The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 10 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  He still listened for the creak of rope in the bath-house or sounds of kicking in the wood, as he turned his spears in the glowing ashes; but he heard neither tonight, only the sow’s noise among the trees. He might have chased her then, but that he was learning to fear the dark, or those things that were couched within it. Instead he trusted her still to be there in the morning, and lay all night fretting in his blankets, doubting her.

  * * * *

  Up at first light, he found the sow moved on; but didn’t need his acquired skills to track her. A blindfold man could have followed this trail, the broken undergrowth and the furrowed earth.

  He caught up with her quickly, and with no hindrance from the wood: no tripping roots, no hanging branches tangling in his hair. There was hunting, apparently, and there was trying to leave, and they too were different.

  Slowing as soon as he heard the sow’s heedless progress, he crept close enough to sight her rump again; and ah, he wanted to do this hero-style, one mighty cast to fell her swift and sure.

  But this wasn’t sport, there was no one to applaud, and his spears weren’t made for throwing. Silent as he knew how, as he had been taught, he slid forward into the wind and the sow never heard him, her great flap ears trailing on the ground as she snouted under leaves and bushes, eating nuts and acorns, eating insects, eating frogs.

  At three yards’ distance he set two spears to stand against a tree, and hefted the other in both hands above his head. The sow moved one, two casual paces forward, blithe in her size and strength, and oh she was big, she was just what he needed; and he took a breath and ran and thrust, all his strength in his arms as he stabbed down, driving the spear’s haft deep as he could into the sow’s flank.

  She screamed, as he was screaming as he stabbed: high and shrill both of them, vicious and unrestrained. But he thought she’d run, or try to; and she didn’t run. She turned, although her hind leg failed her where the spear jutted from it, and her eyes were red in the shadowed wood, and her festering yellow teeth were snapping at him; and he tried to jump backwards, and he fell.

  Sprawled on his back, he looked up into a canopy of branches baring themselves before winter, and he saw his mother twist above his head, lolling at the rope’s end. Her bare feet swayed and turned, one way and the other, feeling in the absence for his eyes.

  He screamed again, and rolled; and though he only sought to roll away from his mother, he was sprayed with slaver from the sow’s jaws as her bite just barely missed him. Gasping and shaken he scrambled away, and the sow strained to follow, hauling her weight unsteadily on three legs, slipping and rising again, squealing in pain and fury.

  Up at last, he wanted only to run; but his eyes snagged on his two spare spears, and this was what they were for, after all, he’d never expected to finish her with one. So he snatched up one of them, holding it two-handed again against her sheer mass; and as she came at him open-mouthed, he rammed its dark point into what was soft at the back of her throat.

  And barely released his grip in time as her jaws threshed about its haft, jutting out between them; but she was a spent force now, crippled and gagged, blood colouring her leg and frothing out between her teeth. He could take time to recover his last spear, time to consider his aim before thrusting.

  Trying for her heart, he didn’t find it. She fell away, though, all her efforts on breathing now, no fight left in her; and he could work the spear deeper, turning and thrusting and leaning on it like pushing a stick into the earth. At last something vital gave, be it her heart or her spirit. One last shudder, and then the slow moan of leaking air with no breath behind it, and she was dead.

  And he lifted his head, ready to howl if he needed to; and his mother was gone, there was no body dangling, wanting to knock, knock knock against his eyes in this dappled daylight.

  * * * *

  He butchered the sow where she lay, bleeding on a bed of dead leaves. There was no other choice; he couldn’t possibly have dragged her back to the portico for a cleaner dismemberment.

  He hewed at her with his short-bladed knife, and this was butchery indeed, up to the elbows in blood and ankle-deep in the run of her spilt guts with the stink of her rising all about him. The knife slipped often in his slimy hands, so that he added his own blood to hers; but he worked all day, and at last had all the pieces of her laid out on cool clean stone under the shelter of the pediment. Then he could wash, he could strip his fouled clothes off and wash those also, naked under the cold sun; and briefly he had no fear of the lake, he watched only with exhaustion and no hint of terror as dark shapes rose to question his shadow only a little further out, where the lake-bed suddenly fell steep away.

  * * * *

  Because he had no other way to do it, he built a slow fire beneath one of the iron tubs in the bath-house, and laid pieces of pork inside it on a bed of well-scrubbed stones. As the bath and the stones heated, so fat melted and ran down to spit and hiss on hot enamel; and this was what he needed, not the meat.

  While the lard rendered, he made crude pots from clay he’d dug with his fingers from the lake’s edge. Baking in the fire’s ashes, several of them cracked or flindered; but some survived well enough to use, he thought.

  Pork for dinner, roasted dry but he wouldn’t heed that. The skin had gone to crackling; as he crunched it something roiled and stirred the water, far out in the centre of the lake. He heard his father cry out in the darkness, and he heard a staccato rattle of gunfire; and he heard his mother’s slow choking; and louder than any, louder than all of those he heard the sounds of kicking.

  * * * *

  His father came to him again when he should have been sleeping. Wet serge warned him, smelling strongly in the damp air; cracking his eyelids barely open showed him an outline against the sky, the glint of moonlight on buckles.

  He heard boots shift on stone, he heard each separate breath like a groan. But no kiss this time, no touch at all; and after his father was gone, what he heard until he slept was his mother’s rope creaking in the wind, as she dangled somewhere close at hand. He wouldn’t open his eyes again to look, but he thought perhaps she was up between the pillars of the portico, that close.

  * * * *

  In the morning, he scooped a potful of lard from the bath and set it to melt by his cooking-fire outside. Threads drawn from his blanket and plaited together made a wick; he laid that across the pot and let it sink, with ends trailing out on either side.

  When he lit them in the shadows behind the bath-house door, they made more soot and smell than light; but they made light enough to work by, Light enough to reclaim the cellars from his mother, perhaps, though she could dangle as well in light as darkness.

  She couldn’t knock, knock knock at his eyes in the light, and that was what counted.

  * * * *

  He made as much light as he could, three lamps each with two wicks burning at both ends, twelve guttering flames to save him. He carried them down one at a time, and even the first time there was no body swinging at the head of the stairs, nor any at the foot, nor in the chamber below: only the boilers and the pumps and the constant rushing sound of water.

  By his third trip down, coming from light into light with light right there in his hands, he felt secure until he looked more closely at the machinery. All the surfaces were coated in a sticky black mixture of dust and grease, generations old; but two words gleamed out at him in the light he’d brought, shining where someone had written them with a finger in that clagging muck. One of course was Guilty, and Coward was the other.

  One quick sobbing breath, staring, seeing the finger in his mind - fine and delicate for sure, trembling a little perhaps with the enormity of it all - and then he turned abruptly, and saw the box of tools in the corner, half-hidden under dark and heavy piping.

  A galvanised iron bucket, and a wooden box of tools: hammers and screwdrivers and wrenches, everything he could possibly need. No can of grease, but he didn’t need grease now, he had his bathful of rendered fat
. He could sieve that through his shirt to get the grit out. Not first, though. Cleaning came first; and first for cleaning were the boilers that bore those two accusations, those truths.

  * * * *

  Days he worked down there, days and into the nights sometimes, cleaning and greasing and taking apart, sketching plans and patterns of flow with charred sticks on the tiled floor. His parents left him largely undisturbed, his father no longer crossing the lake, his mother only distantly dangling. If they were making room for the girl, if it was her turn now, she was being slow to show; and he wasn’t waiting.

  Not consciously, at least. Consciously, he was learning how to plumb.

  * * * *

  At last, the turn of a great brass stopcock brought water gushing through the pipes. The furnace burned hot and fast on gathered wood; and as soon as pressure started to build, the first leaks showed where rubber had perished and his rabbitskin-and-porkfat improvisations wouldn’t hold. He patched as best he could, and set the bucket to catch the worst of the drips. It didn’t matter, he was only testing the system, and there was a drain in the floor in any case. If it wasn’t blocked.

  Sweating, he refilled the furnace and threw a lever, and the pump started to knock, knock knock. Knocked and failed, and knocked again. More leaks, jets of steam now, clouding out the light; briefly he thought the show was over for the day, knock knock and nothing more.

  But again a knock, and a faster knocking; the rhythm changed abruptly, hard and steady and unfaltering now, and he thought of course of kicking; and the girl came walking to him out of the steam and oh, she was so afraid.

  She wore white, as she had when last he saw her. Her fingers plucked at the fabric of her dress, her eyes were wide and panic-lost and all her body was trembling. Her mouth shook so much, at first she could say nothing.

  There was nothing he could say, and nothing he wanted said between them; but she tried, and tried again, and at last,

  “They shot your father,” she said. “They took him out and shot him. For cowardice,” she said; and she had said all this before though not like this, not so dreadfully afraid. “There was a court martial and they found him guilty, and they shot him.”

  Her voice had been hard before, hard and accusatory. You lied to me, it had been saying, you’re a coward too. There had been no tears then, and none of the pleading, none of the terror he saw in her pallid face.

  Then as now, he had been unable to speak at all; then as now, she had gone driving heedlessly on, far past what was honourable or decent. And yes, he was an expert on honour by then, he’d seen it from both sides and knew it better than any.

  “Your mother,” she said, though she clearly, she so much didn’t want to. “That’s why she, why she hanged herself,” she said. “For shame,” she said, “she hanged herself for shame.”

  Let herself dangle in the dark for him to find when he walked clean into her, her bare toes knock knock against his blinded, desperate eyes.

  “You should do that too,” she said, “why not? Why don’t you? A coward and the son of a coward, and your mother the only honourable one among you all, why don’t you just jump in the river? Too scared, I suppose,” she said, answering herself. “I should have known then, when I realised you were a water-funk. Once a coward, always a coward. Like father, like son...”

  And that was all she said, because it was all she had said the first time. After that it was only crying out, and grunting.

  And now as then, and this was what she’d been so afraid of: that it would happen again as it had, that it would have to.

  And of course it did. He swung wildly, and felt the solidity of her against the back of his hand as she sprawled at his feet; and feet, yes, already he was kicking.

  Kicking and kicking, but not to silence her this time, not for shame. Only because she was there, as his parents were intermittently there, in their intermittent deaths; and the thing was there to be done, and so he did it.

  Felt better, second time. Not good, never that; but better. She cried, but not he cried. No choking, no fire in his throat or eyes, neither anger nor grief could find him. Fear might have found him, perhaps, but he wasn’t afraid of this.

  Neutral at last, he kicked until his feet lost her in the steam, until she was entirely gone from there.

  And then he felt his way up the stairs and out into the bath-house where a couple of taps were hissing and spitting, scalding to his hand as he turned them on.

  He scrubbed one of the baths as best he could, and washed every piece of clothing that he’d brought. He laid them out on the portico steps, and came back naked to fill the bath again.

  Lying back with his eyes closed, with burning water lapping at his ears and the corners of his mouth, he thought that nothing was finished, even now; but it didn’t seem to matter. Let his father stumble blindfold against death, let his mother dangle, let the girl come for kicking when she chose. Or when he called her. The world was wider, much wider than this; and here he was only on the fringes of it yet, he hadn’t even been up to the house...

  * * * *

  Later, in the darkness, when his clothes were dry, he thought he might walk down to the lake and into the water. He would be borne up, he thought, and carried over, because in his pockets he carried the keys to D’Espérance.

  * * * *

  But actually, he slept; and in the morning he walked the other way, he walked into town looking for the solicitor.

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  * * * *

  STEPHEN LAWS

  The Song My Sister Sang

  Stephen Laws lives and worksin Newcastle upon Tyne. To date he has published ten horror-thrillers -Ghost Train, Spectre, The Wyrm, The Frighteners, Darkfall, Gideon (winner of the Children of the Night Award), Macabre, Daemonic, Somewhere South of Midnight and Chasm - which have been widely translated around the world.

  His award-winning short stories have appeared in various magazines, newspapers and anthologies (most recently in Best New Horror 9), and he is the regular host of the Manchester Festival of Fantastic Films. His first solo collection of short stories, The Midnight Man, was recently published by Darkside Press.

  “The abandoned open-air swimming pool which is the centrepiece of ‘The Song My Sister Sang’ really did exist,” Laws reveals. “The central character’s description of the place is completely factual. His memories of playing there, the sights and sounds -they’re all mine. The history of the place is also true. It remained derelict for many years, just as described in the story. The place always haunted me, and I knew that one day - when I had the right story - it would feature in my work in some form or other.

  “When I was writing my novelSomewhere South of Midnight, a friend of mine, who works for the local authority responsible for the place, managed to get permission for me to get through the padlocked gate with a video camera. I spent a half-day exploring the pool, the sluices, the derelict changing rooms with their rusted curtain rails and disintegrated tile floors. It was perfect for what I had in mind - the setting for a confrontation between the novel’s main character and a professional hit man.

  “I’d just finished writing the sequence when my friend rang me to say: ‘You’re never going to believe this - but the council has just approved plans to demolish the place and build an outdoor sea-life feature on the site.’ Three months later, the swimming pool was bulldozed out of existence. I suppose I could have just left the sequence as it was, but somehow it didn’t feel right. Perhaps I thought that using a real-life setting, when that setting no longer existed, was dating the book somehow. So I rewrote the sequence for the novel, creating a fictional derelict health club up on the promenade overlooking the site where the swimming pool used to be.

  “But this strangely haunting place just wouldn’t leave me alone. I knew that there was a story there somewhere, waiting to happen. Eventually, it did. When Steve Saville asked me for a contribution to his anthology Red Brick Edens and its theme of urban decay, I knew then that the locati
on had found not only its story but also its home. The swimming pool has gone forever - all that remains is twenty minutes of incredibly eerie video footage on a shelf in my study. And, of course, ‘The Song My Sister Sang’.”

  * * * *

  F

  or most people living along the North-East coast, the Big Event that summer was what happened to the coast-line and its wild-life.

  Just say the words Edda Dell’Orso and see what kind of reaction you get from the local fishermen who ply their trade out of North Shields Quay. The captain and crew of that ill-fated tanker never made it out of the wreck alive, so the Inquiry could only reach an open verdict; even though they’d had the specialists and the engineers and the aquamarine people from Blyth out there to try and find out why the tanker had drifted so close to shore. Close enough to become grounded; close enough to gash one of its main tanks on seabed rocks, close enough to cover the entire length of beach for ten miles on either side with a smothering sea-blanket of crude oil.