The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 16

by Stephen Jones

Haunted Carleton is still a Carleton who can be bossed around. “Don’t tell,” he begs.

  Tilly pretends to think about this, although she’s already made up her mind. Because what can she say? Either her mother will notice that something’s wrong or else she won’t. Better to wait and see. “Just stay away from me,” she tells Carleton. “You give me the creeps.”

  Carleton begins to cry, but Tilly is firm. He turns around, walks slowly back to his half of the yard, still crying. For the rest of the afternoon, he sits beneath the azalea bush at the edge of his side of the yard, and cries. It gives Tilly the creeps. Her hand throbs where something has stung it. The rabbits are all hiding underground. King Spanky has gone hunting.

  * * *

  “What’s up with Carleton?” Henry said, coming downstairs. He couldn’t stop yawning. It wasn’t that he was tired, although he was tired. He hadn’t given Carleton a goodnight kiss, just in case it turned out he was coming down with a cold. He didn’t want Carleton to catch it. But it looked like Carleton, too, was already coming down with something.

  Catherine shrugged. Paint samples were balanced across her stomach like she’d been playing solitaire. All weekend long, away from the house, she’d thought about repainting Henry’s office. She’d never painted a haunted room before. Maybe if you mixed the paint with a little bit of holy water? She wasn’t sure: What was holy water, anyway? Could you buy it? “Tilly’s being mean to him,” she said. “I wish they would make some friends out here. He keeps talking about the new baby, about how he’ll take care of it. He says it can sleep in his room. I’ve been trying to explain babies to him, about how all they do is sleep and eat and cry.”

  “And get bigger,” Henry said.

  “That too,” Catherine said. “So did he go to sleep okay?”

  “Eventually,” Henry said. “He’s just acting really weird.”

  “How is that different from usual?” Catherine said. She yawned. “Is Tilly finished with her homework?”

  “I don’t know,” Henry said. “You know, just weird. Different weird. Maybe he’s going through a weird spell. Tilly wanted me to help her with her math, but I couldn’t get it to come out right. So what’s up with my office?”

  “I cleared it out,” Catherine said. “Alison and Liz came over and helped. I told them we were going to redecorate. Why is it that we’re the only ones who notice everything is fucking haunted around here?”

  “So where’d you put my stuff?” Henry said. “What’s up?”

  “You’re not working here now,” Catherine pointed out. She didn’t sound angry, just tired. “Besides, it’s all haunted, right? So I took your computer into the shop, so they could have a look at it. I don’t know, maybe they can unhaunt it.”

  “Well,” Henry said. “Okay. Is that what you told them? It’s haunted?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Catherine said. She discarded a paint strip. Too lemony. “So I heard about the bomb scare on the radio.”

  “Yeah,” Henry said. “The subways were full of kids with crew cuts and machine guns. And they evacuated our building for about an hour. We all went and stood outside, holding onto our laptops like idiots, just in case. The Crocodile carried out her rubber band ball, which must weigh about thirty pounds. It kind of freaked people out, even the firemen. I thought the bomb squad was going to blow it up. So tell me about your weekend.”

  “Tell me about yours,” Catherine said.

  “You know,” Henry said. “Those clients are assholes. But they don’t know they’re assholes, so it’s kind of okay. You just have to feel sorry for them. They don’t get it. You have to explain how to have fun, and then they get anxious, so they drink a lot and so you have to drink too. Even The Crocodile got drunk. She did this weird wriggly dance to a Pete Seeger song. So what’s their place like?”

  “It’s nice,” Catherine said. “You know, really nice.”

  “So you had a good weekend? Carleton and Tilly had a good time?”

  “It was really nice,” Catherine said. “No, really, it was great. I had a fucking great time. So you’re sure you can make it home for dinner on Thursday.”

  It wasn’t a question.

  “Carleton looks like he might be coming down with something,” Henry said. “Here. Do you think I feel hot? Or is it cold in here?”

  Catherine said, “You’re fine. It’s going to be Liz and Marcus and some of the women from the book group and their husbands, and what’s her name, the real estate agent. I invited her too. Did you know she’s written a book? I was going to do that! I’m getting the new dishwasher tomorrow. No more paper plates. And the lawn care specialist is coming on Monday to take care of the rabbits. I thought I’d drop off King Spanky at the vet, take Tilly and Carleton back to the city, stay with Lucy for two or three days – did you know she tried to find this place and got lost? She’s supposed to come up for dinner too – just in case the poison doesn’t go away right away, you know, or in case we end up with piles of dead rabbits on the lawn. Your job is to make sure there are no dead rabbits when I bring Tilly and Carleton back.”

  “I guess I can do that,” Henry said.

  “You’d better,” Catherine said. She stood up, with some difficulty, and came and leaned over his chair. Her stomach bumped into his shoulder. Her breath was hot. Her hands were full of strips of colour. “Sometimes I wish that instead of working for the Crocodile, you were having an affair with her. I mean, that way you’d come home when you’re supposed to. You wouldn’t want me to be suspicious.”

  “I don’t have any time to have affairs,” Henry said. He sounded put out. Maybe he was thinking about Leonard Felter. Or maybe he was picturing the Crocodile naked. The Crocodile wearing stretchy red rubber sex gear. Catherine imagined telling Henry the truth about Leonard Felter. I didn’t have an affair. Did not. Is that a problem?

  “That’s exactly what I mean,” Catherine said. “You’d better be here for dinner. You live here, Henry. You’re my husband. I want you to meet our friends. I want you to be here when I have this baby. I want you to fix what’s wrong with the downstairs bathroom. I want you to talk to Tilly. She’s having a rough time. She won’t talk to me about it.”

  “Tilly’s fine,” Henry said. “We had a long talk tonight. She said she’s sorry she broke all of Carleton’s night-lights. I like the trees, by the way. You’re not going to paint over them, are you?”

  “I had all this leftover paint,” Catherine said. “I was getting tired of just painting with the rollers. I wanted to do something fancier.”

  “You could paint some trees in my office, when you paint my office.”

  “Maybe,” Catherine said. “Ooof, this baby won’t stop kicking me.” She lay down on the floor in front of Henry, and lifted her feet into his lap. “Rub my feet. I’ve still got so much fucking paint. But once your office is done, I’m done with the painting. Tilly told me to stop it or else. She keeps hiding my gas mask. Will you be here for dinner?”

  “I’ll be here for dinner,” Henry said, rubbing her feet. He really meant it. He was thinking about the exterminator, about rabbit corpses scattered all across the lawn, like a war zone. Poor rabbits. What a mess.

  After they went to see the therapist, after they went to Disney World and came home again, Henry said to Catherine, “I don’t want to talk about it any more. I don’t want to talk about it ever again. Can we not talk about it?”

  “Talk about what?” Catherine said. But she had almost been sorry. It had been so much work. She’d had to invent so many details that eventually it began to seem as if she hadn’t made it up after all. It was too strange, too confusing, to pretend it had never happened, when, after all, it had never happened.

  Catherine is dressing for dinner. When she looks in the mirror, she’s as big as a cruise ship. A water tower. She doesn’t look like herself at all. The baby kicks her right under the ribs.

  “Stop that,” she says. She’s sure the baby is going to be a girl. Tilly won’t be pleased. Till
y has been extra good all day. She helped make the salad. She set the table. She put on a nice dress.

  Tilly is hiding from Carleton under a table in the foyer. If Carleton finds her, Tilly will scream. Carleton is haunted, and nobody has noticed. Nobody cares except Tilly. Tilly says names for the baby, under her breath. Dollop. Shampool. Custard. Knock, knock. The rabbits are out on the lawn, and King Spanky has gotten into the bed again, and he won’t come out, not for a million haunted alarm clocks.

  Her mother has painted trees all along the wall under the staircase. They don’t look like real trees. They aren’t real colours. It doesn’t look like Central Park at all. In among the trees, her mother has painted a little door. It isn’t a real door, except that when Tilly goes over to look at it, it is real. There’s a doorknob, and when Tilly turns it, the door opens. Underneath the stairs, there’s another set of stairs, little dirt stairs, going down. On the third stair, there’s a rabbit sitting there, looking up at Tilly. It hops down, one step, and then another. Then another.

  “Rumpled Stiltskin!” Tilly says to the rabbit. “Lipstick!”

  Catherine goes to the closet to get out Henry’s pink shirt. What’s the name of that real estate agent? Why can’t she ever remember? She lays the shirt on the bed and then stands there for a moment, stunned. It’s too much. The pink shirt is haunted. She pulls out all of Henry’s suits, his shirts, his ties. All haunted. Every fucking thing is haunted. Even the fucking shoes. When she pulls out the drawers, socks, underwear, handkerchiefs, everything, it’s all spoiled. All haunted. Henry doesn’t have a thing to wear. She goes downstairs, gets trash bags, and goes back upstairs again. She begins to dump clothes into the trash bags.

  She can see Carleton framed in the bedroom window. He’s chasing the rabbits with a stick. She hoists open the window, leans out, yells, “Stay away from those fucking rabbits, Carleton! Do you hear me?”

  She doesn’t recognize her own voice.

  Tilly is running around downstairs somewhere. She’s yelling too, but her voice gets farther and farther away, fainter and fainter. She’s yelling, “Hairbrush! Zeppelin! Torpedo! Marmalade!”

  The doorbell rings.

  The Crocodile started laughing. “Okay, Henry. Calm down.”

  He fired off another rubber band. “I mean it,” he said. “I’m late. I’ll be late. She’s going to kill me.”

  “Tell her it’s my fault,” The Crocodile said. “So they started dinner without you. Big deal.”

  “I tried calling,” Henry said. “Nobody answered.” He had an idea that the phone was haunted now. That’s why Catherine wasn’t answering. They’d have to get a new phone. Maybe the lawn specialist would know a house specialist. Maybe somebody could do something about this. “I should go home,” he said. “I should go home right now.” But he didn’t get up. “I think we’ve gotten ourselves into a mess, me and Catherine. I don’t think things are good right now.”

  “Tell someone who cares,” The Crocodile suggested. She wiped at her eyes. “Get out of here. Go catch your train. Have a great weekend. See you on Monday.”

  So Henry goes home, he has to go home, but of course he’s late, it’s too late. The train is haunted. The closer they get to his station, the more haunted the train gets. None of the other passengers seem to notice. It makes Henry sick to his stomach. And of course, his bike turns out to be haunted, too. It’s too much. He can’t ride it home. He leaves it at the station and he walks home in the dark, down the bike path. Something follows him home. Maybe it’s King Spanky.

  Here’s the yard, and here’s his house. He loves his house, how it’s all lit up. You can see right through the windows, you can see the living room, which Catherine has painted Ghost Crab. The trim is Rat Fink. Catherine has worked so hard. The driveway is full of cars, and inside, people are eating dinner. They’re admiring Catherine’s trees. They haven’t waited for him, and that’s fine. His neighbours: he loves his neighbours. He’s going to love them as soon as he meets them. His wife is going to have a baby any day now. His daughter will stop walking in her sleep. His son isn’t haunted. The moon shines down and paints the world a colour he’s never seen before. Oh, Catherine, wait till you see this. Shining lawn, shining rabbits, shining world. The rabbits are out on the lawn. They’ve been waiting for him, all this time, they’ve been waiting. Here’s his rabbit, his very own rabbit. Who needs a bike? He sits on his rabbit, legs pressed against the warm, silky, shining flanks, one hand holding on to the rabbit’s fur, the knotted string around its neck. He has something in his other hand, and when he looks, he sees it’s a spear. All around him, the others are sitting on their rabbits, waiting patiently, quietly. They’ve been waiting for a long time, but the waiting is almost over. In a little while, the dinner party will be over and the war will begin.

  KIM NEWMAN

  Soho Golem

  KIM NEWMAN HAS WON the Bram Stoker Award, the British Fantasy Award, the British Science Fiction Award, the Children of the Night Award, the Fiction Award of the Lord Ruthven Assembly and the International Horror Critics Guild Award.

  Author, reviewer and broadcaster, his novels include The Night Mayor, Bad Dreams, Jago, The Quorum, Back in the USSR (with Eugene Byrne), Life’s Lottery and the acclaimed Anno Dracula sequence – comprising the title novel, plus The Bloody Red Baron and Judgment of Tears (aka Dracula Cha Cha Cha).

  Newman’s short fiction, which is often linked by recurring themes and characters, has been collected in The Original Dr Shade and Other Stories, Famous Monsters, Seven Stars, Unforgivable Stories, Where the Bodies Are Buried and Dead Travel Fast. Time and Relative is a prequel to the BBC-TV series in Telos Publishing’s “Doctor Who Novellas” series, and his non-fiction study TV Classics: Doctor Who is published by the British Film Institute.

  Forthcoming are Horror: Another 100 Best Books (with Stephen Jones) from Carroll & Graf, and a collection of stories for MonkeyBrain Books with the probable title The Man from the Diogenes Club.

  “ ‘Soho Golem’ is another in the series of 1970s-set barbed pulp-nostalgia stories,” explains Newman. “I’d just written the substantial ‘Swellhead’ (in Night Visions 11), which brings the character of Jeperson into the present day, and wanted to get back to his 1970s heyday.

  “Here, I wanted to get into the history of the British sex industry (traditionally associated with Soho), especially in its faintly embarrassing 1970s period but with roots in things like the nude volleyball films of the late 1950s and the saucy Soho of early 1960s films like Beat Girl and Too Hot to Handle (from which I poached a character).

  “Looking at artefacts like the Confessions series of books and films, it’s impossible to imagine they were ever considered a) hot stuff, b) funny or c) profitable – but they displaced some considerable cultural water at the time. Now, there are a few good books about British sex films or the life and works of Mary Millington, but when these things were going on, it was under everyone’s radar.

  “I remember wandering through Soho with my friend Dean Skilton some time in the 1970s, looking into shops that sold 8mm cut-downs of Laurel & Hardy or Universal horror films out front with doubtless more dubious business in the backroom, and some wideboy type scared us away by offering a good deal on a dozen reels of Nazi concentration camp atrocity footage.

  “There are some proper bits of history here, especially about police corruption and the seedier side of the entertainment industry – but mostly the story’s for fun.”

  “Of all quarters in the queer adventurous amalgam called London, Soho is perhaps least suited to the Forsyte spirit . . . Untidy, full of Greeks, Ishmaelites, cats, Italians, tomatoes, restaurants, organs, coloured stuffs, queer names, people looking out of upper windows, it dwells remote from the British Body Politic.”

  —John Galsworthy

  I Spoiling the Barrel

  ON A FINE MAY DAY in 197–, Fred Regent and Richard Jeperson stood in Old Compton Street, London W1. The pavement underfoot was warm and slightly tacky, as if i
t might retain the prints of Fred’s scruffy but sturdy Doc Martens and Richard’s elastic-sided claret-coloured thigh-high boots.

  Slightly to the North of but parallel with the theatrical parade of Shaftesbury Avenue, Old Compton Street was among Soho’s main thoroughfares. Blitzed in the War, the square mile patch had regenerated patchwork fashion to satisfy or exploit the desires of a constant flux of passers-through. People came here for every kind of “lift”. Italian coffee-houses had opened on this street a century ago; now, you could buy a thousand varieties of frothy heart-attack in a cup. This was where waves of “dangerous” music broke, from bebop to glitter rock. Within sight, careers had begun and ended: Tommy Steele strumming in an espresso skiffle trio, Jimi Hendrix choking in an alley beside The Intrepid Fox.

  Also, famously and blatantly, Soho was a red-light district, home to the city’s vice rackets for two hundred years. Above window displays were neon and plastic come-ons: GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS – LIVE NUDE BED REVUE – GOLDILOXXX AND THE THREE BARES. Above doorbells were hand-printed cards: FRENCH MODEL ONE FLIGHT UP, BUSTY BRUNETTE, BELL TWO, HOUSE OF THWACKS: DISCIPLINE ENFORCED.

  Fred checked the address against his scribbled note. “The scene of the crime,” he told Richard.

  Richard took off and folded his slim, side-panelled sunglasses. They slid into a tube that clipped to his top pocket like a thick fountain-pen. “Just the one crime?” he said.

  “Couldn’t say, guv,” replied Fred. “One big one, so far this week.”

  Richard shrugged – which, in today’s peacock-pattern watered silk safari jacket, was dangerously close to flouncing. Even in the cosmopolitan freak show of Soho, Richard’s Carnabethan ensemble attracted attention from all sexes. Currently, he wore scarlet buccaneer britches fit tighter than a surgical glove, a black-and-white spiral-pattern beret pinned to his frizzy length of coal-black hair, a frill-fronted mauve shirt with collar-points wider than his shoulders, and a filmy ascot whose colours shifted with the light.