The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 20

by Stephen Jones (ed. )

  Men have gone to search the waters off the coast, below Hampp. They find nothing of the dead ships. We took all there was to take. As for corpses, bones, theirs and ours are all mingled, like the gargoyles and angels in the stones of the beach.

  When I did tell the priest of the ship, he refused to believe me. So I have told you now and let it be written down, since I was never learned to make my letters.

  You see there is an iron manacle on my ankle, but it is quite a comfort. It supports the aching bone that snapped. The rope perhaps will support my neck and then that will be crushed, or it will also break, and then I will leave this world to go into the other place, from which golden things issue out.

  It is kind they let me say farewell to Iron, my dog. Yes, even though he is no longer mine. They have told me a widow woman, quite wealthy, is eager to have him, since her young son is so taken with Iron, and Iron with him likewise. I have witnessed it myself, only this morning from this window, how the dog walked with the child along the street, Iron wagging his strong old tail that is only a touch grey to one side. The child is a fair boy too, with dark sad eyes that clear when he looks at Iron. And certainly his mother is wealthy, for her cloak is of heavy fur.

  That is all then. That is all I need to say.

  No. I am not sorry for my village. No. I am not afraid to go to the scaffold. Or to die. No, I am not afraid of these things. It is the other place I fear. The place that comes after. The place they are in, the men of Hampp, and my father too. The place where she came from. The Ship. I cannot even tell you how afraid I am, of that.

  CHRISTOPHER FOWLER

  * * *

  Arkangel

  CHRISTOPHER FOWLER’S FIRST BOOK, How To Impersonate Famous People, was published in 1984. However, it is as an author of horror and mystery fiction that he is best known.

  His first thriller was the 1988 bestseller Roofworld. Subsequent novels include Rune, Spanky, Psychoville, Disturbia and the “Bryant & May” series of classic mysteries featuring two elderly, argumentative detectives.

  His short fiction has been collected in two volumes of City Jitters, Bureau of Lost Souls, Sharper Knives, Flesh Wounds, Personal Demons, Uncut, The Devil in Me and Demonized.

  Fowler has worked in the movie industry for more than thirty years. He has written comedy and drama for BBC Radio, has a weekly column in the Independent on Sunday newspaper, and has written articles and columns for The Times, Time Out, Black Static, Smoke, Pure, Dazed and Confused, the Big Issue and many others, including penning BBC Radio l’s first-ever broadcast drama in 2005.

  His 1997 graphic novel for DC Comics was the critically acclaimed Menz Insana. His short story “The Master Builder” became a CBS movie entitled Through the Eyes of a Killer starring Tippi Hedren and Marg Helgenberger, while his filmed short stories include “Left Hand Drive”, “On Edge”, “Perfect Casting”, “The Most Boring Woman in the World” and “Rainy Day Boys”.

  In fact, the author has achieved several ridiculous schoolboy fantasies, including releasing a Christmas pop single, writing a stage show, being used as the model for a Batman villain, appearing in The Pan Book of Horror Stories and standing in for James Bond. He lives in a glass penthouse overlooking London’s King’s Cross area. His autobiography, Paperboy, was published in 2009.

  His fiction has been regularly nominated for awards, including the Bram Stoker Award and the Dilys Award. His collection Old Devil Moon received both the 2008 Edge Hill Award and the British Fantasy Award, while The Victoria Vanishes won the 2009 Last Laugh Award for a humorous crime novel at Bristol CrimeFest.

  “I was at a very Gothic wedding in Poland,” recalls Fowler, “in a walled town filled with amazing churches – the kind of place that has changed so little in sixty years that I half-expected to see troops stepping around corners.

  “The wedding was the kind complete with family dramas, a hair-raising last-minute dash to the church, a wedding feast that lasted a day and a night, and a trip on an ancient deserted train through the countryside with Izabella, the beautiful bride, her new husband Roger, and a bunch of party animals.

  “I love train travel, and we started making up stories, hanging out in the corridor with bottles of beer. We reached Gdansk, but by this time I could no longer remember where I was staying, so we checked into an entirely different town where – for some bizarre reason – the Chinese Terracotta Warriors were being displayed in an old cinema. The odd mix of crazy people and Gothic images created this.”

  THE RIVETS WERE WHITE GOLD, fading to crimson and blood brown before they had been fully hammered into place. Iron plate and tempered steel, rods and bolts glimpsed through fire and steam in the cuprous stench of annealing metal. The world of the engines was ever like this.

  The result was a magnificent piece of craftsmanship, but perhaps they were punished for showing too much pride. One of the workers brought in from Wolsztyn Depot had the four fingers of his right hand sheared off in the engine’s coupling joint just hours before the dedication ceremony, and the cheap Russian grease they used on the plates infected the wound so badly that by the time the ambulance reached the hospital, his arm was a livid poison sac. Amputation should have caught the contagion, but no; they buried him beside the track less than twenty-four hours after the Arkangel rolled out of its shed. No one pretended the work was easy, but jobs were hard to come by back then and the line brought hope, even if the means of achieving such prosperity also carried lasting shame.

  He caught every third word, then realized he was falling asleep. Josh Beckmann wasn’t much of a reader. He threw the guidebook aside and wiped the condensation from the car window, complaining about how long it was taking to reach the town. It was getting too dark to read anyway, and the journey was taking longer than he’d expected. Fields, grey woodlands and factories at low light levels, every Eastern European nation was like this. There was nothing out there to give a clue of what the country was really like.

  Nick looked over at his old friend and wondered again what they were doing here. There was no real reason why he and Josh should still be friends; they had nothing much in common. At art college they had been as close as knives in a drawer. As an adult Josh was a collection of passions and skills to which he could barely relate. A degree in graphic design. A career in real estate. Hobbies that included calligraphy and rebuilding an old Camaro. Josh never kept his girlfriends longer than nine months. He was a reliable man to call in an emergency. He never forgot birthdays. He always spent Passover with his family. He had a temper. He had fallen in love with a girl he’d only met twice. That didn’t explain why Nick should agree to accompany him on a pair of cheap, appalling Ryanair flights to a country he knew nothing about. Perhaps he was just curious.

  And who am I? he thought idly. I have a job I hate. I have a scrubby beard I stubbornly refuse to shave off. I have few opinions of my own, no faith and no loyalties to speak of. I am unformed and unfinished. And I have no idea – literally or figuratively – where I might be heading.

  The backfiring Mercedes powered past a sulphurous smelting plant, a low modern brick factory that glowed in the country night like the site of a nuclear accident, its rotten-egg reek forcing the driver to close the last inch of his window. A housing estate had been constructed next to the sinister block, its dark gardens bristling with frozen washing and plastic children’s toys.

  “Does it often smell as bad as that?” Nick asked the driver.

  “All the time.”

  “How can people live so close?”

  “The houses were cheap,” the driver answered with a shrug. “They can keep their doors shut.”

  The dank green forest of spruce closed in about them. By the side of the road, an incredibly drunk old man was being helped home by his friend. The going must have been slow, because neither of them had much use left in their rubbery legs. The Mercedes had passed quite a few drunks on the way. One had toppled from his bicycle right in front of them. The driver had swerved around him, act
ing as if it was the most normal thing in the world to do. October in rural North-Eastern Poland; Nick figured there wasn’t a whole lot else for them to do except get smashed during the lengthening autumn nights.

  They reached Chelmsk at 9:00 pm, and saw even fewer people on the streets than they’d passed in the countryside. Beyond the smeared taxi windscreen were the high, featureless outer walls of the town, punctuated by nine immense dark churches. There had been fifteen before the war, according to the driver.

  The town was stripped of features, silent, dead. No advertising hoardings, no pedestrians, no lit windows. Bare wide streets without cars of any description, a few shuttered shops, a windswept concrete town square with a green metal barn used for a vegetable market and yet another church at its centre, this one even more vast and forbidding. A plasticky orange pizza parlour was tucked into the ground floor of what looked like the only building to be built in the last sixty years. It was shut.

  “Where is everyone?” asked Josh, pulling his holdall together as the driver pulled over. “Jesus, it’s Saturday night. Danuta is going to owe me for getting her out of here.”

  The hotel was a surprise, a gabled coaching inn with a cobbled courtyard like the ones in Hammer horror films, empty white stables and a well that was too perfect to be real. The whole place was so freshly painted, planted and preserved that it might have been built a week ago. Johann, the boy running the inn, was younger than either of them. He could not take credit cards, so Nick and Josh gave him cash for two nights. Johann took them up to their rooms, leading the way to a corridor that cut through the middle of the first floor. He eagerly insisted on carrying the bags by himself, smiling with a hopeful innocence that would not survive his youth.

  Danuta was waiting for them in the bar, unaccountably nervous and fidgety.

  Nick had forgotten how stunning she was, large black eyes set in a heart-shaped face, framed with glossy bobbed hair as black as obsidian. She wore plenty of make-up – her arms were paler than her cheeks – but the look suited her perfectly. A tiny waist and long legs accentuated by her black dress, silver buckled shoes, and the clincher – black-framed glasses that had the odd effect of making her appear demure and dangerous. There was a sense of purpose about her. She constructed her English sentences with a determination that conveyed meaning by emphasis. It gave her an attractive way of stressing certain words. Unlike most of the girls Josh picked up in clubs, she listened and responded in a way that showed she thought carefully about everything he said. She knocked the rest of them out of the field, and Nick couldn’t for the life of him see what she admired in his friend, unless she really was planning to use Josh as a means of escape. Nobody could have called him attractive. He was stout and dark, with thinning corkscrew hair, but could be smart and quick-witted, even charming when he made the effort, and she responded enthusiastically to that.

  He had met her in one of those Soho clubs that were doomed to disappear after three months, and was a lucky dog for having done so. She had been standing at the bar in the same black dress and silver heels she was wearing tonight. He had singled her out among the bony suburban stalkers, recognizing a timeless appeal in her that eluded the other girls in the room, who were dressed like Victoria Beckham and were out of date in the latest outfits. Danuta was visiting London with her sister, and had managed to slip away for a few precious, thrilling hours. She had come to enjoy the atmosphere of a London bar, and wasn’t interested in meeting anyone. Her lack of desperation separated her from the crowd. The three of them had danced together, and ended up back at Josh’s flat.

  Danuta stayed around the next day, although there were urgent whispered arguments with her sister on the phone. Tousled and hungover, she peered out from Josh’s white towelling robe with the sleeves rolled up, the dark flame of a votive candle. There was an indefinable sadness beneath her surface that flickered in moments of lost concentration.

  Nick cooked them all breakfast. Danuta read the papers, commenting on stories. Josh sat at the kitchen table, smoking and looking anxious. The situation felt unusual.

  Josh’s suggestion – to come to Poland and bring her back to London – caught them all by surprise. Two months had passed since they met, and in that time he had not mentioned her once.

  Danuta accepted a bottle of oak-flavoured vodka from the barman, and set it down before them. As they drank, she picked at the silver label with an ebony nail and confided in Josh, outlining her reservations about the elopement. The couple had an intensity that left Nick feeling aware of his status as the single friend dragged along for support.

  Looking around the bar, he studied the carved wooden rabbits and chickens on the counters and side tables. They covered virtually every surface, inane but curiously touching. Yellow gingham curtains, pickled fruits in great glass jars, bouquets of dried flowers, plaited loaves of bread suspended on the walls; it was like being in some kind of fairytale woodcutter’s cottage. The place was cosy and comfortable, and the vodka dropped a warming root through his chest. There were only four other people in the place, all old men. It felt like four in the morning.

  He heard Josh ask Danuta where everyone was, and she told them that people stayed home most of the time.

  “It’s not a typical Polish town,” she explained. “They don’t like strangers here and barely even talk to each other, except in church or the shops.”

  “Why is that?” Nick asked.

  Danuta shook the fingers of her right hand, a universal gesture of dismissal. “Oh, you know, bad things. Old history. They don’t like to forget, even though they should let go of the past.”

  “That’s why you have to leave this place,” said Josh. “Did you tell your parents about your plans?”

  “I wanted to, but I could find no way of explaining.” Josh had suggested that she should post them a letter before she left, then come to London and get waitress work until something better came along.

  “So you didn’t tell anyone at all?” Josh asked.

  “Well.” She thought for a moment, framing her words. “I told some of my closest friends – but not my family. It is difficult for them to know how I feel. My father is old. He would not understand.”

  And there the matter was left.

  Grandpapa should have been proud to be selected for such an important position, but a sense of foreboding crept through his bones every time he hauled himself up onto the footplate of the Arkangel. Men had died building the train, and what was this grand machine to be used for? Ferrying the directors and a lucky handful of the town’s best families on pleasure trips to the seaside!

  Food had been scarce in the town of late. Even the price of turnips had soared so much that people no longer fed shavings to the pigs. But no expense was to be spared on the train. The priests said it would bring new prosperity to the town, but lately they had been proven wrong every time they opened their mouths.

  Sighing, grandpapa adjusted his cap and signalled to the driver. With an angry blast of steam, the shining behemoth rolled forward out of the station.

  Nick had the impression that Danuta thought Josh would get serious with her when they returned to London, and then she could tell her sister and her father. But to anyone who knew him, settling down was clearly the last thing on Josh’s mind.

  The distance between their future dreams made Nick uncomfortable, because he saw the situation from both sides. He wanted to encourage Josh to be honest, but did not know how best to broach the subject.

  While they ate platefuls of perogi and drank more vodka, Nick figured out what to do. Knowing that Danuta would have to go home to her parents’ house tonight, he decided to take Josh to a bar in town, where he could sit him down in a quiet corner.

  Except that nothing went according to plan. When he suggested going for a late drink Danuta announced that she was coming with them, and they could hardly turn her down. The trio left the inn and headed toward the only open bar in Chelmsk.

  The great dark churches dominated the t
own, forbidding and somehow unwholesome, their decaying walls patched and repaired where wartime bullets had taken their toll. It was so quiet that the click of their shoes echoed against the peeling buildings. A series of tin lamps, suspended across the empty cobbled street, formed sharp cones of yellow light. They passed a peculiar poster for gypsum cement that featured three bald plasterers, a gate topped with a statue of a bear in striped trousers, and a shop with a giant carrot in the window. On every street there was at least one building with a disproportionately tall Gothic tower. There was no graffiti anywhere.

  “I’ve never been anywhere as weird as this,” Josh said. “It’s like everyone’s gone away.”

  “They just remain asleep,” Danuta replied, somewhat mysteriously. “The people here are very private. Too many years of trouble. Twice before in the last century nearly everyone in this town suffered badly. First during the war, then under the communists. Many were taken away. Many died. The ones who survived do not like to forget.”

  “Are you sure this bar will be open?” Josh was shivering. He hadn’t brought a sweater with him, and a chill wind was pushing down the temperature.

  “It is owned by an old friend of mine,” she assured them. “He knows I am going away. He will be open for us tonight.”

  A small blue neon sign, ARTYK BAR, hung behind railings in the basement of a tall grey building with scabby cement walls, as if ashamed to announce that it was open at all. Danuta held the gate back for them. Inside was another cosy, wintry room filled with the smell of spiced roast pig, but the spit had been cleaned and there was no indication that the place had ever experienced custom. The CD player was spinning something Nick took to be Polish pop, or possibly an album of Eurovision Song Contest winners.

  The man behind the counter was wearing a richly patterned sweater of the kind you could only find in rural Europe. There were red and yellow elks dancing around his neck. He shook their hands with an old-world solemnity that belied his youth, introducing himself as Idzi, short for something unpronounceable. He was pleased to see Danuta, less thrilled to meet her new male friends. After a few vodkas he warmed and became talkative, but it was obvious that he used to go out with her and wished they had not broken up. He asked about London, the music, the clubs, the cost of clothes. He had come here from Gdansk when he was fourteen. Gdansk was cool, there was a lot to do at night, this town was too quiet for him. They answered his questions and drank. You could smoke in the bar – Idzi was surprised when they asked permission.