I wouldn’t want you to think that I am totally obsessed by my garden. I do have other interests: reading, for one, and my voluntary work. But gardening is the way I unwind; it soothes away the cares of the day, and keeps me fit. I’ve never been one for the gym – by the look of you I expect you go regularly. When you get to my age you have to allow for a bit of running to seed, middle-aged spread – as you know, we don’t have any children to chase around after – although I must say that Stephan somehow manages to keep himself in trim.
We did try to have children but it wasn’t to be. I’m not one for test tubes and hormones and what have you. I think it’s best to accept the hand you’re dealt on that score. I thought about adoption or fostering, but Stephan wasn’t keen. He said, “I don’t want to look after someone else’s kids”, which is, I suppose, an entirely natural response. This would’ve been a good garden for children to play in, though, wouldn’t it? With all its nooks and crannies. There are plenty of places to hide and you could play cricket on the lawn.
I love columbines – don’t you? So willowy and delicate-looking. And so easy to grow; they sow themselves everywhere. In fact I spend quite a lot of time digging up the seedlings so that they don’t completely take over. For such a fragile-looking plant it’s very invasive.
Some plants are like that; you have to take them in hand. Others – that delphinium there, for instance – need nurturing and protecting from slugs and the wind otherwise they’d never flower at all. And the lilies, so showy and fragrant, so worth the wait! I have even had some success with roses, although black-spot is a perennial problem. Each flower in the garden has its season – its time and its place – and the picture changes from week to week, day to day even, so you never get bored. Well I don’t, anyway. I feel I am here to nurture each plant and encourage it to perform to the best of its ability.
The blackbird is singing again I hear – such a chirpy bird and so unafraid. Of course they’re a devil when it comes to fruit! I protect the currant bushes and the strawberries with netting, but they always manage to get in somehow. I have come to accept a certain amount of depredation, but how far should you allow it to go before taking more stringent measures? And just how rigorous should those measures be? Most people would think nothing of spraying aphids with insecticide or poisoning slugs and snails, even trapping a mouse. Is it the size of the predator that determines our response? To my way of thinking you should not be squeamish when protecting your own.
The shotgun belongs to my uncle: I’ve borrowed it to shoot the rabbits that have been eating my vegetables. Not strictly legal, I know – I don’t have a firearms’ licence – but it’s the only way I can think of to get rid of them. My neighbours have become used to the occasional shot and they’re sympathetic because the rabbits are menacing their gardens too.
I’m always on the lookout for new ways to adorn the garden – I did well at the salvage yard, not only finding these chairs and the table, but also the wrought-iron bench through the archway and the stone mermaid fountain in the fishpond. I thought as soon as I saw you that you would be an adornment to any setting, so slim and young and pretty – I could understand what Stephan sees in you – but you’re a bit of a disappointment close up.
In fact you don’t look too good at all now – bloated and blue around the edges, with the flies crawling into your eyes.
Like the honey fungus in my soil, the blight in my crop, I have dug you out, and now I must burn you. The neighbours are used to my bonfires and will think nothing of it. Stephan is coming home from his work trip this evening and unless I get on with it, you will still be sitting here, corrupting my garden. I thought that I had found the way to end the situation but after our chat I can see that you’re going to be another work in progress. If I am not careful and clever about disposing of you, you could still spoil my design. I have to maintain constant vigilance to keep everything in the garden rosy.
STEPHEN VOLK
After the Ape
STEPHEN VOLK IS THE creator/writer of ITV’s award-winning paranormal drama series Afterlife and the notorious, some say legendary, BBC-TV “Hallowe’en hoax” Ghostwatch.
His other credits as screenwriter include Gothic, directed by Ken Russell, The Guardian, directed by William Friedkin, and Octane. He also won a BAFTA Award for The Deadness of Dad, an acclaimed short film starring Rhys Ifans. His latest feature script, The Awakening, is now in production starring Rebecca Hall, Dominic West and Imelda Staunton.
Volk’s first short-story collection, Dark Corners, featured the story “31/10”, which was nominated for both a British Fantasy Award and a Bram Stoker Award, and was reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Twentieth Annual Collection. More recently, he has been nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award for his novella Vardøger. He is also a regular columnist for the British horror and dark fantasy magazine Black Static.
“The notion of ‘what happened next?’ following a classic monster movie – probably the biggest and best – was an intriguing one to me,” says the author, “and not only the initial considerations of public health issues.
“Somehow kicking this off and shadowing its development was reading somewhere that King Kong was Hitler’s favourite film. Why?
“Anyway the ape is not the monster in this tale. Far from it.”
IT WAS DIFFICULT for her to function with any kind of normality. Not when her lover was lying below, crisscrossed by ropes like Gulliver, people hacking out the insides of his body like whalers from Nantucket.
She’d taken to having her first cigarette while still horizontal, sucking in her already sunken cheeks, drifting into the penumbra of being fully awake. The morning newspaper was always lying outside the door but she didn’t read it any more. Always full of stuff she didn’t want to hear. Stuff that made her feel angry and sickened. Him. Herself. The lies. The legend. The jungle. What did they know about the jungle? They hadn’t been there. None of them had.
In time the salty soreness of her tears compelled her to sit up in the cold of the hotel room, icy shoulders trembling, tiny arms frozen and white.
Doll eyes stared from the mirror. She hadn’t set foot outside for how many days now? How many weeks?
She didn’t care: the room was safe. She was untouchable there, alone with her menagerie of thoughts and memories. Sometimes she wondered if she left or was made to leave those thoughts and memories might remain, like ghosts, her misbegotten soul haunting the building while her physical body was wheeled away on a gurney, nothing left of her but a soft-focus studio publicity shot and an obit in Variety. Somehow she knew how the headline would go.
What did they know? They knew shit.
That was the Bowery girl talking. That’s what she was, after all, down to her raggedy-ass bones. And none of the glamour and pearls and platinum curls of Hollywood could cover that up for her in the end. Once a bum, always a bum.
She unscrewed the cap from the bourbon.
(Poppa’s favourite)
Prohibition. Joke. There were ways. The tumbler told her it hated to be half full.
The numb, plummeting wash of it brought up an acid reflux that hauled her monstrous hangover with it, dispelling any faint illusion her head was clear. Still, she was grateful for a taste of oblivion. Oblivion was her prime concern, of late. Any other concern – eating, sleeping, dressing – fell poor second. What could you do, when the hangover felt like it would kill you? Keep drinking. Truth is, she barely even tasted it any more.
On her wrist a gift from a producer who had a taste in watching instead of doing said eleven forty-five. Hell. Not that she’d missed anything – just that so much of the goddamn day loomed ahead of her. These days she despised being awake, because being awake meant thinking, and thinking meant remembering.
Twig fingers tweaked at the drapes. She knew sunlight was going to be painful on skeleton skin, but managed to let a gap of a few inches illuminate the scrunched-up sheets, the full ash trays, the dirty glasses, the scattered s
hoes, the half-hung clothes, the latest Paris fashion fur coat strewn on the floor – where it would lie forever if she had her way.
Fur.
Those insensitive bastards at the studio.
Fur.
Last time she listened to the radio it was saying they were giving tours of him now. Taking folks on tours inside him, now. She pictured his chest cavity lit by strings of lamps like Jewel Cave in Custer, South Dakota she remembered visiting as a frightened, inexpressive, barefoot child. She knew they’d take out her insides too, if they could. The birds of prey of the Herald and Times, the graveyard worms and rats in raincoats with Underwoods where their morals should be.
The Story: it was all about getting the Story.
And the Story was her.
And sometimes in the darkness of night and nicotine with the shakes and spiders (Giant! Huge!) it was oh so appealing sometimes to say “Here I am you sons of bitches, do with me what you will – here I am, chained, naked, shrieking – and then it’ll be over and I’ll have peace.”
But this wasn’t just about her. It was about the special thing that she and her lover had found and lost in a heartbeat, a great heartbeat like a jungle drum, and it was that they wanted to stamp all over with their dirty thoughts and bad jokes and fabrications, and she wouldn’t let them. It was too precious. Too rare. Too wonderful. Too strange. Too romantic. Too scary. She wouldn’t let them abuse it and she wouldn’t let them have it to do with as they pleased. It belonged to her. It was all she had left. That and the feeling as she slumbered that once again her lover’s giant fingers were closing warmly around her body and she was safe again. It was the one thing, the giant thing they could never, ever destroy. Not with airplanes. Not with anything.
She heard the beeping of taxi cabs from the street far below. The traffic was moving. The traffic always moved.
She wanted to open the window but she daren’t. The streets of Manhattan still ran sweet with blood. The oceanic stench of decay – a graveyard up-ended, said the radio – hung heavy in the air, and even as the lumberjacks and slaughter-men changed shifts day in, day out, nothing could be done to diminish it. It was a brave tourist indeed among the throng of sightseers from every state in the Union who wouldn’t hold their nose or cover their lower face with a handkerchief when viewing the colossal remains. This Wonder of the World. This hairy Behemoth. This Goliath slain by David.
Goose bumps rose on her arms.
She picked up her dressing gown embossed with the hotel’s elaborate crest and wrapped it around her shoulders. It gave her the warmth of a surrogate embrace. The bourbon – telling her, don’t be shy – gave her another.
It didn’t improve on the first. Instead made her feel sour and queasy, mingling with the disquiet she felt in her nerves and, far from acting as an anaesthetic as she prayed, made her even more anxious with the hermetic silence of the room.
Not suddenly, but with conviction, she realized the very real possibility that she’d go mad here, and be carted to the nut hatch, or end up howling at the wallpaper, or running out into Fifth Avenue, half-naked like Mrs Partigan, who lost her brain and took to going shopping on icy winter nights wearing nothing but her undies, and would be chauffeured home by Rolly Absolom, the local deputy, with admirably sanguine regularity.
That was in Marshall, Nebraska, where she grew up, cold and unhappy, raised under the jurisdiction of her Aunt Jelly after Ma’s last illness. She wished she’d seen her mother before she died – but Brice was on the scene by then and Brice and her didn’t get along, which was like saying the War in Europe was a difference of opinion. So doll-face, porcelain and pure, skipped off school (never did like it, got beat a lot) and hopped on a cattle train to New York like a hobo, but her Ma was already in the ground and Brice was damned if he’d pay the return fare, so she earned that singing on street corners and in various other manners, with a pair of goodish legs and a singing voice that got her by.
It was a tough climb and mostly she counted herself lucky if she made it to the soup kitchen every day. Hoofer. Chorus girl. Arm candy for a rich guy. Good-time Annie for the distracted and misunderstood. Wasn’t too choosy. Couldn’t afford to be. When you’ve slept on a doorstep in the pouring rain, you didn’t ask to see a resumé. If the collar was clean, or if there was a collar, the feller was plenty good enough for you. For a night, anyhow: especially if he was paying for a bed. They started saying she should be in movies, and she heard that so many times it turned out to be true. She was good at acting. Every day of her goddamn life.
Tired of her own prehistory, she sat on the side of the bed and rang down for room service. The hotel operator’s voice was chirpy and infantile, making her wonder if the girl was retarded: nobody could be that happy – unless maybe she was on the bourbon too.
She had a difficult time with the words so she stayed monosyllabic: ham, bread, eggs. The girl repeated back her order, making it sound much more coherent and said it would be twenty, twenty-five minutes.
“Is there anything else I can help you with, ma’am?”
The actress spooled through a list of requests in her mind: a life, happiness . . . but said: “No. Just that.”
Hung up, thinking, did she know? Of course she knew. They all did. Probably snickering up her sleeve right now. Calling her boyfriend, eager with the gossip. Guess who we’ve got staying? No! Guess!
The idea of food made her think of the slabs of meat being shorn off her lover’s corpse. The two-man saws at work under the same hefty spotlights the studio wheeled out for the big night at that Broadway theatre when he was shown to the public for the very first time. Before all hell broke loose. She thought of the massive steaks being packed in ice trucks and sent to the deprived, the poor, the needy. There were placards out there saying it was near as God to cannibalism, but the Hungry didn’t care. The Homeless didn’t debate. The Jobless didn’t grumble. Her lover had died and his flesh was being used to feed the poor. There was something desperately Christian in that, but wholly blasphemous at the same time.
When it came, the knuckle-rap on the door was brisk, snapping her blank stare.
Another glass since the phone call (pointless but effortless), she tucked her breasts inside her robe and tightened the belt with a tug. By the time she opened the door her fringe had drooped over one eye, her belt had loosened and her left tit was about to poke out and say Howdy if she hadn’t rescued it.
Focusing before her stood a kid with short blond hair, his ears razored islands on the side of his head, standing to attention like a marine. He wore the white jacket with the horizontal epaulettes that was the hotel staff uniform, and first impression was the whole guy seemed as starched as it was. Black slacks straight as ramrods. Black polished shoes at six thirty. The whole package making her feel even more sluttish and trashy.
“Come in.”
The clockwork soldier entered with the tray. “Where would you like, please?”
She waved indiscriminately. “Anywhere.”
“Very good, ma’am.” Clipped. She tried to pinpoint his accent. European for sure. Hungarian? She should be able to tell. Plenty of those at the studios. Fleeing the old country. Fleeing their wives, too, mostly. Now he was running out of ideas, she could tell.
“Anywhere you can find a space.”
He balanced it on a footstool at the bottom of the bed, uncertainly, and wiped his hands on his behind as he backed away.
She located her purse and spilled out some coins, picked up a few with her thumb and forefinger and dangled them towards him until he held out his palm. He nodded his thanks for the tip and, swear to God, a click of the heels went with it. In the mirror she’d seen his eyes on the bottle of ruin.
As his hand touched the door handle she said: “Can I interest you in an illicit beverage by any chance?”
The kid turned back, painfully polite and not a little nervous. “Thank you, but I do not drink.” Eyes anywhere but on her.
“You mean you don’t, or you won’t?
”
His cheeks flushed a little red, which she thought was sweet, and a curse. A display of his un-worldliness which must be a burden to carry into adulthood, poor sap. A kind of affliction.
“Come on. Live a little. You’re a long time dead. You don’t get any prize in the hereafter for being stone cold sober. Not according to the churches I go to.”
“I’m sorry. I should explain. The hotel, yes? I will be in a lot of trouble. In USA this is against the law.”
“No kidding? What law? The law of the jungle?”
“I’m sorry. These are the rules.”
“Oh, get the lead pipe out of your ass and enjoy yourself, kid. What’s the worst that can happen? Nobody’ll know. I won’t tell. Promise.” She put on a Shirley Temple voice: “Cwoss my heart and hope to die.” She genuflected and he noticed her fingernails made little white lines in her skin as they brushed it just above the bra-line of her nightgown. Her skin seemed soft and still had the sheen of sleep. He looked away.
Turning from him she filled her glass, then turned back to him and drank from it as if demonstrating the procedure.
He looked at the coins in his hand and put them deep in the pocket of his slacks and didn’t leave. She thought he was holding his breath, and maybe he was.
She sat on the unmade bed and crossed her legs, positioning the glass on her knee. The hem of her nightdress rode up her bare, shaved calf.
“You’re German, aren’t you?”
He made an apologetic face. “My English is not so good.”
“Ditto.” She smiled to put him at his ease. “You’re doing fine.” She wanted him to smile back and he did. “Where you from?”
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Page 40
