Dark Terrors 5 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology]

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  She felt him tighten up, and broke rhythm precisely on the beat, rising up so he was almost entirely outside her...then surging definitively down, gorging him as she clasped his head in both hands and, with her mind, pulled as hard as she could.

  The delirious abrasion and tactile immediacy of Rudy’s ejaculation sped her up and, unexpectedly, tipped her over, flooding her nerves with hot electricity. They rarely came simultaneously; that was an unrealistic cliché, a sort of porno movie gag they both mocked. But sometimes it actually happened that way, and this time it was happening exactly that way, as she felt his whole body, flexed hard as a fist, giving her everything he had as one of those little-death cries escaped him.

  It was like getting hit by a wave and swept down by the undertow. Teresa grabbed him hard enough to leave bruises, and bit her lower lip, freeing blood, and hung on, and cried out herself.

  He brought her a towel and a drink and a warm washcloth, and they stayed lazily tangled up for a while, as though the rest of the day did not matter.

  She collected her wits and then, purposefully, replayed their love-making in her mind, superimposing the face of that anonymous guy in the market over Rudy’s. That man who hadn’t even been a flirtation, and who had, in total innocence, got her battered.

  Rudy just smiled at her, stroking her hair. When he returned her fulsome gaze she felt sure he could see her trick, would plunge quickly towards a different kind of heat. He just kept looking at her, frankly, the way he’d stare if they were strangers and this was love at first sight. The conceit was nice but Teresa knew that love was a process of learning another person, and that took time, which was why she had stuck by Rudy even through the bitter times, the harsh and hitting times. You needed time, and caution, and tolerance, and if you did it right, you earned love. Surely Rudy understood that, but he just kept looking at her, and it was beginning to irritate her.

  ‘What?’ she said, suddenly self-conscious.

  ‘It’s funny,’ he said. ‘Yesterday I was drowning in anger, I was like a lit fuse, and I wished as hard as I could for things to change...and I think I got my wish, because I’m trying to read you right now and I can’t get a thing.’

  ‘Really?’

  He swallowed and nodded. ‘For real. You know something else? It doesn’t matter. As long as I’ve got you, the rest doesn’t matter.’

  Abruptly, she realised the rage had been successfully drained from him. It was like watching a film projected on glass, through which she could perceive Rudy’s face. She was reading two inputs. She knew her own expression must be absurdly blank. Not wanting to give herself away, she covered quickly by answering him with a kiss, and retreating to the bathroom.

  Her lip still stung from her passion-chomp, and ministering to it would be a light task. She watched her mirror reflection touch healing finger to mouth. Nothing happened.

  She tried again, concentrating. More nothing.

  What she experienced instead was Rudy’s final thought as he dozed off, as clear, to her, as an announcement on a PA speaker. He would never hit her again. He no longer had it in him. He was penitent, and hopeful.

  Which kind of pissed Teresa off. Rudy’s new attitude did not excuse what he’d done to her, last night and all occasions prior. He had loosened her teeth, blackened an eye, then rammed her until her asshole was bleeding. The big crybaby tragedy of Teresa’s life was that she never objected enough when shit was pulled on her, and Rudy had pulled a shitload. How dare that motherfucker beat her up, rape her, and then give her born-again doe eyes as an excuse the very next fucking morning?

  Eyes narrowed, she cracked the door and peered out. The asshole was already asleep. Teresa noticed the baseball bat cocked against the jamb, Rudy’s idea of budget security. He’d never used it on her. With Rudy it was fists, kicks, backhands, choking. Manual labour.

  He’d fallen asleep thinking he would never touch her in anger again.

  ‘That’s for goddamn sure,’ she muttered.

  Rudy’s eyes fluttered open just in time to register the fat end of the bat, splitting his forehead. He could fix things up later. If he lived.

  David J. Schow lives in the Hollywood hills, where he works as a screenwriter and author. His recent book releases includeWild Hairs,a collection of his non-fiction columns from Fangoria magazine, a new edition of his 1990 collection Lost Angels, and another short story collection due around Hallowe’en. As an editor, The Lost Block, Volume II: Hell on Earth is published by Subterranean Press, and if you look quickly enough, he turns up in the documentary which appears on Universal’s DVD release ofCreature from the Black Lagoon. ‘“Why Rudy Can’t Read” is one of those wine-cellar stories,’ Schow reveals, ‘the kind that take years to mature. A large portion of it was handwritten on legal pages sometime circa 1992. It stayed in the files until 1999, whereupon it resurged and practically finished itself.’

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  * * * *

  No Story in It

  RAMSEY CAMPBELL

  ‘Grandad.’

  Boswell turned from locking the front door to see Gemima running up the garden path cracked by the late September heat. Her mother April was at the tipsy gate, and April’s husband Rod was climbing out of their rusty crimson Nissan. ‘Oh, Dad,’ April cried, slapping her forehead hard enough to make him wince. ‘You’re off to London. How could we forget it was today, Rod?’

  Rod pursed thick lips beneath a ginger moustache broader than his otherwise schoolboyish plump face. ‘We must have had other things on our mind. It looks as if I’m joining you, Jack.’

  ‘You’ll tell me how,’ Boswell said as Gemima’s small hot five-year-old hand found his grasp.

  ‘We’ve just learned I’m a cut-back.’

  ‘More of a set-back, will it be? I’m sure there’s a demand for teachers of your experience.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’re a bit out of touch with the present.’

  Boswell saw his daughter willing him not to take the bait. ‘Can we save the discussion for my return?’ he said. ‘I’ve a bus and then a train to catch.’

  ‘We can run your father to the station, can’t we? We want to tell him our proposal.’ Rod bent the passenger seat forward. ‘Let’s keep the men together,’ he said.

  As Boswell hauled the reluctant belt across himself he glanced up. Usually Gemima reminded him poignantly of her mother at her age - large brown eyes with high startled eyebrows, inquisitive nose, pale prim lips - but in the mirror April’s face looked not much less small, just more lined. The car jerked forward, grating its innards, and the radio announced ‘A renewed threat of war—’ before Rod switched it off. Once the car was past the worst of the potholes in the main road, Boswell said ‘So propose.’

  ‘We wondered how you were finding life on your own,’ Rod said. ‘We thought it mightn’t be the ideal situation for someone with your turn of mind.’

  ‘Rod. Dad—’

  Her husband gave the mirror a look he might have aimed at a child who’d spoken out of turn in class. ‘Since we’ve all overextended ourselves, we think the solution is to pool our resources.’

  ‘Which are those?’

  ‘We wondered how the notion of our moving in with you might sound.’

  ‘Sounds fun,’ Gemima cried.

  Rod’s ability to imagine living with Boswell for any length of time showed how desperate he, if not April, was. ‘What about your own house?’ Boswell said.

  ‘There are plenty of respectable couples eager to rent these days. We’d pay you rent, of course. Surely it makes sense for all of us.’

  ‘Can I give you a decision when I’m back from London?’ Boswell said, mostly to April’s hopeful reflection. ‘Maybe you won’t have to give up your house. Maybe soon I’ll be able to offer you financial help.’

  ‘Christ,’ Rod snarled, a sound like a gnashing of teeth.

  To start with the noise the car made was hardly harsher. Boswell thought the rear bumper was dragging on the road until tenement blocks
jerked up in the mirror as though to seize the vehicle, which ground loudly to a halt. ‘Out,’ Rod cried in a tone poised to pounce on nonsense.

  ‘Is this like one of your stories, Grandad?’ Gemima giggled as she followed Boswell out of the car.

  ‘No,’ her father said through his teeth and flung the boot open. ‘This is real.’

  Boswell responded only by going to look. The suspension had collapsed, thrusting the wheels up through the rusty arches. April took Gemima’s hand, Boswell sensed not least to keep her quiet, and murmured ‘Oh, Rod.’

  Boswell was staring at the tenements. Those not boarded up were tattooed with graffiti inside and out, and he saw watchers at as many broken as unbroken windows. He thought of the parcel a fan had once given him with instructions not to open it until he was home, the present that had been one of Jean’s excuses for divorcing him. ‘Come with me to the station,’ he urged, ‘and you can phone whoever you need to phone.’

  When the Aireys failed to move immediately he stretched out a hand to them and saw his shadow printed next to theirs on a wall, either half demolished or never completed, in front of the tenements. A small child holding a woman’s hand, a man slouching beside them with a fist stuffed in his pocket, a second man gesturing empty-handed at them...The shadows seemed to blacken, the sunlight to brighten like inspiration, but that had taken no form when the approach of a taxi distracted him. His shadow roused itself as he dashed into the rubbly road to flag the taxi down. ‘I’ll pay,’ he told Rod.

  * * * *

  ‘Here’s Jack Boswell, everyone,’ Quentin Sedgwick shouted. ‘Here’s our star author. Come and meet him.’

  It was going to be worth it, Boswell thought. Publishing had changed since all his books were in print - indeed, since any were. Sedgwick, a tall thin young but balding man with wiry veins exposed by a singlet and shorts, had met him at Waterloo, pausing barely long enough to deliver an intense handshake before treating him to a headlong ten-minute march and a stream of enthusiasm for his work. The journey ended at a house in the midst of a crush of them resting their fronts on the pavement. At least the polished nameplate of Cassandra Press had to be visible to anyone who passed. Beyond it a hall that smelled of curried vegetables was occupied by a double-parked pair of bicycles and a steep staircase not much wider than their handlebars. ‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ Sedgwick declared. ‘It’s like one of your early things, being able to publish from home. Except in a story of yours the computers would take over and tell us what to write.’

  ‘I don’t remember writing that,’ Boswell said with some unsureness.

  ‘No, I just made it up. Not bad, was it?’ Sedgwick said, running upstairs. ‘Here’s Jack Boswell, everyone...’

  A young woman with a small pinched studded face and glistening black hair spiky as an armoured fist emerged from somewhere on the ground floor as Sedgwick threw open doors to reveal two cramped rooms, each featuring a computer terminal, at one of which an even younger woman with blonde hair the length of her filmy flowered blouse was composing an advertisement. ‘Starts with C, ends with e,’ Sedgwick said of her, and of the studded woman ‘Bren, like the gun. Our troubleshooter.’

  Boswell grinned, feeling someone should. ‘Just the three of you?’

  ‘Small is sneaky, I keep telling the girls. While the big houses are being dragged down by excess personnel, we move into the market they’re too cumbersome to handle. Carole, show him his page.’

  The publicist saved her work twice before displaying the Cassandra Press catalogue. She scrolled past the colophon, a C with a P hooked on it, and a parade of authors: Ferdy Thorn, ex-marine turned ecological warrior; Germaine Gossett, feminist fantasy writer; Torin Bergman, Scandinavia’s leading magic realist...‘Forgive my ignorance,’ Boswell said, ‘but these are all new to me.’

  ‘They’re the future.’ Sedgwick cleared his throat and grabbed Boswell’s shoulder to lean him towards the computer. ‘Here’s someone we all know.’

  BOSWELL’S BACK! the page announced in letters so large they left room only for a shout-line from, Boswell remembered, theObserver twenty years ago - ‘Britain’s best SF writer since Wyndham and Wells’ - and a scattering of titles: The Future Just Began, Tomorrow Was Yesterday, Wave Goodbye To Earth, Terra Spells Terror, Science Lies In Wait...‘It’ll look better when we have covers to reproduce,’ Carole said. ‘I couldn’t write much. I don’t know your work.’

  ‘That’s because I’ve been devouring it all over again, Jack. You thought you might have copies for my fair helpers, didn’t you?’

  ‘So I have,’ Boswell said, struggling to spring the catches of his aged briefcase.

  ‘See what you think when you’ve read these. Some for you as well, Bren,’ Sedgwick said, passing out Boswell’s last remaining hardcovers of several of his books. ‘Here’s a Hugo winner and look, this one got the Prix du FantastiqueÉcologique. Will you girls excuse us now? I hear the call of lunch.’

  They were in sight of Waterloo Station again when he seized Boswell’s elbow to steer him into the Delphi, a tiny restaurant crammed with deserted tables spread with pink-and-white checked cloths. ‘This is what one of our greatest authors looks like, Nikos,’ Sedgwick announced. ‘Let’s have all we can eat and a litre of your red if that’s your style, Jack, to be going on with.’

  The massive dark-skinned variously hairy proprietor brought them a carafe without a stopper and a brace of glasses Boswell would have expected to hold water. Sedgwick filled them with wine and dealt Boswell’s a vigorous clunk. ‘Here’s to us. Here’s to your legendary unpublished books.’

  ‘Not for much longer.’

  ‘What a scoop for Cassandra. I don’t know which I like best, Don’t Make Me Mad or Only We Are Left. Listen to this, Nikos. There are going to be so many mentally ill people they have to be given the vote and everyone’s made to have one as a lodger. And a father has to seduce his daughter or the human race dies out.’

  ‘Very nice.’

  ‘Ignore him, Jack. They couldn’t be anyone else but you.’

  ‘I’m glad you feel that way. You don’t think they’re a little too dark even for me?’

  ‘Not a shade, and certainly not for Cassandra. Wait till you read our other books.’

  Here Nikos brought meze, an oval plate splattered with varieties of goo. Sedgwick waited until Boswell had transferred a sample of each to his plate and tested them with a piece of lukewarm bread. ‘Good?’

  ‘Most authentic,’ Boswell found it in himself to say.

  Sedgwick emptied the carafe into their glasses and called for another. Blackened lamb chops arrived too, and prawns dried up by grilling, withered meatballs, slabs of smoked ham that could have been used to sole shoes...Boswell was working on a token mouthful of viciously spiced sausage when Sedgwick said ‘Know how you could delight us even more?’

  Boswell swallowed and had to salve his mouth with half a glassful of wine. ‘Tell me,’ he said tearfully.

  ‘Have you enough unpublished stories for a collection?’

  ‘I’d have to write another to bring it up to length.’

  ‘Wait till I let the girls know. Don’t think they aren’t excited, they were just too overwhelmed by meeting you to show it. Can you call me as soon as you have an idea for the story or the cover?’

  ‘I think I may have both.’

  ‘You’re an example to us all. Can I hear?’

  ‘Shadows on a ruined wall. A man and woman and her child, and another man reaching out to them, I’d say in warning. Ruined tenements in the background. Everything overgrown. Even if the story isn’t called We Are Tomorrow, the book can be.’

  ‘Shall I give you a bit of advice? Go further than you ever have before. Imagine something you couldn’t believe anyone would pay you to write.’

  Despite the meal, Boswell felt too elated to imagine that just now. His capacity for observation seemed to have shut down too, and only an increase in the frequency of passers-by outside the window roused it. �
�What time is it?’ he wondered, fumbling his watch upwards on his thin wrist.

  ‘Not much past five,’ Sedgwick said, emptying the carafe yet again. ‘Still lunchtime.’

  ‘Good God, if I miss my train I’ll have to pay double.’

  ‘Next time we’ll see about paying for your travel.’ Sedgwick gulped the last of che wine as he threw a credit card on the table to be collected later. ‘I wish you’d said you had to leave this early. I’ll have Bren send copies of our books to you,’ he promised as Boswell panted into Waterloo, and called after him down the steps into the Underground ‘Don’t forget, imagine the worst. That’s what we’re for.’