The Best New Horror 1

by Stephen Jones

  I listened for the horn.

  Even though the bridge was open at the sides there was an enclosed, somehow isolated feeling about that few yards of shelter. It was brighter here than outside because there was nothing clouding the air between the sodium lights and the reflecting snow and, as I’d already noticed when I’d spoken to David, sounds went dead as if they’d run into something soft. There was scaffolding around the bridge-support across the carriageway, but I could still make out the spraycanned graffiti in amongst the repair work behind it as if through a grid; it read: ROBSON YOUR DEAD WHEN YOU GET OUT, and it had been written in red. My favourite piece of graffiti was one that I’d seen on a beach-front building, the simple and elegant I FEEL A BIT NORMAL TODAY, but it was a beach-front that seemed about a million miles away from the here and now.

  The wind outside must have dropped a little because a snatch of the horn came through, and it sounded closer than ever. It acted on David like a goad. He suddenly lurched to his feet and set out again, stumbling and flailing his arms as if he hadn’t quite brought his limbs under control yet. Wearily, I wondered if I’d ever be able to raise the energy to follow; but even as I was wondering, I was starting to move. David was muttering as he went, but I couldn’t hear anything of what he was saying.

  I stumbled, because there seemed to be all kinds of jumbled crap under the snow here; my foot hooked up what looked like a length of compressor hose, and I had to kick it off. Over on what would normally be the hard shoulder I could see the half-buried shapes of machinery, big generators with tow-hitches and a small dumper that might have been the answer to our prayers if it hadn’t been jacked-up with a wheel missing. It looked as if, until the bad weather had intervened, they’d been drilling out the concrete like a bad tooth. Canvas on the scaffolding had concealed the work, but the material had been ripped by a through-wind to leave only a few flapping shreds around the hole. The cage of reinforcing wire inside the piling had been exposed, and the wire had been burst outward as if by a silent explosion. It looked as if they’d gone so far, and then the freeze-up had enlarged the hole further.

  I suppose I could have thought about it harder. But there are some things, you can think about them as hard as you like but you’ll never anticipate what you’re actually going to see.

  And the sight that I was concentrating on, to the exclusion of just about everything else, was that of the road train firming-up in the blizzard about a hundred yards ahead.

  The first details that I made out were its hazard lights, and there were plenty of them; almost enough to define its shape, rather like those diagrams that take a scattered handful of stars and connect them up into some improbable-looking constellation. They were flashing on and off in time with the horn, and they were about the most welcome warning that I’d ever seen. Ahead of me, David was striding out like a wind-up toy that nothing could stop.

  It was a big Continental articulated rig in three jack-knifed sections, a true monster of the road that would look like a landslide on the move. The distant parp-parp that had led us so far had now become a deep, regular airhorn bellow as we’d drawn closer. David tried to break into a run for the cab, but he had to be close to exhaustion by now.

  We helped each other up and in. An alarm beeper was sounding off inside the cab and in synchronisation with the horn and the lights. There was no sign of Mick anywhere.

  I said, “Where is he?”

  “God knows,” David said, studying a dash that looked like a piece of the space shuttle. “He might at least have left the engine running.”

  “Maybe he didn’t get that far.”

  But David pointed to a bunch of wires that had been pulled out to hang behind the steering column. “What’s that, then?” he said. “Heinz spaghetti? You check the radio.”

  I checked the radio.

  “I don’t think it’s working,” I said.

  Sixty seconds after our entry, the alarms cut and the horn stopped. The silence almost hurt.

  David had found the starter by now, and he was trying it; the first couple of times it stayed dead, but he jiggled the hanging wires like a child patting a balloon into the air and this must have helped some weak connection, because on the third attempt the engine somewhere beneath the cab floor turned over without any hesitation at all. After a few seconds, it caught; but then, almost immediately, it faded away and died again.

  “Bastard thing,” David said, and tried again, but there was no persuading it to catch for a second time.

  He flopped back heavily in the driver’s seat. I said, “Maybe we can just stay here anyway.”

  “There’s still no heat,” he said. “It may seem warmer, but that’s just the comparison with being outside. If we can’t get the blowers going, I don’t see any advantage over being back in the hut.”

  He tried the starter again, but still nothing.

  “There’s your reason why,” he said suddenly, and pointed to a part of the dashboard display. If what he was pointing to was the fuel level readout, it was reading something like empty.

  “These things never run out,” he said bitterly, in what I assume he intended to be mimicry of Mick’s voice. “They’ve got tanks like swimming pools.” And he punched the steering wheel hard, and flopped back in the driver’s seat again with a face as dark as a bruised plum.

  And somewhere out in the night, another horn began to sound.

  We both listened, lost it for a while as the wind howled, and then heard it again. Our signal was being repeated from somewhere further along the road.

  “Here we go,” David said wearily, and he opened the door on the far side of the cab to climb down. This time he didn’t even flinch when the hail hit him. All right, I wanted to say, case proven, you’re no deadweight, now why don’t we just try sticking it out here a while longer, but instead I levered myself up and clambered awkwardly across the cab. I could have dropped and slept, right there. And probably died, ready-chilled and prepared for the morgue, but at that moment I hardly felt as if it would matter.

  Mick’s sheepskin gloves were on the cab floor.

  I reached down and picked them up. I wasn’t hallucinating them, they were real enough. He must have taken them off for the delicate work of hot-wiring . . . but how come he’d allowed himself to be parted from them? I was wearing my clumsy ski gloves, and even inside these my hands were feeling dead from the knuckles out. If Mick had gone the distance to the next stranded lorry, as the sounding of this second horn seemed to suggest, then I reckoned that he’d better not be planning any piano practice for a while.

  I slid out of the cab and hit the snow again. I was now on the northern side of the big vehicle. David had launched off without me, hooked by the call like some deep-sea fish being drawn up to the gaff. The horn wasn’t so regular this time, but it was coming through more clearly.

  And me, I wasn’t happy.

  The forgotten gloves were only one part of it. Another part of it was the fact that you didn’t put a rig and its cargo, total value anything from a quarter of a million up, into the hands of a driver who’s going to be walking the hard shoulder with a can to get some diesel because he let the tanks get empty. And the radio—the radio should have been working, even if only to give out white noise to match the scene on the other side of the glass.

  I was looking around the side of the road train when I fell over Mick’s body in the snow. He was lying face-down and already he was half covered by drift, which for a moment gave me the absurd hope that he might have been insulated from the chilling effect of the wind and might be basically okay. But when I tried to turn him over he was as stiff as a wet sheet hung out in winter, and when I finally got him on to his back I could see that there was a spike of reinforcing wire from the concrete flyover driven right up under his chin. I could see it passing up through his open mouth as if his head were something spitted for a barbecue. His eyes were half-open, but plugged with ice. The short jemmy was still in his ungloved hand, held tightly like a defensive
weapon that he’d never managed to use.

  This had happened right by the big diesel tanks behind the cab. The tanks themselves had been slashed open so that all the oil had run out and gone straight down into the snow. And when I say slashed, I mean raked open in four parallel lines as if by fingernails, not just spiked or holed by something sharp.

  David had stopped, and was looking back; but he was too far away to see anything and only just on the verge of being seen, a smudgy ghost painted in smoke. He beckoned me on with a big, broad gesture that looked like he was trying to hook something out of the air, and even though I yelled, “No! Don’t go! It isn’t him!” he simply shouted back something inaudible and turned away. He walked on, and the blizzard sucked him in.

  And from somewhere beyond him came the sound of the horn, the mating call of some dark mistress of nightmares with her skin oiled and her back arched and her long silver knives at the ready.

  I started to run after him.

  I call it running, although it wasn’t much in the way of progress. I reckon you could have lit up a small town with the energy that I burned just to close up the distance between David and me. Close it up I did, but not enough. He didn’t even glance back. I saw him duck at a near-miss from something windborne and I felt my heart stop for a moment, but I think it was only one of the plastic cones or some other piece of road debris. David couldn’t have been distracted by nuns dancing naked in the air by that stage, because he was now within sight of the next truck.

  The truck.

  It was much older than the first one, and not so much of a giant. It was over on the far side of the barrier and facing my way; it looked as if it had come to a long, sliding halt before being abandoned and half-buried where it stood. It had a crouched, malevolent look, its engine running and breathing steam, pale headlamps like sick-bed eyes. David reached the cab and pounded on the side to be let in. I stopped at the crash barrier and could only watch. The horn ceased. The door opened. The cab’s interior light blinked on, but the insides of the windows were all steamed up and runny and there was only the vague shape of someone visible. David had already hoisted himself half-way up with his foot in the stirrup over the wheel, but now I saw him hesitate. The door had swung out and was screening whatever confronted him . . . and then suddenly he was gone, jerked in at an impossible speed, and the door was slammed and the light went out. I winced at the loud, long and intense muffled screaming that began to come from the cab, but I knew there was nothing that I could do. I thought about those long slashes in the diesel tank and, for David’s sake, I could only hope that whatever was happening would be over quickly.

  It wasn’t.

  And when it finally ended, and after the long silence that followed, I saw the door opening out a crack like a trap being reset. Light streamed out into the snow-mist, a narrow slice falling like a rain of something solid. I looked up at the truck’s windows and saw that the now-lit windshield had been sprayed red on the inside like the jug of a blender, and it was just starting a slow wash-down as the cab sweat began to trickle through it. I watched a while longer, but I couldn’t see anything moving.

  I was calculating my chances of making it through to the service area. What had seemed like a complete impossibility before now had the look of the most attractive available option. I had to have covered a good part of the distance already, didn’t I? And having just had a glimpse of the alternative, I was suddenly finding that the prospect of pressing on had a certain appeal.

  The first move would be to cross the carriageway and put as much distance as possible between me and the truck. There was nothing that I could do for David now, and it made no sense to stay out where the overhead lights made a tunnel of day through the blizzard. It was as I was striking out at an angle across a field of white that had once been the fast lane, a stumbling and deep-frozen body with a white-hot core of fear, that the horn began again.

  That was okay, that suited me fine. As long as somebody was leaning on the button then they weren’t out here with me, and that was exactly the way that I wanted it. I was trying to remember the route from the times that I’d driven it before. My guess was that I was just about to come to an exposed and elevated curve that would swing out to overlook a reservoir before entering the hills where the service area would be sheltered. I wouldn’t be able to see much, if any, of this, but I’d know it because the intensity of the wind was bound to increase; high-sided vehicles took a battering on this stretch at the best of times, and this certainly wasn’t one of those. I’d have to watch my footing. On a clear night I’d have been able to see right out to the lights of some mill town several miles out and below, but for now all that I could see was a dense white swirling. In my mind I could see myself holding one of those Christmas-scene paperweights, the kind that you shake and then watch as the contents settle, but in mine there was a tiny figure of David hammering on the glass and calling soundlessly to be let out. I saw myself shaking the globe once, and I saw the storm turn pink.

  Stupid, I know—I wasn’t responsible for anybody, and I certainly hadn’t got behind him and boosted him up into the arms of whatever had been waiting in the cab. But I suppose that when you’ve just seen somebody meet an end roughly comparable to the act of walking into an aircraft propellor, it’s bound to overheat your imagination just a little. Maybe that could explain some of what came later.

  But somehow, I don’t think so.

  The truck horn was starting to recede behind me. The notes were longer now, like the moan of some trapped beast tiring of its struggles. Great, fine, I was thinking, you just stay there and keep at it, when the storm brightened and a dark figure suddenly rose before me.

  It was my own shadow, cast forward into the blizzard way out beyond the edge of the road so that it seemed to stand in the air over nothing. I looked back and saw that there was some kind of a spotlight being operated from the cab of the truck, the kind that turns on a mount fixed to the body and stays however you leave it. This one was pointing straight at me; it went on past, and I realised that I was too small and too far away to spot with any ease. And there was probably so much snow sticking to me on the windward side that I’d be tough to spot even at close range.

  Any relief that I felt was short-lived, though, because just a few seconds later the spotlight picked up the line of my trail through the snowfield. The bright light and the low angle exaggerated it and left no room for any doubt. The light stopped roving, and the horn stopped sounding only a moment later.

  There followed a silence that I didn’t like, filled with unstated menace.

  And then the cab door opened, and its occupant stepped down to the road.

  I don’t know what I’d been expecting. Anything but this. She was small, and slight. Her light summer dress was torn and soiled and her hair was lank and dusty and blowing across her face. Her arms were bare, but she seemed oblivious to the cold and the wind. She started out towards the point where my trail angled out across the road, and I knew that I ought to be turning and running but I couldn’t come unglued. She was walking barefoot on the snow and leaving no mark; I saw her bend to touch the barrier as she stepped over, and it might have been a stile out in the countryside somewhere in the warmest part of the spring.

  I finally turned to run. I got a brief impression of another of those plastic cones tumbling by in the wind, and then it bopped me as I walked right into it. I went down. I tried to struggle to get up but it was as if I’d had my wires pulled and crossed so that none of the messages were getting through in the right order.

  I could hear her light tread over the wind as she approached.

  She came up and stood right over me. Her skin was as white as marble, and veined with blue; I couldn’t see her face for the halo of light from the cab spotlight behind her. All I could see was her ruined hair blowing around a pitiless darkness in which something was watching me.

  Louie, she whispered.

  Louie? I thought. Who the fuck’s Louie? Because listen, lad
y, it sure isn’t me. I opened my mouth to say something similar and I think I made one tiny, almost inaudible croak. The wind dropped and the night grew still, and then it was like her eyes turned on like blazing torches in the ravaged pit of her face as she bent down towards me, and I could feel their heat and the breath of corruption warming my frost-bitten skin. I could see now that her hair was matted with concrete, and that patches of it had been torn out. The exposed skin was like that of a plucked grouse that had been hanging in a cellar for far too long a time.

  Louie, she said again, this time with a kind of nightmare tenderness, and she took hold of my dead-feeling face in her dead-looking hands and I realised with terror that she was raising me up for a kiss. I saw the darkness roaring in like an airshaft straight down to hell and I wanted to scream, but instead I think I just peed myself.

  She stopped only inches away. She lowered me again. I think she’d just realised that I wasn’t the one she was looking for.

  Then she raised her hand and I saw the state of her fingers, and I knew how she’d caused the damage that she’d done to the diesel tank. I shut my eyes because I knew that this was going to be it. I stayed with my eyes shut and I waited and I waited, and after I’d waited for what seemed like the entire running time of Conan the Barbarian I managed to unstick one eye and look up.

  She was still there, but she wasn’t looking at me. She seemed to be listening for something. I listened too, but all I could hear was the wind in the wires overhead.

  And then, only once and very faintly, the single blast of a horn.

  Louie? she said. And she started to rise.

  Most of what I know now is what I’ve learned since. Louis Robson was a construction services manager who drove a Mercedes, and she was a supermarket checkout trainee. How she ever believed that he’d desert his wife and run away with her will be one of those eternal mysteries like, why do old cars run better when they’ve been washed and waxed; but he must have made the promise one time and she must have replayed it over and over until finally, he told her to meet him one night with her bags packed and a goodbye letter ready to mail. The place where she was to wait was one of his company’s site offices by the new motorway; he’d pull in outside and sound the all clear on the car’s horn. Except that it was a signal that she would have to wait a long time to hear because when she got there, he was already waiting in the dark with a lug wrench. He dropped her unconscious body into a prepared mould for a bridge piling and threw her cardboard suitcase after, and then he put the sealed letter into the post without realising that it mentioned him by name. This was all five years before.