The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 16

by Stephen Jones

  “Aye!” called Amelia Earnshawe, her voice no longer unsteady. “The compact.”

  For the scroll, the long-hidden scroll, had been the compact – the dread agreement between the Lords of the House, and the denizens of the crypt in ages past. It had described and enumerated the nightmarish rituals that had chained them one to another over the centuries – rituals of blood, and of salt, and more.

  “If you have read the compact,” said a deep voice from beyond the door, “then you know what we need, Hubert Earnshawe’s daughter.”

  “Brides,” she said, simply.

  “The brides!” came the whisper from beyond the door, and it redoubled and resounded until it seemed to her that the very house itself throbbed and echoed to the beat of those words – two syllables invested with longing, and with love, and with hunger.

  Amelia bit her lip. “Aye. The brides. I will bring thee brides. I shall bring brides for all.”

  She spoke quietly, but they heard her, for there was only silence, a deep and velvet silence, on the other side of the door.

  And then one ghoul-voice hissed, “Yes, and do you think we could get her to throw in a side-order of those little bread-roll things?”

  VII

  Hot tears stung the young man’s eyes. He pushed the papers from him, and flung the quill pen across the room. It spattered its inky load over the bust of his great-great-great grandfather, the brown ink soiling the patient white marble. The occupant of the bust, a large and mournful raven, startled, nearly fell off, and only kept its place by dint of flapping its wings, several times. It turned, then, in an awkward step and hop, to stare with one black bead eye at the young man.

  “Oh, this is intolerable!” exclaimed the young man. He was pale and trembling. “I cannot do it, and I shall never do it. I swear now, by . . .” and he hesitated, casting his mind around for a suitable curse from the extensive family archives.

  The raven looked unimpressed. “Before you start cursing, and probably dragging peacefully dead and respectable ancestors back from their well-earned graves, just answer me one question.” The voice of the bird was like stone striking against stone.

  The young man said nothing, at first. It is not unknown for ravens to talk, but this one had not done so before, and he had not been expecting it. “Certainly. Ask your question.”

  The raven tipped its head onto one side. “Do you like writing that stuff?”

  “Like?”

  “That life-as-it-is-stuff you do. I’ve looked over your shoulder sometimes. I’ve even read a little here and there. Do you enjoy writing it?”

  The young man looked down at the bird. “It’s literature,” he explained, as if to a child. “Real literature. Real life. The real world. It’s an artist’s job to show people the world they live in. We hold up mirrors.”

  Outside the room lightning clove the sky. The young man glanced out of the window: a jagged streak of blinding fire created warped and ominous silhouettes from the bony trees and the ruined abbey on the hill.

  The raven cleared its throat.

  “I said, do you enjoy it?”

  The young man looked at the bird, then he looked away and, wordlessly, he shook his head.

  “That’s why you keep trying to pull it apart,” said the bird. “It’s not the satirist in you that makes you lampoon the commonplace and the humdrum. Merely boredom with the way things are. D’you see?” It paused to preen a stray wing feather back into place with its beak. Then it looked up at him once more. “Have you ever thought of writing fantasy?” it asked.

  The young man laughed. “Fantasy? Listen, I write literature. Fantasy isn’t life. Esoteric dreams, written by a minority for a minority, it’s—”

  “What you’d be writing if you knew what was good for you.”

  “I’m a classicist,” said the young man. He reached out his hand to a shelf of the classics – Udolpho, The Castle of Otranto, The Saragossa Manuscript, The Monk and the rest of them. “It’s literature.”

  “Nevermore,” said the raven. It was the last word the young man ever heard it speak. It hopped from the bust, spread its wings and glided out of the study door into the waiting darkness.

  The young man shivered. He rolled the stock themes of fantasy over in his mind: cars and stockbrokers and commuters, housewives and police, agony columns and commercials for soap, income tax and cheap restaurants, magazines and credit cards and streetlights and computers . . .

  “It is escapism, true,” he said, aloud. “But is not the highest impulse in mankind the urge towards freedom, the drive to escape?”

  The young man returned to his desk, and he gathered together the pages of his unfinished novel, and dropped them, unceremoniously, in the bottom drawer, amongst the yellowing maps and cryptic testaments and the documents signed in blood. The dust, disturbed, made him cough.

  He took up a fresh quill; sliced at its tip with his pen-knife. In five deft strokes and cuts he had a pen. He dipped the tip of it into the glass inkwell. Once more he began to write:

  VIII

  Amelia Earnshawe placed the slices of wholewheat bread into the toaster and pushed it down. She set the timer to dark brown, just as George liked it. Amelia preferred her toast barely singed. She liked white bread, as well, even if it didn’t have the vitamins. She hadn’t eaten white bread for a decade now.

  At the breakfast table, George read his paper. He did not look up. He never looked up.

  I hate him, she thought, and simply putting the emotion into words surprised her. She said it again in her head. I hate him. It was like a song. I hate him for his toast, and for his bald head, and for the way he chases the office crumpet – girls barely out of school who laugh at him behind his back, and for the way he ignores me whenever he doesn’t want to be bothered with me, and for the way he says “What, love?” when I ask him a simple question, as if he’s long ago forgotten my name. As if he’s forgotten that I even have a name.

  “Scrambled or boiled?” she said aloud.

  “What, love?”

  George Earnshawe regarded his wife with fond affection, and would have found her hatred of him astonishing. He thought of her in the same way, and with the same emotions, that he thought of anything which had been in the house for ten years and still worked well. The television, for example. Or the lawnmower. He thought it was love.

  “You know, we ought to go on one of those marches,” he said, tapping the newspaper’s editorial. “Show we’re committed. Eh, love?”

  The toaster made a noise to show that it was done. Only one dark brown slice had popped up. She took a knife and fished out the torn second slice with it. The toaster had been a wedding present from her Uncle John. Soon she’d have to buy another, or start cooking toast under the grill, the way her mother had done.

  “George? Do you want your eggs scrambled or boiled?” she asked, very quietly, and there was something in her voice that made him look up.

  “Any way you like it, love,” he said amiably, and could not for the life of him, as he told everyone in the office later that morning, understand why she simply stood there holding her slice of toast, or why she started to cry.

  IX

  The quill pen went scritch scritch across the paper, and the young man was engrossed in what he was doing. His face was strangely content, and a smile flickered between his eyes and his lips.

  He was rapt.

  Things scratched and scuttled in the wainscot but he hardly heard them.

  High in her attic room Aunt Agatha howled and yowled and rattled her chains. A weird cachinnation came from the ruined abbey: it rent the night air, ascending into a peal of manic glee. In the dark woods beyond the great house, shapeless figures shuffled and loped, and raven-locked young women fled from them in fear.

  “Swear!” said Toombes the butler, down in the butler’s pantry, to the brave girl who was passing herself off as a chambermaid. “Swear to me, Ethel, on your life, that you’ll never reveal a word of what I tell you to a living soul
. . .”

  There were faces at the windows and words written in blood; deep in the crypt a lonely ghoul crunched on something that might once have been alive; forked lightning slashed the ebony night; the faceless were walking; all was right with the world.

  IAIN ROWAN

  Lilies

  IAIN ROWAN LIVES IN the north-east of England, near the sea but not near enough. He has had short stories published in a number of magazines and anthologies, including Postscripts, Ellery Queen’s, Alfred Hitchcock’s, Black Gate, The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases and other titles. He is currently finishing revisions to his first novel.

  According to Rowan: “ ‘Lilies’ came from the image of the city that it’s set in – a vague half-daydream of an idea that lurked around in my subconscious for a month or so. Then I sat down to explore it in writing, and much to my surprise a story poured out in one sitting.

  “A story that, with some editing, ended up as the one that’s published here. It’s the only time that I can say that I’ve produced a story that seemed to have written itself. Which, as I’m naturally lazy, is a bit of a shame.”

  IT WAS AUTUMN, and the city was at war. As the pavements glistened slick with damp yellow leaves, the hills to the north talked to each other in low rumbling voices. Soldiers clattered into the city in trains, spent their money in a whirl of drink and women, and left for the hills. Fewer returned. Those that did, drank more quietly, eyes on the floor, worn coats patched up against the spiteful wind. The leaves fell, the war carried on, and every day the night stole in a few minutes earlier. It was autumn, and the city was at war, and Alex was afraid.

  He was one of the lucky ones. He had spent fourteen days on the front, cowering in holes in the ground while the earth erupted around him and men that he had spoken to just hours before lost arms, legs, lives. His entire world had been mud. He had lived in mud, tasted mud, pressed himself against the mud as if it could shelter him from the world being ripped apart around him. Then his sergeant had crawled up to him one morning, spat in his face, and told him that his daddy must have lined somebody’s pocket: he was to report to the back lines for transport to the city, and when – not if, when – he returned to the front the sergeant would make it his personal mission to ensure that Alex was first in the firing line.

  He was assigned duties couriering messages back and forth, from civil servant to general to minister to anonymous civilian. It was tiring, it was tedious, and it was safe, but Alex was still afraid and often when he ate all he could taste was mud. He spent hours shivering outside closed doors, shuffling his feet in the rotting autumn slush. He hurried from one side of the city to the other, two stops on the train, six stops on the rattling tram, hours of getting lost in strange streets, and everywhere, the dead.

  Alex tried not to look at them, conscious of the impulse to stare, embarrassed by it. He had seen the occasional dead person back in the village, as had every child. He’d even slept under the same roof as one, when his grandfather came back. None of this prepared him for the city. In the village, custom was that families kept their dead to themselves, that the week was a time for private moments, not public display. In the city, Alex thought at times that the dead outnumbered the living. If the war went on much longer, maybe they would.

  As he searched an elegant row of tall houses for the address on the letter in his hand, he passed one of the dead. The man stood on the pavement, looking at the houses, slowly moving his head from side to side in an unconscious mockery of Alex’s own search. It struck Alex that the reason there were so many dead in the city was that they could not find their families. They were cut off by the dislocation of wartime, everything in motion. Perhaps the man standing in the street, vacantly considering doorways, belonged to a family who had all died together, and now they all wandered the streets with the same cold stare, looking for one another, never finding each other, always lost.

  Alex was only nine the day that his grandfather came back. The old man had been ill for weeks, sweating and wheezing in his bed. Alex had spent dutiful hours by his bedside, alternating between fear and boredom. It had seemed that his grandfather was over the worst and would live to sit glowering by the fireside another year, but then he sat up in bed, said something about last year’s apples, and died. He was buried the next day. Alex stood uncertain in the soft rain while his mother cried and the village priest stumbled through his words. Then the mourners walked away, Alex’s uncle putting a hand on his shoulder to guide him. Halfway across the graveyard he looked back.

  The graveyard workers stood around the shallow mound while the black-coated priest knelt in front of it. His coat tails flapped around him, and for a moment Alex thought that he was not a man at all, just a swirl of crows, come to reclaim their graveyard from the intruders. Then the priest thrust his hands into the soil and pulled, and Alex saw the thin white legs of his grandfather appear, heard the priest muttering the blessings.

  “This isn’t for you,” his uncle said softly, and the pressure of his hand kept Alex walking. He still looked back though, and he saw his grandfather’s rebirth from the ground, the soil falling from him like black snow. When the priest had brought the body back into the world again, he nodded his head and the graveyard workers draped a shroud over it, and carried it slowly into the place of rest. “Now we wait, son,” Alex’s uncle said. “Wait for the miracle.”

  Three days later, as Alex steered his dinner from one side of his plate to the other, there was a heavy knock at the door. Alex’s mother gasped and closed her eyes. His father stood up and said “Well. Well.” Alex took the opportunity to drop several vegetables under his chair.

  “You go to your room now, Alex,” his mother said.

  He looked up cringing, thinking that she’d caught him, but saw that her eyes were still shut.

  “No,” his father said as he walked to the door. “No, the boy should stay. He’s old enough.” Standing outside in the rain was one of the workers from the graveyard, and just behind him stood Alex’s grandfather, looking confused, as if there were something very important that he should remember that he could not. Alex’s father handed over the customary couple of coins and the worker nodded and then walked away.

  “Come in, father.”

  The old man shuffled into the house and stood in the middle of the kitchen as if he were unsure what to do. Alex stared at him, fascinated. He was the same grandfather to look at as always, but his skin was pale and his eyes were clouded, the way fields were by the early morning mist. Alex’s father ushered the old man to his usual seat by the fire, his mother cried, and the boy hung back by the door, wondering, uncertain.

  * * *

  Alex climbed worn stone steps and knocked on a dark green door. An elderly man in an ornate servant’s uniform cracked the door open and raised a trembling eyebrow.

  “Message for the colonel.”

  The old man held out his hand, and Alex gave him the letter. Noise came from the end of the street, a brief scuffle, the sound of running feet, but no voices. Both Alex and the servant turned to look into the gathering darkness, but a voice bellowed from inside the house and distracted them.

  “Who’s that? Who is it there, eh?”

  “A messenger, Colonel,” the old man said. “Message for you. I have it here, I will bring it up.”

  They both looked out at the street again, but whatever the noise was, it had stopped.

  “A courier, eh.” The colonel had come down the stairs, and stood in the hallway red-faced, breath wheezing, looking at Alex. “Know what the message is about, son?”

  “No – no, it’s sealed sir, I wouldn’t read it—”

  “Don’t have to read it, son. Know what it’s about. Know what they’re all about. All about how little by little we are trying our hardest to lose the war. Don’t look so shocked lad, you think that’s treasonous talk, you should hear what the generals say. A drink for the cold, eh.”

  The servant creaked off tow
ards a side-table in the hall.

  “No, my orders—” Alex said.

  “Bugger your orders. Who gave you your orders?”

  “My sergeant.”

  “Bugger your sergeant. I’m a colonel, still counts for something. A drink for the cold.” The servant had returned with two shot glasses. The colonel handed one to Alex.

  “You been there, have you son? At the front?”

  “Yes,” Alex said.

  “Thought so. See it in your eyes.” He raised his glass in a toast. “To the end of the war.”

  “End of the war.” The raw spirit burnt Alex’s throat and made his eyes water. He bit down on his tongue, desperate not to cough. The servant took the glass back, and Alex began to retreat down the steps.

  “Yes, the end of the war,” the colonel was staring out into the dusk, one hand tugging at his beard, seeing a landscape that wasn’t the city. “Don’t go back there, lad.”

  Alex saluted and hurried away down the street. Just before he reached the main road, he saw a dark huddle on the pavement. It was the body of the dead man. Alex looked around, wandering what to do, who to contact. The man had obviously been searching for his family or old friends, and had not found them. Now his week had passed, and he was gone for ever. Given another chance, and it was wasted. Sad. Alex bent down over the body, and then he saw the white petals of the lily that had been placed on the man’s stomach.

  The fire of the alcohol in his stomach turned to a sour swell of fear. He looked up and down the street, saw no-one, and hurried away towards the main road, towards the light. Alex knew what the lily meant: it meant that this was none of his business, and that he should leave now, before those responsible saw him there, considered him a witness to their crime. It had never happened in his village, but he had heard the stories, knew what the lily, flower of mourning, meant. It meant political support for the enemy over the hills, it was a mark of rebellion against everything – the government, custom and tradition, all the old ways. Those who left the lilies were subversives who put into practice the ways of the enemy. They committed the strangest of murders, they killed the already dead.