Doing what?”

  “Saying things, under your breath.”

  “Yeah, of course,” I lied. “It’s, uh, I’m memorising something. For work.”

  “You’re barmy, you are.”

  She drained the rest of her glass in a swallow, and stood up. “Got to go. If I don’t get to Lisa’s before she opens the second bottle then we won’t be going nowhere, and I really fancy a boogie tonight.”

  She gave me a quick peck on the cheek, and then she was off, cutting through the crowds at the bar like a fish through reeds it had known all its life.

  I honestly didn’t mean to have another pint. I was just sitting there, looking at all the people, trying to gather the strength to leave, and to find some distraction from the fact I was a bit freaked out by what Cass had just told me. Ron caught my eye from behind the bar, and I gave him a quick upwards nod, just meaning “hello” – one of those things you can say without saying, a physical utterance – but he mistranslated my intentions and starting pulling me another Stella instead.

  And so it went.

  XI

  I don’t know how many hours later it is, but I’m standing outside somewhere and it’s very cold. My hands hurt and I look down and I see I’ve cut the back of one. How?

  Climbing the fence, presumably.

  Because I’m back there again. In the park.

  I turn around and recognize the things in it. The big slide, the small one. The pirate ship. The swings and the little wooden house.

  But when it comes to this last item, I’m not recognising it in the right way.

  It’s drizzling a bit and so I walk over to the wooden house. It’s small and battered, about four feet by three feet, open at both ends and with a roof over it, painted yellow some time ago. I go in the front end and perch on the tiny bench inside, and I know I’ve been there before; that though all the rest of the childrens’ stuff in the park is fairly recent, this house has been here a long time, as long as the park itself.

  I get out a cigarette, and try to sort through my memories of the other night, the one Cass told me about. She didn’t say anything about me sitting in a little house, and she would have mentioned it, if I had. I didn’t sit in there
after I woke up, either – I just tried to find a way out. So why do I think I’ve been in there before?

  I put my head in my hands. I don’t feel right. My mind is full of beer and I can’t think straight. Having my eyes shut isn’t helping either, and so I raise my head and open them again, and as I do I’m suddenly overcome by a memory, so sharp and vivid that for a split second it’s more real than anything else.

  In the memory I’m sitting exactly where I am now, on this bench in this little wooden house. I’m not here because I’m drunk and sheltering from the rain, however. I’m here because it’s a wooden house and I always sit in here for a while when we come to the park.

  I do not feel cramped. There’s plenty of room.

  And then I turn toward the little door at the front, and …

  Suddenly I jerk up, banging my head on the roof, and lunge outside.

  But he isn’t there.

  I know who I’m expecting to … no, not “expecting” to see, because I know now that what I’ve just experienced was a memory, and not happening in real time. I know who I was remembering looking up to see, on some unimportant Saturday morning a long time ago.

  I look around, still convinced he’s going to be here somewhere, maybe over at the bench, or looking vaguely at the houses, or slipping behind a tree.

  It’s my dad.

  This is our park, the one we come to together.

  And when I find I can’t see him, and the memory suddenly starts to fade, I feel miserable, because it has been so long since I’ve seen my father’s face, so many years since he died, and I miss him.