The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Horror

by Stephen Jones

  Gran was waiting for him on the promenade, holding onto a railing at the very edge of the harbour. Danny waved, but he knew she wouldn’t see him. He doubted if she could even see the boat, but she knew what time he was due to return, and was just being there for him.

  Grandad sat on a bench a few feet behind her, talking to a man seated next to him. His conversation was animated – he waved his arms and at one point stood up and made a gesture, incomprehensible to Danny, to illustrate some point he was making. Danny guessed he thought his companion was someone from years back in his past, when his life had been exciting, and that they were sharing some adventure together.

  As Grandad, in his enthusiasm, took a few steps away from the bench, another man, who Danny had not noticed, but who must have been standing near by, screwed up some paper he had been eating out of and tossed it into a bin. Then he sidled closer to Grandad as though he were on wheels, in a sliding, gliding movement that arrested Danny’s attention completely, and totally altered his understanding of the scene he was witnessing.

  The man on the bench got up, stood next to Grandad, and pointed inland to somewhere in the town. When Grandad turned to look, the man took his arm, and began, with a certain amount of force, Danny thought, to lead him away. The second man, moving as though he were sliding on ice, fell in behind them.

  Gran, still peering myopically out to sea, was obviously unaware of what was going on behind her. The boat was coming in to dock now, and Danny could see her bland, smiling face staring out at the blur of the world in front of her.

  He half stood up and shouted at her, and made jerking movements with his hand intended to make her look behind. As he rose to his feet some of the other passengers thought he was getting ready to disembark and also started to get up off their seats. Perceiving this, the man who was steering the boat turned and yelled something to his mate, who jumped onto a chair and called to everyone to be seated. In the confusion of people bobbing up and down Danny lost sight of Gran, but he was careful to keep an eye on Grandad, who was being led slowly uphill into the town.

  Not a purposeful walker at the best of times, Grandad liked to stop and start when the urge took him, and the two men were plainly having trouble getting him to go where they wanted him to, and were making slow progress.

  The boat bumped against the harbour wall and the teenager skipped ashore to fasten the ropes. The bear-like man took his place next to the couple of steps up the side of the vessel and helped his frail, nervous passengers onto dry land by steering them across the short gangplank, whether they wanted him to or not.

  Danny tried to squeeze forward in the queue, getting a few sharp comments from some old ladies as he did so. When his turn to disembark came he tried to avoid the hands of the man by almost running off the boat, but without success. He felt fingers like tentacles curl around his upper arm to stop him in mid-stride.

  The man lifted him effortlessly and half-turned him so they were face to face. Danny could smell cigar smoke on his breath, and other more strange odours that he had never come across before. There was a scrap of tobacco on the man’s lip that must have irritated him, as he flicked it with his tongue, and spat it out over Danny’s shoulder with a toss of his head. The action reminded Danny of squirrels he had seen in the park at home, standing on their hind legs and spitting out indigestible fragments of nuts they were eating.

  Not that there was anything cute or squirrel-like about the man’s appearance. His heavily-featured face with its sharp, down-curving nose, and receding, almost horizontal forehead was set hard in an ambiguous mask of contempt and vague curiosity, as though Danny were a not-very-fine example of something that, had it been of better or different quality, would perhaps have interested him. Either his head was unusually small, or it seemed so in proportion to the bulk of his vast, barrel-like body. His little gimlet eyes bore in on Danny’s like nails. In the irises of each of them Danny could see tiny reflections of his own frightened face.

  The man loosened his grip on Danny’s arms and ran his hands down them to the wrists, pressing with his finger tips, feeling for the bones beneath the flesh. He held the joints of Danny’s wrists between his thumbs and fingers and lifted them to the height of his shoulders, so the boy’s hands hung in front of him like a half-animated puppet’s.

  Danny squirmed and looked back over his shoulder. Gran was just behind him on the promenade. He could tell from the confusion and apprehension on her face that she was close enough to see what was happening to him.

  He tried to get away from the man’s grasp, and yelled out, “Grandad’s gone. They’ve taken him away again. Get after him. He’s gone up into the town.”

  The man moved then, and held Danny out so he was hanging by his wrists over the side of the boat next to the little gangplank. The vessel was about twelve inches from the harbour wall and rocking slightly, up and down and from side to side, in the wake of other boats passing beyond. Danny thought if the man let go and he fell he might be crushed between the wall and the side of the boat.

  The water below his feet, the colour of boiled cabbage, and marbled with rainbow-tinted whorls of diesel fuel, looked deep, thick and viscous, like glue. Darker shapes moved below its surface. It somehow looked hungry too. Danny imagined his broken body being sucked down into it, dragged under the keel, and pulled out to sea by swirling undercurrents.

  He was only suspended thus for a few seconds before the man stretched out over the side of the boat and lowered him slowly onto the edge of the harbour and released him, but they were long seconds, and terrible while they lasted. Some of the elderly people waiting their turn to go ashore thought the man had played an amusing joke on Danny, and squawked with laughter as he ran shouting to his grandmother.

  By this time she had discovered her husband’s absence, and, as soon as Danny’s toes touched the ground, went stumbling away on her arthritic feet to look for him.

  “Up the hill,” Danny yelled, “they’ve taken him up the hill.”

  Gran turned to him with a hopeless look, already out of breath and concerned about her hammering heart.

  “Don’t worry,” Danny said as he overtook her. “Wait here. I’ll get him back.”

  The streets were full of old people drifting back and forth from the beach. They reacted too slowly to get out of Danny’s way so he had to run a zig-zag course around them. He lost sight of Grandad from time to time but knew he must soon catch up with him because the trio had come to a stop halfway up the hill.

  They seemed to be arguing. They were standing just inside an alleyway between two decrepit-looking red-brick Victorian hotels. The man who had been seated on the bench next to Grandad had had hold of his sleeve. He wasn’t actually tugging at it, but was making it impossible for the old man to retreat.

  The other would-be abductor, with the smooth, oily movements, was gliding around the pair of them, talking all the while, and making calming gestures with his outstretched hands. Danny could hear Grandad’s voice. He was bellowing at the two men that he had had enough of their nonsense. He was going to arrest them. Didn’t they know he was a member of the Mounted Police? He was back in the past in Canada again. His face looked more worried than he sounded, but brightened when he saw Danny, who assumed he had been recognized for once.

  The two men, following the old man’s gaze, turned to see Danny running towards them. The one with peculiar movements detached himself from the tableau and slid towards Danny like a skater. He was dressed in a tight black jacket and shiny trousers, like a waiter’s. Danny couldn’t be sure, but it seemed that the man’s feet, encased in narrow patent-leather shoes, hardly moved, and never quite touched the floor – as though he were suspended a fraction of an inch above the pavement. Perhaps because he was, nevertheless, coming at Danny fast, his form seemed slightly blurred, his features indistinct. When they were almost touching they both side-stepped to avoid each other in the same direction, and collided.

  Danny expected to get hurt. He heard himself sh
out to Grandad to get away as he made contact, then automatically shut his eyes to protect them. He felt a sensation as though he had run into a large, soft mattress that gave to the slightest pressure. There was no indication that what he had hit was anything like a human body that contained flesh and bones, and whatever it was gave way on contact and spread out alarmingly, as though it had come apart. Danny thought he had run right through it and somehow come out the other side.

  He opened his eyes and saw what looked like a two-dimensional drawing of a bloated human figure expanding above and in front of him. It was floating away, and waving its flattened arms and legs slowly, like someone drowning in a dream, and clawing desperately at the air with its hands. Almost at once its fingertips appeared to grasp onto something invisible – a hard thin edge of reality, perhaps – and dug in and held on. Then, with an obviously painful effort, it pulled itself back together, contracted, shrunk into itself, and reformed.

  All this happened very quickly and, almost before Danny had time to think, the man was hovering in front of him again, with a mildly expectant look on his bland, undistinguished face, exactly like a waiter lingering at a table in expectation of an order. It was as though he were silently challenging Danny to believe that the astonishing metamorphosis he had just observed had indeed happened, and was trying to suggest, by his unconcerned expression and the shear ordinariness of his appearance, that it could not have done.

  But Danny knew. He knew what he had seen. He knew a great deal all of a sudden, and what he didn’t know he guessed.

  He flung himself at Grandad, latched onto his arm, and pulled the old man sideways down the hill with all his strength. They tottered along like the contestants in a three-legged race, barging into a number of ancient holidaymakers who they were not able to brush aside, and stumbling and almost falling on the steep incline.

  Gran was waiting for them on the promenade. She looked as though she was going to cry when she saw Grandad’s face. It was blank and empty, like a paper mask before the features have been painted on it.

  Gran said, “Where were they taking him, Danny? What did they want him for?”

  Danny couldn’t bring himself to say what he thought he knew. He pretended to be more out of breath than he was, and stammered something about muggers. He could see Gran was terribly distraught, but knew this was because of the state her husband was in, and because he had nearly been stolen from her. Thankfully, she could not have seen what occurred when he, Danny, collided with the man in the waiter’s outfit, so he wouldn’t be called upon to give an explanation of that. On the other hand, he realized, if she had seen, she would at least be more aware of what they were up against.

  He looked back up the hill to see if the men had followed him, but there was no sign of them. Suddenly his stomach lurched, and he felt a surge of dizzying nausea, a return of the seasickness that had started half an hour earlier when he had been on the boat, now exacerbated by his recent experiences.

  “Gran,” he said, “I’m ill. Let’s get away from here. This is a terrible place.”

  Misunderstanding him, thinking he merely wanted to return to the hotel, Gran nodded emphatically. She put her arm around her husband’s shoulder and steered him away. The old man walked like an automaton, staring down at the pavement just in front of his dragging feet and saying nothing. Danny dawdled behind all the way to the hotel, to keep the couple in his sight.

  Danny looked even worse than he felt when the three of them got together in the dining room for their evening meal. Gran led Grandad in by the elbow. His walk had developed an aimless, twisting tendency that had to be corrected every few steps, and his eyes looked empty and uncomprehending, like a blind man’s, or someone concussed. The old man would eat nothing, and Danny couldn’t.

  Gran stuffed some meat into her mouth and made a show of chewing it to encourage him to do the same, but the smell and appearance of what was on his plate convulsed his stomach and he had to get up and away. Gran’s face took on an even more concerned expression when he explained how sick he was. He hated to put this extra burden on her, but he had no alternative. She dug in her bag for some pills, instructed him on the dosage, and told him to get to bed. Danny said “Good night” to Grandad, who made no response at all.

  “He’s lost his tongue,” Gran said, trying to make a half-angry, desperate joke of it, but sounding instead, strangely, much younger than her years, and on the edge of tears again.

  Danny dragged himself up the wide blue-carpeted stairs feeling dizzy and disorientated. The spaces around him seemed much wider than he knew they were, as though the hotel had expanded in all directions – a process that appeared to be obscurely continuing out at the edge of his vision. He counted flights from floor to floor grimly, passing hand-over-hand on the stair rail like a man hauling himself along a rope to safety. It occurred to him to take the lift, but he knew his stomach wouldn’t stand for that.

  On the second floor corridor he heard a confusion of hushed sounds behind him, and somebody called out sharply for him to step aside.

  Two men in white jackets were approaching him, pushing a grey painted metal stretcher-bearer. On it was a slender human form half wrapped in a loose-knit white blanket. The lower part of the face of this person was encased in a plastic mask attached by a tube to a cylinder slung below the stretcher. A pink tube curled up from the blanket to what looked like a brown bladder on a stick one of the men was holding above his head.

  Danny realized the figure on the stretcher was the young girl he had seen in the dining room a few times. She was lying on her side with her eyes wide open. The transparent mask had a black rim that underlined and isolated her eyes. They looked like two shiny purple holes drilled into her almost bald head. Her little white ears stuck out like toadstools from the sides of her scalp that looked as though it was made of scrubbed white wood. Danny realized that normally she must wear some kind of wig.

  She stared at him hard as she passed, giving him an even worse version of the withering look he was used to seeing on her face, and rose up and turned as she passed to keep him in view. Danny found he was pressing his back against the wall to get away from her.

  The power of her gaze had a negative force strong enough to repel him physically. It felt like a protracted bomb blast.

  She struggled to keep her eyes on him, to keep up the pressure, and tried to sit up. As she did so the blanket slid down from her shoulders to her waist and Danny saw what looked like black shadows, just beneath the skin, sliding down over the ribs of her flat white chest to take shelter under the blanket over her belly. It was as though they were afraid of the light.

  The shapes moved hastily, but with purposeful, controlled caution, like fish seeking the safety of deeper, darker waters. The girl kept her purple-black eyes on Danny until one of the men pressed her back down and pulled the blanket up to her chin. They stopped the stretcher at the service lift and Danny, released from the repulsive attraction of the girl, turned his back on them and staggered away.

  He found his room at last, wriggled clumsily out of his clothes, pulled the curtains across the open window to hold back the early evening sunlight, clambered into bed and fell, sweating and squirming, into feverish sleep.

  Suddenly, Danny was staring into the dark. His eyes had clicked open with a snap that was almost audible. His whole body was rigid with tension. His senses were as alert as a hunter’s and, when at last he moved, he moved stealthily. He peeled the quilt smoothly back off the bed and stood up. As he did so the sound that had woken him was repeated somewhere out beyond his window. It was a sliding sound similar to the noises he had heard earlier in the week, but not quite the same. It was a lighter, easier sound. The box was moving faster.

  Danny crept to the window and edged the curtain to one side just far enough to give him a view of the section of the street visible between two hotels at the lower level. The sound seemed to be coming from down there.

  Seconds later he heard it again, as a long corner
of shadow stretched out to his left along the street below. It was followed by the blunt black end of the box, which slid swiftly into full view and came to rest at a point halfway between the hotels. But only for a moment – the bear-like man behind it hardly paused for rest before pushing it on out of sight. The box was only briefly visible, but Danny noticed that the tarpaulin had been removed from the top, and that an upper section seemed to be slightly askew, as though the lid had been lifted and not properly replaced.

  Something has been taken out, or has come out, Danny thought. Either that or the box has been opened in preparation for something that was going to be put into it. Or was going to get into it . . . For a second Danny had a dim vision of something huge and dark clambering out to make way for something frail and white that was desperate to clamber in. He shut his eyes and shook his head to shatter the fantasy, and went and sat on his bed.

  He almost went back to the window to take a look at what, if anything, was going on on the beach, but decided against it. He was still feeling ill. He was weak and cold, though his skin was damp with sweat. The pills Gran had given him had helped, but their effect had worn off. But he knew she had more in her bag.

  He went into the corridor, and tapped on the door of his grandparents’ room. No answer. He tapped again, louder, then tried the handle. The door wouldn’t move when he pushed it. It must be earlier than he thought, he decided, if it is locked. Gran and Grandad always went to bed at ten. They must be somewhere down stairs, probably in the television lounge.

  He set off at a trot along the corridor and ran down the stairs. It wasn’t so easy to get lost going down into the hotel because you just kept on going until you reached the bottom, then you stopped. Or so he had assumed. It had worked before.