The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 20

by Stephen Jones (ed. )

  The train hurried off, leaving him in his filthy clothes alone on the platform. The exit was bathed in its orange light, and as he walked towards it a strange sound followed. Like the suction of a foot leaving mud, it repeated, echoing off the walls. He looked around but the platform was empty. The noise continued and he wondered if he was really alone, or if someone else had left the subway train while he was too preoccupied to notice. He looked back again, and then moved faster towards the orange stairwell.

  Light spilled from it and flooded the blotched tiles. Philip saw illuminated a dark stream of footprints that curled around the concrete walls and into the stairwell. From the first stair he could just barely see the surface level above and the dark night that already clogged the sky. He climbed the stairs, anxious to escape the shrinking walls and the awful sound behind him, and tried to ignore the feel of the railing, still slick with the sweat of an entire city’s hands.

  A pair of figures crested the top stair. They stood side-by-side, silhouetted by the pale light behind them. They filled the width of the stairwell and began to descend towards him. He stood to the side, unsettled by their approach, to let them pass.

  But when they were almost upon him, Philip recoiled in horror.

  They were six or seven foot tall, coated in some foul black crude like thickened oil; it slowly rippled over their bodies, obscuring their faces and mouths. It seemed to eat the light, and – like two black holes – reflected nothing under the orange glow.

  Philip found the first stair behind him, and then the next, and soon scrambled back down them to the platform. He needed to escape from those barren faces and find his way free.

  He turned the corner and there were more faceless shadows awaiting him. They grabbed his shoulders, black stuff swimming frantically over their hands, and touched his face. He felt numb instantly and his legs crumbled, dropping him to his knees. Philip’s stomach constricted, muscles convulsing, lungs filling, and he coughed up a thick, viscous fluid. With a shudder, his gut exploded, and a torrent of black grease poured from him like blood, covering the ground. Dark figures stood around him, their faces a swirling mass, black sputum pooling at their feet, as one by one Philip’s muscles failed. His whole body revolted, liquid spilling out, and he collapsed onto the drowned square tiles.

  Slowly, the world stopped moving, and for a brief moment threatened to never resume.

  Then, drop after drop, the congealed oil crept back towards Philip’s lifeless body. It crawled onto his chest, into his hair, through his clothes. More followed, faster, coating his body in a layer of sludge, of bile, of everything that had filled him for so long. It covered him, flowing thick like a river across the surface of his cooling skin. Eddies swirled in his eyes, finding banks in the angles of his bones. It was a torrent flooding over him, a tumultuous sea, as silent as the shadows that looked on.

  Eventually the waves subsided, and the liquid began to calmly move beneath the dull orange lights of the deserted subway platform, swirling in odd patterns.

  Then, something stood, and one more shadow joined the night.

  LYNDA E. RUCKER

  * * *

  These Things We Have Always Known

  LYNDA RUCKER CURRENTLY lives in Athens, Georgia in a rambling old house with her partner and lots of books, an overgrown yard, and one fussy cat imported from Ireland.

  This is her third appearance in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Her fiction has also appeared in Black Static and Supernatural Tales, among other magazines, and she has a story in the forthcoming anthology Apparitions, due out from Screaming Dreams Press in 2010.

  “On an afternoon break from one in a series of deadly dull office jobs I once held,” Rucker recalls, “this narrator’s voice stole into my head and started telling me about the very strange sort of work that he did and the even weirder place where he lived.

  “I wrote it all down on a yellow legal pad (possibly pilfered from an office supply cabinet) and, consumed as I was at that time with that ‘anywhere-but-here’ feeling, I really did think that Cold Rest, creepy and apocalyptic as it was, seemed preferable to the place I found myself in that day.”

  COLD REST IS THE NAME of this hard town scratched out on the side of a Georgia mountain ridge, so far to the north it’s bleeding over into North Carolina, really, although it doesn’t seem much to belong to either place. The people here have a certain way of talking, like you’ll find in isolated regions, the kinds of places no one ever really leaves and that outsiders never move to, or even visit.

  I have always known that there was something wrong in Cold Rest. People round here laugh when they say, something in the water, but it’s true that the community my wife was raised in is not like other places. And there is a hardness about every single resident of Cold Rest – Sarah included – that is, in the end, like living alongside something rigid and alien. It hasn’t been a perfect relationship; in twenty years we’ve had plenty of opportunity to hurt one another. I think Sarah still gets the occasional note or e-mail from the man she thought about leaving me for (though she never would have) five years ago. You learn to overlook these things. Here in Cold Rest, things are different, as I have said.

  That something was always waiting in Cold Rest we all knew. You often had the feeling that you were in a room with someone, even when alone, who was getting ready to speak, making barely audible noises prior to forming actual words. You felt it sometimes like a seismic rumble deep in the earth. When you dreamed it you never could remember the following day, just a kind of uneasiness like something had crawled into your brain in the night and left the faintest of markings behind, a gloss of breath where your own thoughts used to lie.

  “That one’s lovely, Neil.” Until Sarah spoke I didn’t know she’d been watching me. She came forward and touched the robin I’d been carving as gently as if it had been alive. Dusk had descended while I was out there in my little workshop at the back of the house. I had lost track of time.

  Sarah frowned when she saw what else I was working on, an abstract sculpture about half her height, rusted wire twisted into irregular angles broken by slivers of mirror. Everywhere that the robin whittled out of oak was warm and comforting, this seemed designed to inflict a kind of wound upon the observer. I worked on the robin when I got blocked on the other piece.

  “I wish you’d just stick to carving birds and dogs like you used to,” she said. “You never made anything like this before.”

  I just shrugged.

  “Dinner’s ready. And Gary’s here.”

  That surprised me. I hadn’t heard my brother’s truck – though it’s true that I sometimes get so engrossed in my work that I am not really aware of anything outside it – and Gary hadn’t dropped in to see us in a long time. He lived a couple of hours away, so it wasn’t as though he’d just stop in casually.

  I looked over the robin I’d been carving, ran one finger along its breast, felt something stirring. It seemed finished.

  “What does he want?”

  Sarah said, “I think he wants a job.”

  My brother’s a writer – no, you probably haven’t heard of him; when he tells people the names he writes under you can see them being sorry they’ve asked, anxious in case it turns out the names ought to ring a bell.

  Gary prefers to think of himself as a regular guy. I know because he’s told me so many times. He writes horror, thrillers, crime, whatever he can get paid for – Sarah says a romance novel here and there, though he’s never admitted it to me – and that seems all right to him because it’s regular-guy fiction.

  We were sitting down to dinner, the four of us – our teenaged daughter Emma crept out of her room and joined us – and I said it outright. “I don’t know, Gary. I mean, I’m sure I could get you on at the yard, but why in hell you want to go and do something like get a job? And why here?”

  Gary looked at his food and mumbled. “Headaches. I’ve been getting these damn fierce headaches. I don’t have any health plan and I’m scar
ed to see a doctor. Something’s really wrong, I could be paying them off for the rest of my life.”

  There was a silence round the table, except for the sound of Emma’s chewing with her mouth open.

  Gary tried to laugh. “Thought I’d try to get me some of that sick leave you working folks are always talking about. Imagine getting paid to lie in bed all day and puke!”

  I said, “It doesn’t really work that way,” but Sarah cut me off with a look.

  “Besides,” Gary went on, “the things that go on here sometimes with those carvings you do, I figure maybe I could use a jolt of that for my books.”

  Sarah said, “It doesn’t happen the way you tell it to, Gary. Neil’s carvings come to life under his hands sometimes, but it’s not anything he can control. You can’t use it for your own purposes.”

  When Sarah says come to life you understand that she is not speaking figuratively. I have told that you Cold Rest is not like other places.

  “Well,” Gary said, “I’d sure like a chance to try.”

  Sarah changed the subject. “How’s Barbara?” she asked, referring to Gary’s long-time, on-again off-again girlfriend.

  “She got married last month.”

  Emma scraped her chair back and announced that she was going out. Her hair was black as pitch that night and falling across her face. The week before it was emergency-red. It was as though someone different sat down to dinner with us every few nights, although even without the outlandish hair I felt like I didn’t know her any longer. She’s grown so tall in the last couple of years, and her hands are long and delicate, pianist’s hands, except she hasn’t touched Sarah’s grandmother’s baby grand in the living room since she reached her teens. She has dark eyes and her mouth is sulky, at least around Sarah and me. Sarah said she was sure Emma and her boyfriend were having sex, but that she didn’t know what to do about it. I said, I’m sure you’ll handle it, because I didn’t even want to think of it, and I didn’t know why we had to do anything. That boyfriend of hers, Sam or Simon . . . What kind of a name is Simon anyway? I tried not to look at him when he came to visit. He had soft, puffy hands. I imagined saying something to him like, “You’d better not touch my daughter with those hands!” fully realizing how ridiculous that made me. I said to Sarah, “For God’s sake, she’s only sixteen years old,” and she said, “But don’t you remember sixteen? She seems like a baby to us but at sixteen you think you’re all finished growing up.”

  But. Sixteen! She still looked like a child.

  “I’ll see what I can do for you,” I said to Gary. “You can stay here if you need to. There’s not much in town in the way of rentals.”

  “Why don’t you take Gary out to your shop and show him what you’ve been working on?” Sarah suggested. “Maybe he’ll like them better than I do.”

  Gary always feigned, or perhaps genuinely felt, a polite interest in even my most banal creations. We walked out there while Sarah was brewing coffee. Evenings in Cold Rest are beautiful. There’s a special way the sun slips down the mountain and leaves everything glowing. Tonight we were just in time to see the sky deepen and blaze in all its twilight glory. I dragged a couple of the things I’d been working on out of my shop, because I’d noticed that when the light was right – at about that time of day – the metal I was using glowed like it was plugged into an electrical outlet.

  Gary didn’t touch any of it like he usually does. He stood back a bit and pointed at one of them. “What’s going on there?” he asked.

  I had stretched and hammered torn strips of canvas across an irregularly shaped cage I’d built, and along the sides threaded teeth from the skulls of dead animals I’d come across in the woods.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I just felt like it had to look that way.”

  Gary didn’t say anything for a long time. Finally, “I don’t like it.”

  That shocked me, and it hurt a little. Gary always liked what I did. He was younger than me, but I treated him more like an older brother, anxious for his approval. I’d never been real proud of my woodworking before, mediocre stuff I could’ve sold at inflated prices in some of the tourist towns to folks who didn’t know any better. For the first time, making these sculptures that came to me in dreams, I felt like I was doing something that mattered.

  “I think you ought to get rid of them and go back to making birds and baby rabbits, even if some of them do get away from you,” he said, and then he was heading for his truck just like he hadn’t said he was going to sit a while and have coffee with Sarah and me, and she came out the back door when she heard his engine and looked at me with a question in her eyes. Had we argued? I shook my head, to show her I didn’t know.

  The following evening, when I got out to the shop after work, I found the robin with its neck broken. I’d forgotten to set it outside before I closed up for the night, and it had flown repeatedly against the windows.

  I cradled it in my palms and carried it in to show to Sarah and Emma. I felt so bad, like I’d taken it up in my own two hands and dashed it against the wall. Like I’d created something just so it could suffer and die. We buried it in the backyard because it didn’t seem right to just throw it out, and Emma set a little ring of stones round its grave.

  Sarah teaches English at the local junior high school in town. At night sometimes, to help me unwind, she reads me poems. I like the ones that rhyme. I know that’s not very sophisticated of me, but there it is. My favourite poet is Robert Frost. Emma said, “Sean (or Stan, or Steve, or whatever his name is) is a poet and he said Robert Frost was supposed to have been a real dick.” Sarah said, “Emma!” and Emma said, “What? I’m just saying,” and I didn’t say anything at all. Instead I repeated lines of poetry to myself. I like the one about miles to go before I sleep.

  Sarah had Emma’s boyfriend in her class a few years ago. She said he “had quite a way with words for such a young person”. This made me feel like she was taking sides with Emma and that boy, against me. Sarah writes poetry, just for herself. Once in a while she’ll read one to me. They don’t rhyme, and I don’t understand them, although I pretend like I do. I think this is one of the things she liked about the man she had the affair with. He was a poet of moderate renown – if you move in those circles, which I don’t; I took Sarah’s word for it – and she met him when she taught in a special program down south for gifted children a few summers ago. I remember how she was for a while afterwards. Not better, not worse, just a different Sarah; their intimacy drew out dormant parts I’d not known in her. She used words and turns of phrases she hadn’t before. Her mind strayed to subjects I was unaccustomed to. They weren’t his words, his subjects. They belonged to Sarah, but it was all hidden geography in the context of our relationship.

  Maybe that was why she and Gary didn’t like what I was working on. Maybe it was as simple as that, the unaccustomedness, the fact that they were used to seeing me work with wood and blade to make cosy scenes like fox families or spring fawns. I told myself that while she read to me that night by the fire, got lost in the words she was speaking till I fell asleep dreaming of the bird pitching itself against the glass, trying to get free, until it shattered the bones in its neck, and she had to wake me to send me to bed.

  I knew that Emma was gone almost before she actually left. I thought afterwards about that word – almost – such a little word, six letters and the difference between what was and what might have been. I woke covered in a bad dream, and I felt something wrong in the night. Something gone out of the house. Later, when I talked to Sarah about it, she said I must have woken up earlier, unknowing, when Emma closed the front door, or heard the engine of whatever car swept her into the night and away from us. I told her she must be right. But I knew what woke me was the simple fact of her absence, unnatural and complete. The house fairly vibrated with the lack of her. Had I known, in my dreams, that she was going? Had I let her go, to find out how far away she could get?

  I was right all along not to trust th
at boy.

  The week after Gary came to dinner – before Emma had left us – he accompanied me to the yard for the first time. I showed him round a little bit, and he went to talk to Human Resources, a phrase which has always had a little too literal a turn to it for my liking.

  Gary talked a good game about honest manual labour but he’s never been the type to break a sweat, and I knew he’d wind up taking a position in the office. I can’t blame him for that. It gets unbearably hot in the yard in summer, and in the winter the ground freezes hard. I’ve seen folks felled by heat stroke and frostbite and worse things, because of what it is we’re digging out of the ground there. And we sink mine shafts deep into the earth, even though it’s getting harder to find people willing to go under the ground like that. Mostly just the old-timers’ll take that kind of work.

  Gary moved into our spare room, and he got up and went to work every day, and locked himself away when he came home, only venturing out for dinner. I figured he must be getting a lot of writing done. It got so we were seeing more of Emma than him, and that’s saying something. I didn’t pay him much attention, to be honest, because I’d been dreaming again about what I wanted to work on next, and the dreams were strange and left me with a taste in my mouth like cold metal. I didn’t have clear pictures in my head of the devices I needed to build next, but the designs seemed etched into the movement of my hands.

  And then Emma was gone, and the work was all that could soothe me, take my head somewhere it wasn’t worried sick about what was happening to her. The police said they’d do all they could, and none of her friends knew a thing. Sean’s – or Seth’s – or Sam’s mother visited Sarah one day; I couldn’t bear to be around her, a wan, ineffectual woman. I headed out to the shop.

  After a while Gary joined me. I was painting sheets of tin in coat after coat of black paint. I wanted to get a deeper black than I’d ever seen in nature. I asked Gary if he thought it was working. He didn’t answer me.