The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror

by Stephen Jones

  Her whole body wept.

  The kid touched her shoulder. She sat up briskly and unexpectedly and threw her arms around him and held him tight. At first he didn’t know what to do with his hands, so he wrapped them around her. He could feel her ribs, her shoulder-bones. He could feel her heart beating, like a frightened bird’s you’d pick up in your hand, a damaged thing you’d want to save.

  The kid didn’t want her to die, he wanted her to live.

  His fingers sank into her, shocking her. He held her by the shoulders and pressed his lips on to hers, into hers, forcing her head back sharply and mouth open and his mouth over it, hard. Sucking the breath out of her he twisted her and pushed her down on to her back on the bed. She was weak and frail and it didn’t take a fraction of his strength to overpower her. Was he overpowering her? No, because she wasn’t resisting in the least. She simply lay there before him, her cage of a chest rising and falling quickly through the shimmering silk of the night gown to catch her breath, eyes flickering like a doe deer brought down by a predator. Startled, afraid – but the kind of fear, he thought, that meant excitement and desire and longing and lust and not Stop, not No. If she meant No she would say No.

  Sirens and car horns battled in the street a million miles below.

  He knelt across her, Colossus – (or so he thought. Men!) – taking her hand and putting it on his full erection coiled and pressing against the cloth of his slacks. She didn’t like to take it away and hurt his feelings. Without a sound he furiously unbuttoned his jacket from the bottom to the top. In the dark the golden orbs popped and flew. She watched the vest come up off over his head and saw that his emaciated chest had hardly any hair on it. Saw the smoothness, the pinkness of him. All she could think was, he shone. Then his pants were down and her nightdress slid up in almost the same moment, as his weight dropped down on her. His back made a bridge and he wriggled his hips till the tip of his thing breached her and went deep so fast she uttered a cry and dug her fingernails into his cold, doughy flesh – not an expression of pleasure, but she’d learned that the male of the species liked this kind of thing. Her knees dropped aside. Memories tumbled on her in a barrage of the past; a wall crumbling on top of her she couldn’t stop. He gripped her face and pushed it back into the sheets, smothering her with fingers and thumbs as she struggled to gulp air down her throat. She grunted and sobbed – another requirement, thinking Why? What? How? And he was stabbing into her: a noble act, a heroic act, he thought – a Redemption, a Resurrection, yes – ja, jawohl. It was time she entered the world of the living again, and he was the man to do it. (Do it! Do it!) She would thank him. She would worship him. He’d be a God. And she’d be renewed and whole again and perfect and pretty and famous and fucked. And just as she was thinking, Oh God, I wonder if it’s possible to enjoy this, and not the pounding sweat of it, the grunting bourbon breath of it, the slow, numbing death of it, the disgust of it – it was over.

  And he felt the heat of fame washing over him, like reporter’s flashbulbs going off, like Valentino’s smile, like a tuxedo on fire.

  And she only felt the weight of him, the dead weight of him. And not that she didn’t want it, but not that she did. And the Grand Canyon like someone had hollowed her out with a big spoon. And the Grand Canyon being full of trash, which was where she belonged, said Poppa, because that was what she was, and that’s what she would always be – you hear me?

  (But you asked me to, Poppa.)

  (I believed you, Poppa.)

  He slid his penis out of her, thinking that behind her closed eyes and smiling lips she’d rediscovered love.

  (Poppa?)

  But she was thinking of the ape’s tree-trunk finger pressing against her belly atop the Empire State Building, his ebony fingernail a tarnished mirror. His caress so gentle for a big guy.

  She rolled on to her side and hugged herself as the chill of the room returned.

  They want the Story, she thought. Well you know what the Story is? The Story is: no man has ever come close to how I felt with him. On that mountain top, on that skyscraper, with him at my side, towering so high, roaring as they came out of the sun.

  Stand in front of it, said Poppa.

  Look right into the camera, said Poppa.

  Look frightened, said Poppa.

  Beautiful, said Poppa.

  Beautiful!

  Beautiful!

  Would anyone scare me like Poppa?

  Would anyone love me like Poppa?

  Then she remembered the blood in her lover’s fur, cloying, clammy, clotted. How he swayed from side to side in startled puzzlement. Ageless. A Sequoia hacked down. A century collapsing, a world destroyed, a country eradicated. How she wanted to communicate, but could not. How she wanted to forgive him, but could not. Save him, but could not. How she wanted to be scared but fear was gone. His majesty. His Highness. His – gone.

  She turned over and saw the German boy’s head against the pillow and thought of the giant’s head against the pillow of the sidewalk below, at the same angle, eyes non-focused in death.

  He rolled his head to her. “It is what you wanted, yes?”

  She paused before deciding to nod.

  He smiled and lit one of her cigarettes and sat up – you could easily count his vertebrae – and stretched over to pick up his vest and hotel staff jacket, and dressed with his bare back to her as

  an airplane passed overhead with the monotone murmur of a disappointed voyeur.

  Oh, the pinkness of him.

  Her insides congealed. There was something inside-out about the feeling. The nausea of stepping off a carousel, which was supposed to be an enjoyable experience but wasn’t – and yet the relief of being off. She didn’t want to think about it.

  He handed her his cigarette and lit another for himself. She considered the action unbearably familiar and unbearably arrogant. She wanted to cry again.

  He stood up, his shadowy cock, now shrunken and unattentive, dangling under the rim of his white jacket, and peeked behind the drapes at the afternoon sunlight. “Damn monkey.” He chuckled as he buttoned up his collar. “We socked him good, huh?”

  She pulled the sheets around her in a nest.

  He got on to the bed on all fours and kissed her with puckered lips, which she endured. His grin was horribly self-congratulatory and she wondered how much of this had been his purpose: to screw the actress in 7205? Perhaps he had announced it to the others as he picked up her tray. Perhaps he’d brag about it tonight in a bar. He had not been violent and hadn’t hurt her, even, as others had done – that was exactly it: she felt nothing. Nothing at all. There was a gaping hole inside her where he’d been and it was as if it hadn’t happened at all, and she knew with great clarity that was the way it would always be from now on.

  She sat up in bed with her breasts and knees covered. “I hope you don’t lose your job.”

  “Screw my job,” he said.

  He was a different person now, as they always were. And it was never a surprise to her, but it always hurt.

  “You know what they call me in the kitchen? Sauerkraut. This was supposed to be the land of the free, the home of the brave, of democracy and opportunity. I came expecting bright, clean Americans like bright clean American automobiles, not sweaty Turks tweaking my ass and blowing me kisses and Italians barking and cursing at me, sticking my hand into boiling water for dropping a plate, a Jew begrudgingly giving me my stinking wages at the end of the week. I expected New York to be like an elevator, going up, always up, like the tall buildings, taller, higher, always higher. A place of money, a place of glamour and power and gasoline. Not foreigners and perverts.”

  He held his stomach in, puffing his hairless chest as he pulled on his slacks. “My father sent me here to learn the hotel trade. One year, he said; you will learn more than in any university. He owns three of the biggest hotels in Munich, one in Frankfurt, two in Berlin.”

  He tucked in his genitals. “I always thought the United States would be g
reat, but it is not so great. I expected a strong country, but it is not strong. It is weak. A cripple, like your President. You have no work – no good work. Thirteen million unemployed. Almost every bank is closed. People are losing their farms, homes, businesses. You have no money, no hope . . .”

  “We have movies.”

  He snorted. “Which is what? Nothing but a sign of decadence.” Threading his belt buckle, tugging it to the right hole and poking the pin through. “I have read the history books. This is the way empires fall. Look around you from your high buildings and what do you see? The poor rewarded for doing nothing, immigrants like me given opportunities while patriotic Americans struggle. Your country is sick and your men are standing by watching it happen. They are not fighting for what they value. They are not fighting for the future. They do not have a leader powerful enough to make things change.”

  The actress held her cigarette vertically with her fingertips and blew on it so that the tip glowed red.

  “I’m going back home. Not to Munich. To Potsdam,” he said. “I have an uncle there, an industrialist. I know there is always a job there open for me.” He waited for a reaction from her but all he saw was a long glowing red puff on her cigarette. The blue smoke hung flatly in the air between them. He crushed his own cigarette out on the plate of cold, untouched food.

  “Come with me. A new life. A good life.” he said. “America – it is a place for dreams. But for some dreams you have to return to Germany.”

  She said: “I think there’s a Potsdam up in Saint Lawrence County.”

  The kid laughed through his nose at that – funny girl, crazy girl.

  Stupid girl, said Poppa.

  “I’m serious. Come. It is beautiful.”

  Beautiful.

  This way. To the camera.

  You’re frightened. You’re amazed. You’re terrified.

  As the jungle drums began pounding in her heart, she imagined marrying this man. She could, so very easily. After all he thought she was a star. He knew she was a star. You could see it in his eyes. He wanted that radiance of fame, of anecdote, of fable, to fall on him. He wanted to be larger than life too. He wanted to have her on his arm, to show her off to bosses and officers and leaders. Own her forever and have her obey his orders. She could see herself making home with him in some little cuckoo-clock house with deer buck heads on the wall, with parties hunting boar or gnawing chicken legs and swilling beer. Or a trophy wife in Los Angeles. She a star – the parts would come knocking (“No jungle pictures!”) – him a screenwriter, or producer, or both. Kids, several. Nannies, English. Stern, but not too stern. He’d slap her occasionally, but only when she’d deserve it. He’d have affairs, but then so would she. He’d find some younger, prettier version. So would she. The divorce would be expensive. She’d get the children and dogs. He’d get fat, bitter and twisted, not necessarily in that order.

  “You know,” she said, “I’m ready for breakfast now.”

  He gave a broad grin exposing his white, so-perfect teeth. The parenthesis grin of a football player with a chiselled jaw. So American.

  “And some good, strong, black American coffee,” she said.

  He picked up the tray. “You are on the mend, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “I love you.”

  Everyone wants to love you, said Poppa, on the boat, during the voyage to the island. And you know what? Let them.

  “I know,” she said.

  When the kid had gone and the door was closed and she was alone again in the room she imagined her lover’s gigantic skull, polished and white in the lobby of the Smithsonian, surrounded by a party of eager schoolchildren, any one of them smaller than his pointed teeth. The skeletons of dinosaurs keeping a respectful distance. The stare of aeons in the space where his beautiful eyes used to be.

  She got out of bed and took a sheet of hotel notepaper from the drawer. Sitting with her reflection in front of her – who was that woman with ribs in her chest you could count? Pale, gaunt, frightening: why would anyone make love to that? – she changed her mind and rummaged in her purse. She spiralled out her lipstick and wrote on the mirror:

  Thank you, Peter.

  Thanking him for making it clear. Even if he wouldn’t understand. Couldn’t understand. Could anyone? Then she signed her name. Her autograph. Maybe it would be worth something one day.

  (See, Poppa, I’m worth something after all.)

  She had to hurry now. It would only take so long for the elevator to descend and return.

  Light flooded the room like a bomb blast so bright she had to cover her eyes. When she opened them again, blinking, her surroundings took on a different aspect, washed with colour anew. It seemed she was in a different hemisphere now. A different latitude. The world up-ended, transformed, and rare. And she felt no longer weak and fragile and worthless: she felt strong and excited and loved.

  The drapes fluttered like flags, horizontal into the room.

  She shed the fur from her shoulders. It gathered behind her feet.

  She knelt, then stood. Bare feet. Bare legs. Goosebumps. White skin. (The kid with the whitest skin in school – so poor she couldn’t afford shoes.) Silk dressing gown (silk – how she’d moved up in the world) clinging, a goldy sheen over the dark nipples and black vee of her gender – invisible.

  Looking down at ants the way he looked down.

  Like her lover, she felt no fear.

  The unnatural blonde closed her eyes.

  Doll eyes.

  Drums in her chest.

  Took one foot from the window ledge, then the other.

  As it had to be – falling like he fell. Seventy floors, sixty, fifty – then the numbers floated away, irrelevant like everything else. Wind raked through her frizzled hair, an ice-blonde blur as she dropped, pinioned by her plummeting. All her senses peeled away to reveal a peculiar kind of freedom, a strange kind of pleasure that life would not be there to torment her very much longer, and that was fine, that was okay. A euphoric surge enraptured her: Thank God for that, and she prepared to enjoy her last few seconds on this earth, unencumbered by the future. And all she could think of was the smallness of it all. And the air rushing past. And that his mighty hand might catch her, even now. And his mighty roar might yet echo in the canyon of the skyscrapers with the mighty beating of his chest. And he would save her. And they would be together on the mountaintop. Because it wasn’t like the papers said, oh no. It wasn’t “Beauty killed the Beast.” It was Romeo and Juliet. Of course it was. And that was how all great love stories ended, didn’t they? . . . Like this.

  What is the ape to Man? A laughing stock or a painful embarrassment. And Man shall be just that for the Superman: a laughing stock or a painful embarrassment. Once you were apes, and even now, too, Man is more ape than any ape . . . Behold, I teach you the Superman! The Superman is the meaning of the Earth. Let your will say: the Superman shall be the meaning of the Earth!

  – Friedrich Nietzsche Thus Spoke Zarathustra

  BRIAN LUMLEY

  The Nonesuch

  BRIAN LUMLEY’S FIRST STORIES and books were published by the then “dean of macabre publishers”, August W. Derleth, at the now-legendary Arkham House imprint. Upon leaving the British Army in December 1980 (after completing a full military career of twenty-two years), Lumley began writing full time, and four years later completed his breakthrough novel, Necroscope®, featuring Harry Keogh – a psychically-endowed hero who could communicate with the dead.

  Necroscope has now grown to sixteen large volumes, published in fourteen countries and many millions of copies. In addition, there are Necroscope comic books, graphic novels, a role-playing game, quality figurines and a series of German audio books, while the original story has been optioned for movies for four consecutive years. Lumley is also the award-winning author of more than forty other titles, and his most recent book is Necroscope: The Plague-Bearer, a long novella from Subterranean Press featuring Harry Keogh. Forthcoming is a futuristic
vampire novel entitled The Fly-By-Nights.

  “Readers who attended the KeoghCons in Torquay, Devon, will immediately recognize the only slightly disguised location in which this story is set,” explains the author. “Two previous tales in this sequence (‘The Thin People’ and ‘Stilts’) were narrated first-person by the protagonist, an unfortunate fellow who, where weird or unconventional collisions are concerned, appears to be accident prone – in spades! And being a recovering alcoholic hasn’t much helped his case, because pink elephants just don’t compare with the creatures he’s wont to bump into.

  “The earlier tales are alluded to, but briefly, which barely interferes with the pace of the current story. As to why I wrote this one: it’s simply that I have a fondness for trilogies, let alone outré encounters . . .”

  I’VE OFTEN HEARD IT SAID that lightning never strikes twice. Oh really? Then how about three times? Or perhaps, in some unknown fashion, I’m some kind of unusually prominent lightning conductor whose prime function is to absorb something of the physical and psychological shocks of these by no means rare events, thus shielding the rest of humanity and keeping them out of the line of fire. Something like that, anyway.

  Or there again perhaps not. My being there didn’t much help Barmy Bill of Barrows Hill that time in old London Town. It was more like I was an observer . . . except even now I can’t be sure of what I saw, what really happened. Perhaps I was drinking too much, in which case it could have been a very bad attack of the dreaded delirium tremens. That’s what I tell myself anyway, because it’s a whole lot easier than recalling to mind the actual details of that morning when the police required me to identify Barmy Bill’s dramatically – in fact his radically, hideously – altered body where it had been dumped in that skip on Barchington, just off The Larches . . .

  Anyway, let’s stop there, because that’s another story and somewhere I really don’t want to go, not in any detail. But if we’re still talking lightning strikes, then Barmy Bill and the Thin People would be numero uno’s Numero Uno: my personal Number One, my first but by no means my last.