Something Wicked Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Unknown

  “Eh, what’s that?”

  Wake up, slowcoach.

  Tony drew in a breath. Spoke more sharply. “I’ve been here a month.” It felt like a year. “Who was in the job before me?”

  The penny dropped. Grimshaw’s wrinkles merged in thought.

  “That would be Barrows. Paul Barrows.”

  “Work here long?”

  Grimshaw shrugged. “A couple of months. Three, maybe.”

  This answer conveyed the scant attention he paid to his surroundings. It also summed up his lack of respect, explained how he could happily snore while Tony sat and grafted.

  Grimshaw oozed that sense of entitlement that Tony had seen arrive with old age, whether it had been earned or not. His indifference might also explain why Tony’s predecessor had not stayed in the job too long.

  “So he resigned, yeah?”

  Tony hadn’t forgotten that Grimshaw had been at Panther for fifteen years. A picture was forming.

  “After a fashion. He didn’t turn up for work one night.”

  The picture – a clear image of final straws as they pertained to idle, long-employed workmates – had slowly coalesced in Tony’s mind. Now the picture flew apart, scattered by a subliminal fear.

  “He just didn’t… turn up? How long ago was that?”

  “Not long before you arrived, obviously. Six weeks or so. Barrows just upped and left. No warning. No official resignation. Never heard from him since.” And then, eyes twinkling, Grimshaw offered up some knowing advice. “I guess this job isn’t for everyone…”

  Tony was no longer listening. His suspicion had hardened, become a tumour inside his guts. The hums and buzzes refused to cushion him, refused to soften the blow. The screens looked on in cold vacuity. The phone rang, and when Tony made no move to answer, just sat there staring at his hands, Grimshaw was forced to pick it up. As the old man spoke – his voice attesting that he was put out by this intrusion – Tony numbly excused himself, saying he needed the toilet. On leaden feet, he made his way into the canteen.

  The suspicion that had haunted him for the past two days was born of familiarity - that odd sense of recognition when he’d seen the Cutter in the yard. Now Tony stood before the notice board, the rows of passport-sized photos, smiling frozenly out at him.

  He reached up, fingered the corner of his own photograph, only recently stuck there. He was aware that if he did this, there would be no turning back. He could neither forget nor ignore if his suspicion proved true. His hand was on the lid of Pandora’s Box. The revelation might poison his mind, snap his strained mental state.

  Tony realised this and, at the same time, realised that nothing could stop him.

  He tore away his photograph, revealing the old one underneath.

  Out with the old, in with the new. The treadmill never stops turning.

  Paul Barrows grinned at him. Dark haired. Neatly groomed.

  It wasn’t hard to imagine those locks a little more unkempt, perhaps even hanging in his face, a lank, greasy curtain. Or to see that grin a little wider, stretched to the point of madness. The face on the board, for all its normality, belonged to a horror show. A horror show performed in a snowy yard in the middle of the night. There, and elsewhere around Leicester City. In empty shops. In Roman ruins. In frozen canals. In bloodstained alleys…

  Tony had read all the stories in the papers. He remembered Tracy Marks, the first victim. Hadn’t the police found her body – a body missing both its feet – a little over a month ago?

  “No.” Tony stumbled backwards until his shoulders bumped the wall behind him. No, it couldn’t be.

  But the face on the board said it could.

  Paul Barrows, ex-employee. The face of the man who’d stood in the yard.

  Paul Barrows. Cutter.

  He had no time to harness his shock. No time to know he was in shock. His heart galloped like a crazed horse, bolting from the stables of reason. He shook his head as if to fling delusion from his eyes, but the face on the board stayed the same.

  Then he heard Grimshaw cry out. The cry was a lifeline, wrenching Tony out of the canteen and back toward the front desk where the old man sat, stiff in his chair, one hand clutching his chest. Before Tony could reach him, Grimshaw slipped to the floor and lay there, shuddering. Tony didn’t need to be a doctor to recognise the signs of a heart attack. Nor was it hard to see just what had caused it.

  The bank of screens arced before him, a plasma panorama. On every one was a single eye, magnified a thousand times. An unblinking orb of blue and white, pressed up close to the camera – to all the cameras, across the city… Tony barely registered the fact. The impossibility.

  His mind overloaded, he had no more shock to give. He could see the veins, the dark disc of the pupil. The eye peered into the control room. Peered into him.

  Watcher had become watched.

  Tony sank into the empty chair, the old man twitching at his feet. He should call an ambulance. Call somebody, anybody, but the eye transfixed him. He was a human panic alarm. A bell seemed to shriek from deep inside of him, rendering him immobile with dread.

  The eye could see him. He knew it could see him. He felt its scrutiny on every inch of his horripilating skin. Was it possible that this… person could hear him too?

  He spoke idiotically up at the screens. “What… what do you want from me?”

  The image on the screens panned back, a blur that resolved into a face, then into the figure of a man. A man standing in a snowy yard. The image repeated. A tarot of dread.

  The corners of the screens blinked with the time: midnight.

  Paul Barrows grinned up at Tony. Barrows, the Cutter, looking amused.

  Tony reeled in dislocation as spaces were crossed, distances breached. How could the Cutter see him like this, simply by gazing into a camera, a machine bolted to a wall on Vestry Street? How could Barrows communicate? The cameras did not function that way. Nevertheless, he knew that Barrows saw him, knew that he was sitting here in the control room. Was Barrows looking for Grimshaw, a man he had formerly worked with? Something told Tony this wasn’t the case. The man’s interest seemed too keen, too personal.

  Even faced with such stark evidence, Tony wanted to believe that he was dreaming – even that his mind had finally cracked – rather than accept the impossible. But as the Cutter grinned and raised his scissors – snip, snip in the winter air – Tony discovered that he could not.

  Barrows raised his other hand, his fingers splayed.

  Five.

  The gesture was more than a greeting.

  Tony looked past him, into the yard. There was the bricked-up arch, crammed with shadows. There were the symbols etched around it, and then he saw one of those symbols mirrored in the snow, sketched out roughly on the cold, wet ground, concrete showing through the gaps.

  A five-pointed star. A pentagram, scrawled before the arch.

  The Cutter stood at the centre of the star. The camera zoomed out further, whirring. At the tip of the star, which pointed directly at the arch, a crumpled figure lay. Her pale skin was grainy on the screen. The figure was clearly female, and naked. The sodium light stained her blonde hair white.

  Tony thought about Tracy Marks, found dead in an empty shop. About June O’Brien, lying by the Jewry Wall, a discarded heap of ravaged flesh. Claire Ellis, the poor girl found in the canal. Susan Pepper, slumped in the alley…

  Four victims. Each one missing a part of their body. Each one young and blonde.

  Four…

  Dear sweet Jesus – no…

  Was that what the Cutter was trying to show him? How could he have been so dense…?

  Tony needed no closer inspection. He knew the crumpled figure like his own, had traced those curves with finger and tongue. How many times had he kissed her hair? Placed his palm on the bulge of her belly?

  He was looking at Jane. Jane lying naked in the snow. Naked and unmoving.

  The Cutter grinned, an invitation. He waved the scissors, a
threat.

  At that moment, the Dead Man’s Handle started to shriek.

  Instinctively, Tony turned in his chair to silence it, depressing the small red button. When he turned back, the screen was dark, the image of the yard vanished. Grimshaw gasped and gurgled on the floor.

  Tony ignored him. He only cared about one person now.

  Shock had become an engine, driving him up and out of his seat, propelling him across the room. Tony lurched through the cramped canteen, yanking his card out of his pocket. Without stopping to grab his coat, he burst out of the monitoring station – “Please close the security door. Please close the security door” – an arrow of fear shot into the night.

  Tony raced across the city, mingling with the freakshow. He pushed past lads, drunk and laughing, their girlfriends yelling at them to behave. Past skaters, ravers, scenesters, goths. Fuck, he should have called the police when he’d had the chance. Now it was too late. He was just one of the crowd, a pedestrian in a sweat-soaked shirt. A part of the parade. He raced past shops that sold laptops. Smartphones. Tablets. Screens upon screens upon screens. Civilisation watching itself. Mass commercial narcissism. A hundred cameras followed his progress, logged him in blank, motorized scrutiny. They could not log the panic in his soul.

  Panting, Tony left the crowds behind, plunging into the gloom of the warehouse district. Fresh snow crunched underfoot. No one but the drunks would be here till Monday. Every gate around him was locked.

  Every gate but one.

  He stood before the warehouse on Vestry Street, his breath steaming in the chill.

  Only now did Tony pause, hesitant to cross the threshold. To do so was to leave the real world behind. The world of alarm clocks, buses and phone calls. Of traffic jams and radio waves. Satellites and fast food. In the murk beyond the gate (the chain across it had been snapped, he noted), who knew what terror waited? Barrows the Cutter, of course. A man who dared to climb through windows. Who’d severed feet, a tongue, hands and eyes… But Tony knew that that was not all. The awareness of shock showed him the truth.

  He was meant to be here. He had been summoned. Chosen. Now he would have to pay the price…

  Cautiously, he entered the place, his footprints in the snow a map of trepidation. He skulked along the warehouse wall, passed the unlit office windows, rounded a corner into the yard.

  He pulled up short as the Cutter turned to face him.

  “I spy with my little eye…” Barrows said, “…a blessed son. A chosen one. An initiate come into the temple.”

  The Cutter still stood in the centre of the star, Jane’s crumpled form behind him.

  “What … what have you done to her?”

  The words were hoarse in Tony’s throat. Hoarse and insincere. He had seen the blades that Barrows held, the scissors much too red for rust. He had seen the splotches across the snow, a trail that led to a pool around Jane, a pool that he dearly wished was oil.

  “What have you done?”

  Tony darted forward, cold adrenaline swamping all thought for his own safety. But he skidded to a halt in the snow as the Cutter showed him his handiwork - a tangled, visceral mess, held up in his other hand, dripping with fluids and blood.

  “It’s life she wants,” Barrows said, nodding in the direction of the arch, as if his words explained everything. “New life. These rituals must follow the same laws. A sacrifice for the temple. New life to feed the old. Life from this world to bind the ones beyond it. Death does not become her.”

  The ice climbed up through Tony’s legs, shrinking his balls and piercing his stomach. He glanced over at the bricked-up arch, into that shallow yet fathomless darkness. That thick, wormy darkness. The shadows swirled as they had on the screen, but the motion was not a trick of the light, an illusion caused by dancing pixels. Something in that darkness was alive. Alive and waiting…

  Tony tore his gaze back to Barrows.

  “Become who?” he asked.

  Barrows seemed happy to answer. “The Goddess,” he said. He thrust out the mess in his hand, more gore splattering the snow. “The sacrifice is made and you will serve her. You should consider it an honour.”

  Tony could barely see him. Hot tears streamed down his face.

  “No. You… No!”

  But, like the scissors and the blood, he had also seen the outline of limbs, tiny and half-formed, limp in the Cutter’s grip.

  Now he was truly down among the dead.

  “Life,” Barrows said again. “Life, and all that comes with it. Terror. Pain. Dominion.”

  With this, Barrows turned, his offering held high.

  Tony was on him in a moment, rage usurping his caution. They grappled there a moment, face to face. The mess fell from the Cutter’s hand, met the frozen ground with a squelch. Then Barrows tripped over Jane’s body and tumbled backwards into the snow, a gasp of pain punched from his lungs.

  Somehow, the scissors were in Tony’s hand. There was no hesitation now, no qualms about crossing any kind of threshold. The rusty blades rose and fell. Rose and fell. Rose. Fell. Rose. Fell. Rose. Fell…

  The world was remade in blood and screams. Somewhere, two floors underground, down among the dead, the scene played out on sleepless screens. Metal and flesh blurred and flashed in black and white, with no one there to watch them.

  Then there was silence.

  Tony stumbled away from the muck on the ground, boots slipping on ice and blood. Barrows and Jane lay together in a jumble of limbs, throats slashed open and slick with blood. Somewhere in the mix was his unborn child, a child he would never hold in his arms, never get to show the world to…

  He sobbed into his wet fist, his loss yawning like an abyss under him. The world now seemed wicked and strange, beyond anything he recognised, anything he could call sane.

  He felt a breeze on his neck, and realised he was standing before the arch. He turned to face the darkness. The breeze fluttered his hair and shirt, frosty fingers touching him, tasting him… He was too far gone to wonder where the breeze came from. The bricked-up arch was no more than a nook. The breeze was a chill breath, gusting from nowhere.

  But something in the darkness whispered. Whispered to him, he realised, as it must have whispered to Barrows. Whispered to Barrows of longing and need. Reaching out into the world. Reaching out from beyond life. Through the lens of a closed-circuit camera. Down the wires. Onto a bank of LCD screens…

  Begging. Tempting. Demanding…

  As the darkness boiled and churned, slowly assuming a shape, Tony felt that need touch him, fierce and unrelenting. Primal. Feminine curves writhed in the gloom, the intimation of pendulous breasts, carved vulva, as black as onyx under water. And he was hard. So hard it hurt. As the wind increased and the shadows swirled, he saw that Barrows was not just a Cutter, but also a tailor. The half-finished thing before him – this goddess of lust and death – looked on Tony with stolen eyes, walked forth on stolen feet, reached out with stolen hands…

  Spoke with a stolen tongue.

  There was still work to do.

  Tony had time for a last, ridiculous thought.

  Out with the old, in with the new.

  And then the darkness claimed him.

  Half an hour later, with the bodies in the warehouse and the blood scuffed over with snow, Tony left the yard on Vestry Street. Sodium light shone in his eyes, eyes that were no longer his own. Now he saw with holy eyes. Seeing through walls. Seeing through cameras. Seeing the raw heart of the world.

  The sleeping city spread out before him. A freakshow. A cage. A hunting ground.

  Clutching the scissors, he slipped into night, eager for the work to resume.

  Beneath the myriad eyes of the control room screens, the Dead Man’s Handle sat untouched in its little black box. For long, slow minutes, as the computers flickered unwatched, and the air conditioning hummed, there were only the bleeps of occasional alarms, muted and unmarked. Only that, and silence.

  Then the Dead Man’s Handle screamed an
d screamed.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Firstly, I have to thank the authors for their wonderful stories. Without them there would literally be no book. This anthology also marks the first time in Something Wicked’s seven-year history that we had the backing of a mainstream publisher, so a big thank you goes to Louis Greenberg at eKhaya and Fourie Botha at Random House Struik - for spotting Something Wicked and believing in it, co-publishing this baby with us, taking us under their wing, and giving us a budget (Shock! Horror! We’re still reeling), not to mention some much-needed guidance.

  Not only was this a financial weight lifted off our shoulders but for the first time we have felt appreciated for our work and what the Something Wicked brand stands for. Really, that’s what you live for - for someone (other than your parents, or the parents of the authors) to get it. To support the book and love the stories like we do. Louis made us feel appreciated.

  Special thanks go to Lauren Beukes, Sarah Lotz and Jared Shurin for being fans singing our praises - constantly punting Something Wicked whenever they have the opportunity.

  As usual, we need to thank our artists: Pierre Smit, who once again came roaring into the party with beautiful illustrations for every one of the 27 stories featured; and the awesome-tastic Vincent Sammy who gave us our extraordinarily beautiful cover. Vincent and Pierre, along with Hendrik Gericke and Vianne Venter, have over the years - along with Jesca Marisa, who is not featured in this book - become the creators of the visual style of Something Wicked and for that I am very grateful.

  As the driver of this crazy-train, I need to thank Vianne and Mark Sykes for their tireless dedication to the stories and the written word. Vianne has edited every single story we have ever published. Likewise, Mark has proofed every word. They are my core team and without them, Something Wicked would be nothing but a photocopied fanzine being handed out on street corners.

  Lastly, and most importantly, we need to thank you, our reader, for buying this book. We’ve given these stories a home, but it’s only a halfway house.