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

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  Then I curled up with my head on the pillow, listening. I could hear her slow breathing. I could smell perfume and sweat on her neck. Eventually, I knew she was asleep. I strained to hear, but there was still nothing. So this was what it was all about, except apparently not.

  * * * *

  At the start of the next term, Trevor and the unknown girl seemed to be making a go of it. I heard them almost every night, and the loss of sleep was more than compensated by the relief. But somehow, I knew this level of intensity was bound to lead to a break-up. It did, but not in the way I was expecting.

  My brother’s wedding was the start of it. I had to go home for the weekend, only a fortnight into the term. Throughout the ceremony and the long, drunken reception, I kept replaying the cries I’d heard in the early hours of the previous day. Trevor! Oh - oh, God! Trevor! It was the first time I’d heard her call his name. Guilt about remembering that in church brought me down all through the evening and the dark, rainy morning that followed. The bus journey back to North Birmingham took a long time, and her voice became clearer with every mile. When I got back to Gillott Road, I sat in the dark and listened to a bootleg tape of Dylan’s ‘Albert Hall’ concert from 1966: the slow, haunting journey through ‘Visions of Johanna’ leaving the audience baffled; the sneering venom of ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ provoking audience fury and a cry of ‘Judas!’ Then Dylan’s enraged ‘I don’t believe you! You’re a liar!’ and the raging, desperate finale of ’Like a Rolling Stone’.

  At last I slept, dreaming something about Mary Magdalene washing Christ’s feet with her hair. The dream ended with a creak of bedsprings from overhead. With the first muffled gasp, I was wide awake. Her cries marked the accelerating rhythm of their bodies. She came fast, then began to approach a second climax. It sounded almost the same as on Thursday morning. Trevor! Oh - oh, God! Trevor!

  No, not almost the same. It was exactly the same. Note for note, it was a perfect copy.

  Thursday, Sunday. Was there a pattern I didn’t normally get? Because I’d missed two nights, I’d heard the same tape twice running. Otherwise, I might never have noticed. But even now, with the truth in my veins like ice, my hand was still pumping hard. Semen dripped onto my belly, and the voice upstairs laughed. I knew I couldn’t go back to his room.

  * * * *

  You probably know the rest, if you saw the papers that Easter. The police interviewed all the tenants of the house. I didn’t have much to tell them. Before it came out in the press, my landlord told me what the police had found. Apparently they’d been trying to trace the girl since November. They’d interviewed Trevor at the Medical Centre; he’d claimed not to recognise her bus pass photo. Some other bit of evidence - maybe someone who’d seen them together — had made them visit him in the house, where they’d seen the photographs.

  Then they’d found the jar. And the wooden box. I can still remember my landlord’s expression, as if he’d felt a sardine come to life in his mouth. A mixture of disgust and awe. ‘The police say they found a locked wooden box full of bones. Including a skull. And all the teeth. Can you believe it? Taken apart, like bits of a jigsaw puzzle.’ Exactly like bits of a jigsaw puzzle.

  The main thing the newspapers picked up on was that he refused to confess or to defend himself. At his trial, they could hardly get a word out of him. I think he ended up in a prison psychiatric unit. What became of his collection of tapes, I have no idea. Maybe I’ll visit him one day and ask. What’s kept me away is a mixture of fear and jealousy.

  I never saw her. Maybe I never truly heard her voice. I hold her in my sleep, feeling her silent terror shake into the core of my hollow flesh. Joanna, her name was. Joanna. And I’m jealous that he had her first. But even more, I’m afraid that if I reach out to him, he’ll take her away.

  Joel Lane lives in Birmingham, in Britain’s West Midlands. His acclaimed short stories have appeared in a range of publications, including Darklands, Little Deaths, The Ex Files, Dark Terrors 4, White of the Moon and Hideous Progeny. He is the award-winning author of a book of short stories, The Earth Wire, and a collection of poetry, The Edge of the Screen,while his first novel,From Blue to Black(which is about drums, guitars and death), was recently published by Serpent’s Tail. He has also edited a horror anthology, Beneath the Ground, which is forthcoming from The Alchemy Press. According to the author, ‘“The Bootleg Heart” was influenced by Cornell Woolrich (an unsung hero of psychological horror), Bob Dylan and a nasty bout of ‘flu.’

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  * * * *

  Saturday

  CHERRY WILDER

  Jack Dixon knew that he had gone mad. The final strand had snapped and he was completely sans marbles. He had nowhere to look: he did not trust the Pennsylvania hills any more; the rearview mirror reflected the angry faces of his hosts. He glanced sideways at the driver. Corey was a young black man, very tall and thin, acquired by the family in the West Indies. He was a trusted servant; he often made a fourth at bridge or danced the limbo at parties. Now Corey stared at him and asked in an undertone:

  ‘What did you see, Mr Tenn?’

  ‘Dixon.’

  Corey curvetted with the great car on the dirt road; down in the dark valleys, where night had already fallen, Jack could see the glint of lake water.

  ‘I’m sorry, Corey,’ he said. ‘My name is John Dixon. Mr King is joking when he introduces me as Jack Tenn. Old college joke...’

  The glass panel was wide open but communication between the spacious interior of the custom-built limousine and the driver’s seat was patchy. Now he heard Elizabeth King say in a drunken harridan’s voice:

  ‘You’re a jinx! Your stars are vile! You stink of bad luck!’

  Jack glanced fearfully out of the window and saw an old man with a scythe. Avery King snarled at his wife:

  ‘If that dog vomits I’ll shoot it!’

  Corey pressed a button and the glass panel closed. Jack could see the Kings still at it, and now he could see Chung, the chow-chow dog, paws up, peering at Corey and himself.

  ‘What you see, back there, Mr Dixon?’ persisted Corey.

  Something awful. He had seen something awful, something that convinced him about losing his wits. (No one, amateur or professional, ever believed what he foresaw, at this moment. Namely that he would be describing what he had seen to them, at some future time...)

  ‘Big black car parked by the roadside,’ he said smoothly. ‘You catch a glimpse of it too?’

  A hearse, glittering with glass and gold, its doors flung open obscenely, spilling out wreaths of flowers. Against the near side were a man and a woman dressed as bride and groom: they were grotesquely patched with blood as if they had been machine-gunned. The man still lolled half upright against the hearse, but the woman had slid down, leaving her long veil pasted to the carosserie with blood.

  ‘...going to Les Hiboux,’ said Corey. ‘Nothing else around here. A few summer places on Lake Grant.’

  ‘Long way out,’ said Jack, pulling himself together. ‘Can anyone really make a go of a restaurant out here?’

  ‘More of a hobby now,’ said Corey. ‘For Pierre and his mama. They had a smart place, Le Coq Vert, near Stony Brook. Mr King bought them out when his partners put up the new fitness centre.’

  In the back seat Avery wrestled the dog to the ground then took a firm grip of Elizabeth’s long rope of pearls. She sat back until he released her then seized his hand and tried to bite it. Jack looked out of the window and saw a flock of birds clustered around the branch of a leafless tree. They flew away and left the ragged corpse of a naked black man swinging from the branch.

  He sat back and shut his eyes.

  ‘I’m not feeling awfully well, Corey. Is it far?’

  ‘We’ll stop up ahead at the lookout, Mr Dixon.’

  Jack had a strong feeling of déjà-vu. He was back at college in America, driving like this, in the evening, and someone said ‘stop at the lookout’. Could almost fill in the details, they were in
the Edsel, Avery was driving, two of their best girls were along. Ace King and Jack Tenn and a couple of homecoming queens.

  He was overwhelmed with a rush of pure reason, thinking of this harmless scene. A college reunion was a rite of passage; old Ace and old Jack had been dealt a few good hands. Each had succeeded in his own way, as Jack knew they would. Jack could describe himself as a dramaturge, quietly stalking his Chair of Drama at an English provincial university, and Ace had succeeded to the family millions.

  The holiday had begun very well. This was some new thing, some kind of nightmare. There had been something in the drinks back there at the Kings’ family seat; they were all being gassed here in the limousine. He was going suddenly insane, assailed with frightful images, and with an embarrassment that amounted to hatred. Avery and Elizabeth had never been anywhere near as bad as this before, they were out of their minds.

  When the car drew up he sprang out at once but not more quickly than Avery himself, the dog Chung, and Corey, who opened the door for Elizabeth. They were at a crossroads on the shorn summit of a hill and the moon was rising. A resonant bird-cry came from the direction of the lake and farther off a dog howled. Chung, the good-tempered tawny creature that Elizabeth had saved from the cooking pot in Hong Kong, when he was a puppy, gave vent to an extraordinary snuffling moan and began to run in circles, black tongue lolling.

  Avery came striding up to Jack and looked him over with concern. He put his head back, stuck his hands in his trouser pockets and rocked on his heels, staring at his friend.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked. ‘Saw you looking very squeezed out...grimacing away in the front seat.’

  ‘Right as rain!’ said Jack, stiffening his upper lip.

  Avery was neatly built and fair, a natural sportsman. There was something essentially simple and lovable, for Jack, in a man who could bounce into a room wearing flannels and really say: ‘Anyone for tennis?’

  ‘I have a wager going with Corey,’ said Ace seriously. ‘Here, you must hold the pot.’

  Jack took the envelope with a stiff little bow, like a second at a duel, and buttoned it into the breast pocket of his denim jacket. Sporting chances of all kinds were an important part of life in the King household; there was an unhealthy preoccupation with luck, good and bad, and the picking of winners. Jack tried to recall Ace’s gambling addiction in college; had his old pal always been so heavily into bloody mumbo-jumbo? The trouble seemed to have carried over into the next generation: when Ace Junior could not be found he was usually in Las Vegas.

  The two men strolled along the edge of the dirt road and stared to the northwest, over the boundless tree-girt reaches of mountain and valley. Jack turned his head, looking for Elizabeth, and his blood turned to ice in his veins. He could see her white naked sinewy legs, the folds of her long sequined chiffon skirt, the thrust of Corey’s half-covered buttocks: they were up against the car on the other side.

  A string of possible reactions flashed before his eyes, but he could do nothing. He looked at the hills and was overwhelmed by a mortal terror that Ace would turn his head. He felt a cold sweat break out on his brow.

  ‘Did you see that?’ whispered Ace suddenly.

  ‘What? No! What was it?’ babbled Jack.

  Ace ran along the shoulder of the road and peered down the narrow crossroad, hardly more than a track in places. Jack stumbled after him and saw a tall figure in a grubby pale-coloured coat, a duster, and a battered black hat. In two long, bouncing steps the man was lost from view behind a tree.

  ‘Did you see it?’ demanded Ace.

  ‘I saw a man,’ said Jack. ‘A tramp or something.’

  ‘Bad luck!’ said Ace. ‘You missed the possum.’

  He turned to call his wife: ‘Elizabeth!’

  Jack’s head snapped around at the same moment. The hilltop was spacious and very light still; Corey, in his modish tan leisure suit, was posed nonchalantly a hundred yards away. Elizabeth stood looking back the way they had come, with Chung at her heels; her long blue-grey chiffon skirt blew backwards, she held a cashmere shawl wrapped tightly about her shoulders.

  Now she came swimming through the air of evening, put her powdered cheek next to Jack’s for a moment, then said to Ace: ‘Let’s get on, shall we?’

  Jack was convinced by Elizabeth, she was one of the most convincing persons he knew. His perception must be disastrously at fault; she had not been coupling with Corey, she had not even been stridently drunk, taunting Ace with his bad stars.

  ‘Ace,’ he said, ‘did you see that chap, just now?’

  ‘No,’ said Ace easily, ‘can’t say I did. But then, I was looking up a tree.’

  They were all walking towards the very centre of the crossroads, Elizabeth was leading them, walking faster now. It was dark; the darkness had gathered all around them as they walked, and now there was only a small circle of remaining daylight on the pale earth where the four ways met. A white hen and a black cockerel lay intertwined, dabbled with blood, their throats cut.

  Jack felt a light touch on his shoulder; Corey said gently: ‘You can see the place from here . ..’

  Down the hill the scrubby undergrowth and the spruce plantation gave way to cleared land, fields with fences of split rails. On the right was a low stone building with warm light in its windows. He looked back quickly at the dead chickens to see if they were still there; the hen twitched at his feet.

  * * * *

  ‘Corey,’ he demanded, ‘what the hell is all this? I saw some character in the bushes just now...’

  ‘The lake,’ said Corey, acting tongue-tied. ‘There’s some kind of freaks camping down by the shore.’

  There was a sudden drumming on the dusty earth. Elizabeth screamed and overbalanced as Chung butted his way past her legs. He went through the midst of them, his pads drumming, seized the black cockerel and raced on down the hill into the darkness.

  ‘Chung! Baby!’

  Elizabeth got up, taking an arm each from Jack and her husband.

  ‘He’ll go to the restaurant, Mrs King,’ soothed Corey. ‘He’ll go find Madame Belle.’

  ‘Beast!’ said Elizabeth.

  She looped her pearls around her neck another time and headed for the car.

  ‘I lay you ten,’ said Ace, as they hurried after her, ‘that there are at least four people in the place besides us.’

  ‘You mean four other people having dinner?’ said Jack warily.

  ‘That’s right. Are you on?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jack firmly. ‘I say there will be fewer than four. In fact we’ll probably be the only people in the place. Timing it from the moment we walk in, of course.’

  He hated getting back into the car and was relieved when Elizabeth flung herself into the front seat. He and Ace settled in the nether reaches; Corey had opened the glass panel. Jack did not want to look out of the window, though it occurred to him that perhaps theother side of the car was jinxed. He felt an aversion to the back of Elizabeth’s head with its perfectly recreated pageboy bob. It was her normal colour, grey-blonde, but he began to think it was a wig; he was troubled by the notion of an ugly seam that ran all the way down the back of the head, like a scar.

  He turned his head, looked back at the crossroads, and was able to reach out and tap Ace on the knee. They both looked through the wide rear window. Jack saw the man in the duster standing in the very centre of the crossroads, where the white hen was still lying. He raised a rifle to his shoulder, aimed at the big car, point-blank. Jack gave a cry and ducked his head; there was a light jolt, Corey swung the wheel.

  ‘Sorry, Mrs King!’ he said. ‘That was some pothole.’

  ‘Something back there?’ enquired Ace.

  ‘Did you see anything?’ countered Jack.

  ‘I saw the water lapping on the crags...’ quoted Ace dreamily. ‘What was I supposed to see?’

  Bearing in mind that he was one of the few people ever to spoof Avery Philpott King III, Jack said in a low voice: ‘The girl,
of course!’

  Ace looked back again with mild interest.

  ‘Girl? Where?’

  ‘Gone now ...’

  He hadn’t been able to draw Ace. To prevaricate when one was actually having hallucinations seemed to him the height of madness. Perhaps everyone did it when they began seeing things. Jack called to mind certain scenes in Hamlet and The Tempest where visions were taking place.