The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 20

by Stephen Jones (ed. )

  Danuta stepped down and joined them on the platform, but just as she did so they were hit by the breaking force of passing bodies. It was like being caught in a sudden rush-hour; as though everyone who had ever passed through the terminus had reappeared at the exact same instant, a living wall of flesh and bone that broke them apart with great force and swept them aside.

  Josh’s fingers rose and pawed the air to grasp at Danuta’s hand. For a moment the connection was made and held, but then Danuta was torn from him, dragged down by those even more desperate. Nick launched himself forward and scrambled toward the pair of them, climbing on the backs and shoulders of the dispersing dead.

  He could see the others clearly, but they were moving out of reach in the great churning sea of flesh. He was surrounded by the fearful faces of those about to die, each held in impression rather than detail. Their tormentors – men merely recruited to perform a duty, after all, replaceable faceless servants – were corporeally unrepresented in this seething nightmare. Goaded and panicked, the naked howling mass rushed forward toward the gates. High above them, crimson sparks danced in the ash-laden smoke that belched from the glowing chimney furnaces. The entrance to the crematorium was packed with rushing bodies; everyone who had passed this way, all at once. No fires of Hell had ever born witness to such eager damnation.

  Nick fought to stay afloat in the eddying mass, shouting after Josh as he was borne away toward the gates. Danuta resurfaced near him, and his fist connected with her raised wrist. He pulled hard. He would return her to the carriage and force her to ride the train back to Chelmsk. He would persuade her to surrender her unborn child, a trade that meant saving her own life. She had known the consequences of boarding the Arkangel. He owed her a debt of honour. More, he knew he loved her. He yelled at her to hold on, but the sound of his voice was lost beneath a million others.

  He felt himself being carried backwards toward the open door of the train carriage, turning and tipping until he had lost all sense of balance or direction. When he managed to upright himself he saw the Arkangel’s pistons starting to pump, saw the conductor haul himself up into the train on shattered legs. Before the carriage door was slammed shut he glimpsed Danuta one last time.

  She had found Josh close beside her, and although they could not touch she seemed to draw comfort in his proximity. She looked around for Nick, saw him climbing to his feet in the doorway of the train, and placidly studied his face. Her eyes told him something else, that the child in her belly was his. As if she was freed by imparting this knowledge, she no longer resisted the movement of the crowd but complied with her fate, twisting toward the gates and brick chambers beyond like an exhausted swimmer drifting through an ocean of souls.

  When Nick looked back at the scene through a caul of tears, he found that she and Josh were already lost from view.

  The whistle shrieked and the train began to shunt once more. Through blasts of steam and acrid coal-smoke Nick saw the station roll back and fade like a scene fragmented by migraine.

  When he was finally able to raise his head once more and look from the window, all that remained was the empty plain, the ancient meadowlands, and the approaching forest of silver birches.

  IAN R. MACLEOD

  * * *

  The Camping Wainwrights

  IAN R. MACLEOD HAS BEEN making occasional forays into horror fiction for most of his professional career (including four previous appearances in Best New Horror). In fact, pretty much his first professional sale was to Weird Tales twenty-odd years ago, and involved strange things happening in an ordinary suburban environment – which has turned into a fairly regular theme.

  His most recent novel, Song of Time, won the 2009 Arthur C. Clarke Award, and he is just putting what writers like to tell their agents, editors and families are “the finishing touches” to a new novel set in an alternative version of Golden Age Hollywood.

  “I came up with the idea for ‘The Camping Wainwrights’ after reading about a bipolar dad in one of the Sunday newspapers,” recalls the author, “whose family always knew things would soon be turning wild when he started singing to himself and wearing shorts.”

  IT’S A STRANGE SMELL. Part-familiar, yet feral and strange. Deep odours of trodden grass and wormcasty earth mingle with canvas and fresh air. Even folded fully dry and rolled up and brushed clean of that year’s harvest of grass and beetles, then put away to slumber its winters in our attic, our family tent had a presence. I could imagine it, smell it, resting above me the dark joists beyond my ceiling as I lay in bed – its lumpen shape reminiscent of some alien mummy surrounded by cobwebbed summer offerings of frying pan, peg, groundsheet, folding chair. On those other occasions when I went up into the attic, those seasonal visits to collect the Christmas decorations or put away my year’s worth of school exercise books, its aura was far stronger than anything else. Stronger than that of my old toys, or my rusty pram. Stronger than Christmas itself, even in the times when I still believed in the promises made by tinkling strings of half-dead fairy lights.

  We Wainwrights – Dad, Mum, my elder sister Helen and I – were a camping family. We camped. Even back then in the early 80s, the word camp had other meanings, but Dad could get away with such statements standing talking to the neighbours, or to the blokes he encountered down at the pub. He probably announced it to the kids he taught at his school as well, and most likely didn’t get a single snigger. Camp. Camping. To camp. That was us: the tent, the sizzle of bacon, the great outdoors and the midnight walk to the shower block carrying a damply unravelling roll of toilet paper. We were all defined by the two weeks each summer, and the several weekends, which we routinely spent under canvas.

  Camping, for Dad, was an endless adventure. There were the plans, the trickily unfolded maps, the plastic patchings of the groundsheet and the trips to renew the gas canister which powered the cooker. There were his camping clothes – his shorts, of course, canvas as well – which he kept folded away in a special drawer. There were the winter’s nights of slide shows. I can still hear him humming in the way he only did when he was involved in anything to do with that tent. The compressed atonal sound comes back to me now, along with the endless tink tink tink as, crouched out on the patio in freezing mid-November, he gleefully hammered pegs straight in preparation for next summer’s trip.

  We were all involved. There was no alternative. There were the family sessions, which he scheduled, proclaimed, for whole weeks in advance, during which he would spread out his latest collection of leaflets, brochures and Ordnance Surveys across the kitchen table before Mum, Helen and I, and explain at unstoppably great length exactly what we would be doing in the summer ahead. I remember how the tart and musty smell of the tent seemed to seep down from the attic on those evenings to pervade the house. Later in the night, when I wrestled with sleep, Dad’s voice still droned through the bedroom wall as, punctuated by Mum’s monosyllabic replies, he talked about the drives we would take, the many historic sites and morally improving locations we would visit.

  I wouldn’t say that my sister Helen and I were particularly close – we had our separate interests, and were three years apart in age – but we’d occasionally discuss our schoolfriends’ holidays, which involved package flights to some sunny part of southern Europe. The idea of those bright, white concrete apartments with their proper beds and sea views, a private toilet – shower, even – and chairs that didn’t fold up when you tried to sit on them, seemed an impossible dream. We wondered over the idea of beaches so hot that the sand was impossible to walk barefoot, of lands where you didn’t have to shelter in the damp-smelling “family room” of some out-of-the-way pub from the endless rain or, worse still, sit huddled playing endless rounds of Travel Scrabble in the dripping communal space of our tent. Once, I ducked into a travel agents on the way back from school and grabbed up some package tour brochures on the mumbled pretext of a geography project. I smuggled them home with all the guilty excitement other lads might have experienced with a c
opy of Penthouse. It was all there in those glossy pages, even the sex: those beaches sprawled with bikinied bodies instead of a deserted expanses dotted with a few hardy families huddled behind windbreaks and some locals exercising their dogs. I could almost feel the sun, and taste the absence of canvas. Then, one evening, I lifted the brochures out from their hidden space under my bedroom carpet and found their pages savagely creased and muddied. As if a dog, although we Wainwrights didn’t own a dog, had dragged them across several wet gardens. But what could I have said? Even if I’d confronted Dad, he would have denied all knowledge, or come up with a semi-plausible explanation.

  After all the months of preparation and talk, the day would loom when we were finally to set out again for our summer camping holiday. Mum, who was quiet at the best of times, became quieter, whilst Dad grew louder. His hummings broke into song, or simple ringing shouts of excited affirmation. The process of bringing the tent and all the other camping accoutrements down from the loft was protracted. Everything had to be cleaned, re-assessed, mulled over. There would be lightning trips to obscure shops to buy new aluminium pans or a peg hammer. And it all required an audience, and small delegations. Little tasks which Mum and Helen and I were all expected to perform, and which generally went wrong in strangely unpredictable ways.

  Our tent was a reasonably modern affair; mid-green, with separate inner compartments, and a metal-poled frame which was high enough for even a man as tall as Dad to be able to move around freely within it. The mummy-like sack which it filled was too big to sit in the back of the Volvo, and was laid out in one of those awninged trailers for it which you still often see on summer roads. When the early morning start of our holiday eventually arrived, with the trailer and the car and all our bags and supplies packed and every possible detail itemized, re-checked and accounted for, we would crawl yawning into the car and set off through a world made strange by dawn mists and buzzing milk floats. The route was scheduled long in advance, as were the stops we were supposed to take on it. Dad disliked motorways, so Mum was constantly occupied in deciphering his complex hand-written directions as we veered along A and B roads. The accompaniment to these journeys was Dad’s humming and occasional shouts, along with the cassette tapes which he banged into the slot mouth in the Volvo’s dashboard with all his typical holiday relish. Being the age he was, a child of the ’50s, Dad had an especial liking for the works of Mantovani, Syd Lawrence and Perry Como.

  “Listen to that!” he’d shout over the saccharine racket whilst Mum struggled with all the spewing bits of paper. “So much better than today’s rubbish!”

  Inevitably, we ended up getting lost, although nothing could dent Dad’s holiday mood as we repeatedly circled a roundabout or sat at a junction as holiday traffic growled up behind us. For him, one of the highlights of these long hours of travel was to slow down on the street of an obscure village, wind down the Volvo’s window and beckon some wandering indigene towards him. Absolutely lost, he’d declare. No use asking my navigator. Absolute waste of time. But perhaps you . . .? Whether or not the randomly-chosen local had the faintest idea where we should be going, the one-sided conversation would continue. We’re campers, you see, us Wainwrights. Always have been. Can’t beat the great outdoors, the British Scenery . . . One of Dad’s favourite occupations was talking pointlessly with strangers.

  After several such stops, and occasional pauses for Helen, who grew carsick, to hunch retching over a verge whilst Dad kept the motor revving and sang along to “What Did Delia Wear Boy”, and after he’d taken the navigation over from Mum and cheerily pointed out to us all exactly where she’d gone wrong, we’d finally arrive at the site, and the proper process of camping began.

  Everything had to be choreographed. We all had responsibilities. Found the drinking water tap yet, our Terry? he’d say to me, think it must be over there, after previously sending me off in the opposite direction. All the pegging and the hammering and my getting the guyropes twang-tight, as Dad liked to call it, and searching for this and that small but essential item, which one or other of us were supposed to have packed – and it was never Dad – and which had either gone missing or turned up strangely damaged. That pale, disappointed look on his face again, beneath the smile, now with the two bright red spots on his cheeks which the outdoors always brought out in him.

  Cloudy skies, damp grass. Uneven fields scarred by the yellowed outlines of previous camping families. The smell of slurry from a nearby farmyard, the twittering of skylarks. Further off, the drone of some arterial road. Dad, already in his shorts, and humming, whistling, occasionally letting off those weird shouts, would soon be off to test the lie of the land or reconnoitre the toilet block or check out what the site shop has to offer whilst us other three Wainwrights were still struggling to perform our allotted tasks. Hands deep in his voluminous pockets, clayey white legs protruding, he’d strike up conversations with the families of nearby tents, and even some of the caravans, although he disapproved of the latter as too easy and not quite the real camping experience. Then he’d join in with the football match that many of the younger kids spent most of their holidays playing, calling vigorously for the ball.

  “Ah, this is the life . . .” he’d pronounce as he eased himself back down into one of our folding chairs. “Isn’t the tea up yet, darling? What on earth have you lot all been doing over here . . .?”

  After the traditional camping meal of burnt yet undercooked sausages which Mum had struggled to prepare with some vital utensil missing, the evening, and the even longer night, drifted in. Summer nights are surprisingly dark in Britain, especially in the sort of low, deep, river-strewn valleys which are generally set aside for camping. Surprisingly cold, as well. By ten or ten thirty, as I braced myself for what I hoped would be, but probably wouldn’t, my last trip to the reeking, slippery cavern of the shower block, I would already be shivering.

  “Not going to bed already, our Terry?” said Dad, jiggling his knees in his shorts. “Warm, beautiful night like this! Call yourself a camper, eh?”

  But I knew that the dew would have already have dampened my sleeping bag. And that, just I was unentangling my underpants from my feet before pulling on my pyjamas, my inner tent would unzip, and Dad’s head would appear. Everything alright in there our Terry? he’d enquire cheerily with those two red spots flaring on his cheeks as I hopped about, freezingly naked. Eventually, I worked out that Dad could see what I was doing from the shadows my torch threw against the tent’s lining, and I got changed in darkness instead.

  A chorus of goodnights. Hawks of sputum. Dad’s humming. Canvas zipping and unzipping. That tent-smell, compounded now by the rank rubber of the lilo. Twisting about as you try to find comfort without losing your precious core of bodily heat. The debate, which can fill whole excruciating hours, as to exactly when the moment will come when you’ll have to get up and head for the toilets. Despite the tent’s separate inner compartments, any sense of isolation was illusory. Along with the sounds of the night, you could hear every sigh, move, scratch, swallow, fart or breath anyone else made. Dad snored – snored with the same loud relish with which he did everything else when he was on holiday – but in the proximity of the tent, I was also party to the sounds of his and Mum’s love-making. It would start with a lower-sounding version of Dad’s usual humming. Then, after enough shuffling of sleeping bags and squealing of lilos to set the entire tent swaying, came a stutter of surprised sobs from Mum: the sort of noises you’d expect someone to make in the throes of grief rather than any sort of ecstasy. Followed by owl calls and the tick of the rain as the tent subsided and Dad’s breathing slowed into the rhythm of his snoring, all of it overlaid with the aching sense of my bladder’s imminent over-brimming.

  For all that, there’s something strangely right about camping. It’s where we humans come from – the more northerly sort, anyway, who were never free to sleep under the stars. When I say right, I don’t mean that camping ever felt good, and it certainly wasn’t homely. T
here was just this mustily atavistic sense of doing something which already lies deep under your skin. I felt it when we visited a Neolithic tomb on one of our camping holidays. Stooping under the ancient lintel into the earthy space beneath, I realized instantly from the smell, and the whole dark, damp sense of confinement, what my ancestors had had in mind when they had raised this mound. They had wanted to create a long-lasting replica of the sort of space their dead chieftain would have spent his entire life living in: it was a stone tent.

  Such visits were a common part of Dad’s schedules for our holidays, and we’d be quizzed about them afterwards on the drive back to the site. Now, tell me, Helen, according to the latest geological research, were those lintels brought here from Brittany, or from Cornwall? We were never right, and Dad – who’d been studying the leaflets and guidebooks all winter – was never wrong, but those upturned bowls of earth, upright slabs and vaguely defined ditches spoke to me with a kind of sympathy. I almost felt awe, standing on low hills in the freezing rain, watching the wind-driven mist shimmer around teeth-like circles of stones. Gods were worshipped up here, I realized, and they were the gods of this muddy earth, of this rain, of lives lived barely sheltered in fluttering constructions of leaking animal hide. Something cold arose as I gazed down at the puddled grass and thought of the blood that had once been let here, the sacrifices which had long been made. Lying in our own tent that night after a meal of greasy chicken in another pub’s family room, and listening to continuing rain, the presence of these demanding and capricious beings remained. They drew me closer than I had ever been to making some kind of sense of what it meant to be a camping Wainwright.

  Ever since I could remember, there had always been a feeling of things being marginally askew, of a universe perpetually misbehaving. Early incidents are hard to separate from childhood’s general mess and chaos. Like my favourite Corgi car vanishing, only to resurface months later rusting in the flowerbeds, or the Action Man doll which was left to writhe and melt on the cooker after I’d placed it somewhere else. Such things happen to all kids, and perhaps sometimes I was responsible for them, but I’m as sure now as I was then that, mostly, I wasn’t. Mum, when I came up to her hot-faced and uncomprehending after some new incident, would patiently tidy things up with promises about putting them back together, or dispose of whatever it was straight away if it was clearly ruined. Helen was little better. They had something similar at the back of their eyes – a smudge of resignation which asked What else did you expect, our Terry? This, I soon understood as balls of wool unravelled in Mum’s occasional stabs at knitting and Helen’s dolls lost their eyes, was part of their lives as well. Dad, though, was always solicitous, caring, fascinated as he turned over the evidence of the latest disaster over in his long-fingered hands. Perhaps you dropped it, eh, our Terry? We don’t always remember exactly what we did with things . . . Maybe a cat took it – they do come into the house sometimes. Perhaps it was blown off the table by the wind. Or perhaps you forgot, eh lad? Perhaps it’s that, our Terry. Perhaps you just simply forgot about what you really did with it . . . As I grew older and the incidents and Dad’s explanations grew more baroque, I learned to hide whatever was especially precious to me, although, as with those package holiday brochures, that tactic sometimes failed. It was just another part of our lives, of being a Wainwright – the existence of this capricious poltergeist, which could remain dormant for months, then visit you with some trivial destruction and kneel down afterward to inspect the damage with a broad smile and two pale pinks spots on the cheeks of its equine face. It wasn’t something we other Wainwrights discussed. After all, these things – the dead mouse which turned up in Helen’s old doll’s house, or the lines of Mum’s washing which were repeatedly torn and muddied as they fell across the lawn – are part of the life of every family. As I grew older and Mum’s mutterings became more clipped and monosyllabic, and Dad remained happy as ever to explain things in his own inimitable way, it seemed that there was little else we other Wainwrights could do, other than get on with the life that we were living.