The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 16

by Stephen Jones

  “I love you, too, Persephone,” he tells her, the words sounding so small and awkward, barely audible in the hot space between them.

  “Again,” she says, eyes too bright, breathless.

  Kevin looks down at the basket, frowning. He sets it aside. They have been together for three months and her desperate need for the rope’s embrace has increased exponentially until she is not satisfied with less than seven or eight times a day. Her hunger is a black hole, desire that is never satiated. Of all the women he has been with, all the women that he has tied, she is the only one who can never get enough and at first it was perfect, true love. But now, it is as if she doesn’t even see him. She only sees the knots.

  “Do we have to?” He reaches out as if to take her into his arms and she steps back, wary. “Please. I just want to hold you for a while.”

  “After, okay?” She is acting like a junkie, desperate. It makes him feel invisible and he is overwhelmed with a desire to hit her, to keep on hitting her until she really sees him. He still loves her so much, and the love feels like its own kind of crushing bondage.

  “Persephone,” he says. “I can’t do this anymore.”

  Her head swivels sharply.

  “What?”

  He looks away, pain and resignation in the corners of his mouth.

  “Look, you don’t love me.” His voice is soft and hopeless. “You never did. You love the rope.”

  There is a moment of anger flashing hot and fierce across her features, then it submerges and she slides her arms around him, all cooing and seductive lies.

  “That’s not true, baby,” she whispers. “You know how much I love you.”

  She guides him to the bed, takes him down. He knows that she is lying, but her touch, her mouth feels so good and he lets himself pretend, knowing inside that it really is over.

  After, she slips out of his embrace. Moving cat-burglar silent, she pulls on clothes and takes the basket. He lays in the bed with his back to her, eyes wide and glinting with angry tears. He does not stop her.

  In her dim dressing room, she strips naked and opens the basket. The rope is coiled inside like a sleeping cobra, but when she lifts it out, it lays inert in her hands, lifeless. She winds it around her wrists, but it is as limp as the bunched-up cotton clothesline in her vanity drawer.

  “Come on,” she whispers through clenched teeth, frustration a nest of angry hornets in her belly. “Come on, come on, come on.”

  Nothing. Just a length of fancy satin rope. She flings it away, furious. So it only works with him. No problem. He’s probably still sleeping. She could sneak back in and be there to lovey-dovey him into making it work for her.

  “It’s dead.”

  She turns and sees Kevin poking the rope with the toe of his boot.

  “Dead?” Fear ignites in her throat. “It can’t be . . .”

  “Oh, don’t worry, baby.” His voice is cruel, caustic. He pulls out a stubby little pocket knife and thumbs it open. “There’s plenty more where that came from.”

  He plunges the knife into the inside of his scarred wrist.

  “Jesus, Kevin!”

  She rushes to him, filled with a sudden terrible fear that he will die bleeding on her carpet and the rope’s secret will die with him. But it is not blood that oozes from the quivering slit in his flesh. It is something more solid, stealthy, glistening like a newborn snake. A wet length of the gore-red rope struggles free from the wound, fat as a vital artery and pulsing and Persephone backs away, nausea churning in her belly. Its blind head elongates like an earthworm, straining toward her and she screams, clawing through her vanity drawer until her shaking fingers close over the cold grip of her .38.

  “Keep it away from me,” she says, drawing a bead first on the languidly flexing rope, then up to Kevin’s forehead. The idea that she allowed one of those things to touch her skin, to wind down between the lips of her pussy, sickens her and brings a cold crawling sweat to the back of her neck. But her fear is underscored by the stealthy flush of desire, her body’s memory of that inescapable embrace.

  “Come on, baby,” Kevin says, too-green eyes narrow and hot with anger. “What’s wrong? I thought you loved this.”

  The rope-like creature finally wriggles free, plopping with a dull smack onto the floor between them and humping, sidewinder swift, toward her feet. With a shriek of disgust, she fires at it, cutting it smartly in half. The halves flop noiselessly around, thick sluggish blood splattering the carpet.

  Kevin takes another step and she stumbles backward against her vanity.

  “Stay the fuck away from me,” she hisses. “Freak!”

  The anger in his eyes flares into bright, killing hatred, and when he takes that last step, she shoots him, again and then three times.

  He crumples and she instantly regrets her actions, rushing to take him in her arms. It is not love that wrenches high wailing sobs from her twisting belly, but the realisation that she has killed the golden goose, that she will never feel that ultimate surrender again.

  When a hundred slick ropy tentacles boil up from the bullet holes and seize her, she is almost grateful. As they wind around her throat, crushing her oesophagus and cutting off her air, she fights against them, twisting. She cannot break loose. Every time she moves, they move with her, complex constrictor embrace shifting and tightening and she begins to grey out, world going red and muddy around the edges. In her mind she sees a clock ticking relentlessly into the red, red like the pulsing spots that obscure her vision, red like they are, those horrible wormy things that cinch tighter, tighter around her and she wonders how long it’s been. Has it been three minutes? Longer? Is she dying? She imagines a vast, dark, blank-faced audience waiting in excruciating expectation while the clock inches closer and closer to the oversized, cartoony skull that marks the number three. Black starts to swallow the pulsing red and she feels sure that it is really over when the coils around her begin to slacken, subtly at first, then relaxing exponentially around her. One by one they begin to fall away like the chains in her act and she tries to hold on, teeth digging into the raw flesh inside her mouth and realisation filling her like the blood rushing back into her numb extremities. Her vision returns in slow, gauzy stages and she becomes aware of her cheek pressed against the cold floor inches from her dead lover’s face. The fleshy ropes that still connect them like a dozen corrupt umbilici are slowly liquefying around her and she clutches frantically at them, trying to wrap them back around her wrists but her desperate fingers punch through their slick, disintegrating skins. She was willing to hold on, to pretend, but in the end she has escaped again, just like always.

  STEPHEN GALLAGHER

  Restraint

  STEPHEN GALLAGHER LIVES IN Blackburn, Lancashire, with his wife and daughter. While working for Yorkshire Television’s documentaries department, he scripted two serials for BBC-TV’s Doctor Who series – Warrior’s Gate and Terminus (both of which he subsequently novelized under the pseudonym “John Lydecker”).

  Gallagher’s subsequent novels include Valley of Lights, Down River, Rain, Nightmare With Angel, Red Red Robin and White Bizango, while his short fiction has recently been collected in PS Publishing’s Out of His Mind.

  He adapted his own novels Chimera (aka Monkey Boy) and also directed Oktober as TV miniseries, along with scripting episodes of Chillers and Murder Rooms: The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes.

  His latest novel is The Spirit Box from Subterranean Press, and he is the creator and writer of the science-and-suspense TV series Eleventh Hour.

  “The opening scene of this story links to a very specific memory,” Gallagher recalls. “I can picture it still. It’s 1984, it’s night, and I’m on an examination couch in a curtained booth in the Accident and Emergency department of Bolton General Hospital.

  “I’m sitting there in my underpants waiting for the doctor, feeling very vulnerable as I hear the business of A&E going on just a few feet away . . . and I’m bright yellow. Real yellow. Van Gogh
yellow. With my goose-pimples I look just like a plucked corn-fed chicken.

  “Only a couple of weeks before I’d been in Russia, researching my novel The Boat House. I was about to be told that I’d contracted a bout of Hepatitis A and that the virus was most commonly transmitted via the fecal/food chain. That’s right, the fecal/food chain. Some bastard of a Russian cook had effectively been wiping his arse on my breakfast.

  “Hope that doesn’t spoil the story for you. I can tell you that it didn’t do much for the rest of my year.”

  “DID YOU GET A look at the driver who forced you off the road?”

  The woman in uniform had pulled up a chair to put herself right alongside Holly’s hospital trolley, so that she could speak close and keep her voice low.

  Holly made the slightest movement of her head, not even a shake, and was instantly sorry.

  The policewoman spoke again.

  “Your son thinks it was your husband’s car. Could that be right? We’ve called your house and there’s nobody there.”

  Holly meant to speak, but it came out in an unrecognisable whisper.

  “Where are the children?”

  “Out in the waiting room. They’ve been checked over and neither of them’s hurt. Your neighbours said you left after some kind of an argument.”

  “I’d like some water.”

  “I’ll have to ask if that’s all right.”

  Holly closed her eyes, and a moment later heard the sound of metal rings sliding as the policewoman stepped out of the cubicle. Only a curtain separated her from the Saturday night crowd out in Casualty, and a pretty lively crowd they sounded.

  She lay with a thin blanket covering her. They’d brought her back here after the X-rays. It was a relief to hear that the children were unhurt, even though it was what she’d half-expected. That short trip down the embankment would have shaken them up, but it was only their stupid mother who’d neglected to put on her own seat belt after making sure of theirs.

  That car. It had come out of nowhere. But if there was one thing that Holly knew for certain, it was that Frank couldn’t have been at the wheel.

  Why? Because she and Lizzie had struggled to lift him into the boot of their own car, not forty-five minutes before. And assuming he hadn’t leaked too much and no-one had lifted the lid for a look inside, he had to be lying there still.

  He certainly wouldn’t be going anywhere on his own.

  The young policewoman was back.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I had to stop an argument. I forgot to ask about your water.”

  “Where’s the car?” Holly croaked.

  “Still in the ditch,” the policewoman said. “The accident unit can get it towed away for you, but you’ll have to sort out the rest with your insurers.”

  This was seductive. The linen smelled clean, and felt fresh. Holly was all but exhausted. She’d been lifted, laid down, tended to. It would be so easy to drift. The racket right outside was almost like a lullaby.

  But her husband’s dead body was in the boot of her car, and the police were all over it even as she lay there.

  “Can I get that drink now?” she said.

  As soon as the policewoman was gone, Holly tried to rise up on her elbows. The effort it called for surprised her at first, but she made it on the second attempt.

  She was in her underwear, her outer clothing piled on a chair that stood against the wall. She started to climb off the trolley and it hurt, but it wasn’t too bad; nothing grated and nothing refused to take her weight. Her head ached and she felt a great overall weariness, but there was no one part of her that screamed of special damage.

  The floor was cold under her bare feet. She stood for a moment with her hand resting on the trolley, and then she straightened.

  At least she could stand.

  She tweaked open the side-curtain and put her face through the gap. In the next cubicle sat a young man on a chair, holding a spectacularly bloodstained dressing to the side of his head. He was in formal dress, with a carnation in his buttonhole and his tie all awry. He looked like the type who owned one suit and wore it for all his weddings, funerals, and court appearances.

  “I wouldn’t call you a shitsucker,” Holly said.

  He blinked at her, uncomprehending.

  “The man you came in with just did,” she said.

  He was up on his feet in an instant, and as he flung back the outer curtain she got a glimpse of the scene beyond it. The rest of the wedding party was out there, arguing with the staff and with each other. The bride in her gown could be seen in their midst. They rose in a wave as the bloodied guest was spotted hurtling toward them, and then the curtain fell back as if on the world’s most energetic Punch and Judy show.

  That ought to keep her policewoman occupied for a while.

  Holly could feel the adrenaline pumping now, flushing her of all weariness and pain, leaving her wired and edgy and ready to roll. She dressed as quickly as she could, and then instead of emerging into the open she started to make her way through one dividing curtain after another toward the end of the row. In the next occupied cubicle, an elderly West Indian man lay huddled under a red blanket. In the last sat a scared-looking woman with a small boy. They looked up apprehensively as she appeared out of nowhere.

  “Sorry to disturb you,” Holly said. “Where’s the children’s waiting room?”

  It was around a corner and separated from the main area by a short passageway and a couple of vending machines. Under a mural of mis-shapen Disney characters stood a basket of wrecked toys, some coverless picture books, and some undersized chairs across which a sleeping form lay. She woke up Lizzie, and dragged Jack protesting out of the corner playhouse in which he’d made a den. He quietened suddenly when he looked at her face. She took them both by the hand and they followed a yellow line on the hospital floor toward the exit.

  As they approached the automatic doors, Holly saw herself in the glass. But then the doors slid apart, and they sailed out into the night to look for a taxi.

  In the presence of the driver they asked her no questions, and they gave her no trouble. Lizzie was twelve. She was dark, she was pretty, good at her lessons and no good at games. Jack was only six, a beefy little fair-haired Tonka truck of a boy.

  The roads were quiet and the taxi got them to the place on the ring road in twenty minutes. It was a good half-mile on from where she’d expected it to be. The police were gone but the car was still there.

  “Do you want me to wait?” the cab driver said, but Holly said no and paid him off.

  She waited until the cab was out of sight before she descended to her vehicle.

  The children hung back on the grass verge, by the deep earth-gouges that marked the spot where their car had left the carriageway. Spray-painted lines on the grass and on the tarmac showed where the accident unit had taken measurements. Down in the ditch, they’d left a big POLICE AWARE sticker on the back window of her Toyota.

  The Toyota was old and it wasn’t in the best of shape, but it was a runner. Usually. Right now it was stuck nose-first in the bushes along with all the windblown litter at the bottom of the embankment.

  The keys had been taken, but Holly groped around in the wheel arch where she kept a secret spare. As she crouched there, she glanced up at the children. They were watching her, two shapes etched against the yellow sodium mist that hung over the road.

  Her fingertips found the little magnetic box right up at the top of the arch, deep in the crusted road dirt.

  “Got them,” she said. “Come on.”

  Lizzie was nervously eyeing the Toyota as she and Jack came scrambling down.

  “What are we going to do?” she said. “It’s stuck here. We can’t go anywhere.”

  “We don’t know that for certain yet,” Holly said, tearing off the police notice and then moving around to open the doors. She didn’t know what the procedure was, but they couldn’t have looked inside the boot. However quick the glance, Frank would have been hard
to miss.

  Jack climbed into the back, without an argument for once, and Lizzie got into the passenger seat.

  Once she was behind the wheel, Holly checked herself in the rearview mirror. At least when she’d hit her head on the roof, her face had been spared. Her vision had been blurred in the ambulance, hence the need for an X-ray, but that had mostly cleared up now.

  Still, she looked a sight. She ran her fingers through to straighten her hair and then she rubbed at her reddened eyes, but of course that only made them worse.

  “Here goes,” she said, and tried the engine.

  It started on the second try. It was sluggish and it didn’t sound at all right, but it caught just the same.

  There was no point in trying to reverse up the banking, but she tried it anyway. The wheels spun and the car went nowhere. So instead she put it into first gear and tried going forward, squeezing on through the bushes.

  For a moment it looked as if this wasn’t going to work either, but with a jarring bump they lurched forward into the leaves. Switches bent and cracked as the Toyota forced its way through. She glanced in the mirror and saw Jack watching, fascinated, as foliage scraped and slid along the window only inches from his face. God alone knew what it was doing to her paintwork.