The manageress nodded and clucked her tongue.
“She insisted on bringing the boy, because it would be their last chance of a holiday together, though I didn’t think it was right. But you can’t argue with someone who’s going to die soon, can you? Especially if it’s your own mother, so I let him come.”
The manageress nodded and looked about her for some excuse to get away. No obvious opportunity presented itself.
“It’s so terribly sad, that she should be denied those last few months they promised her,” Danny’s mother said, and hid her face in her hands.
Danny was keeping an eye on Grandad. The old man was quite oblivious to his wife’s death. He had a loopy half-smile on his face, and was rubbing his hands together a lot, as though they were cold, or he were washing them. He kept strolling off, and Danny kept leading him back to his parents.
Danny used these opportunities to buy soft drinks from a machine in the bar. He could feel them all sloshing about in his stomach, but he still wanted more. Or perhaps he wanted something else. It was a funny kind of thirst he had, that would not be quenched, and there didn’t seem to be anything he could do about it.
He had tried to explain his other worry to his father and mother, about the people who had attempted to lure Grandad away, but his mother had started to get angry with him, and told him that this was no time for him to talk rubbish.
It was obvious his father thought he was fantasizing too. He had shaken his head at Danny when the boy had mentioned the man who travelled across the ground without moving his feet, like a skater. So Danny shut up. He realized there was no point in trying to get through to his parents, who were both up to their ears in troubles of their own, so he gave himself the job of protecting Grandad. He was delighted when his father told him the four of them were returning home by train at once, that very morning.
When the taxi came Danny sat in the back with Grandad and his mother, who was now overwhelmed with grief. He held her hand, but got the impression she was unaware that he was there. Strangely, he had no feelings at all about Gran’s death. It meant nothing to him yet. He was more concerned with the torrent of weeping beside him, and alarmed at his mother’s inconsolable condition. He felt Grandad was safe now.
As the taxi drove along the seafront Danny saw the great bulk of the box ahead of them on the edge of the promenade. Someone had started to push it back towards the jetty, but hadn’t got very far. The oily-black, overgrown gull was perched on top of it, standing in perfect balance on one leg. Its head was set at an angle. It seemed to be carefully scrutinizing the traffic moving towards it.
The taxi, travelling slowly because a number of elderly people were dawdling and doddering across the road to get to the beach, came almost to a stop less than ten feet from the box. Danny slid down in his seat and turned away, trying to make himself invisible, just as the driver saw a gap ahead and accelerated into it, taking the vehicle some way beyond the box and the bird. Danny, thinking and hoping he had got by unobserved, couldn’t resist turning around and sticking his head up over the top of the back seat to take one last look out the rear window at the gull.
The bird was riding the air a few inches above the boot of the taxi. Its beak dipped down towards the glass of the rear window, and it stared with one dead-reptile eye straight into both of Danny’s. It retained this pose for a moment, then broke away from the taxi with a single tug of its wings that took it soaring into the air.
Danny expected it to follow the vehicle, but it didn’t. It climbed up to a vast height at incredible speed, as though it had seen a hole in the sky it was afraid was due to close. Then it seemed to change its mind. It plummeted back towards the town and disappeared behind the roofs to the right, ahead of the taxi.
Danny’s father, sitting next to the driver, looked at his watch and remarked that they might miss the train. The driver shrugged, indicated towards the clutter of old people crossing the road ahead, and said he was doing his best.
When they got to the station there was no queue at the ticket office. Even so, Danny’s father had to write a cheque, and seemed to take an age doing so.
Danny bought a tin of Coke, gulped it down, then stood with the other two and a little heap of luggage at the ticket barrier, ready to assault the platform to get to the train the instant they were free to do so.
When his father emerged running with the tickets Danny grabbed some of the baggage and shot past the ticket inspector right behind him. His father, with one arm around his still distraught wife, scuttled awkwardly alongside the train looking for an empty compartment. They were halfway along the platform before Danny thought to look back to see where Grandad was. There was no sign of him.
Danny stopped and looked all around. Except for himself and his parents, the platform was empty. He shouted to his father, and felt the eyes of dozens of passengers on the train turn to stare at him curiously from behind the dusty carriage windows. His father understood what had happened at once.
“We’ve got to find him Danny. Go back. You take the right and I’ll go left. He can’t be far.”
Danny shed his baggage and pelted back through the barrier again. He saw Grandad almost at once, standing by a newspaper kiosk, talking to the man in waiter’s uniform. The man was half-hidden in a doorway. His face was just visible, and only his arms protruded. They undulated in beckoning, luring movements, like the tentacles of an octopus. Grandad, shifting from foot to foot, was rubbing his hands and smacking his forehead in gestures of wild indecision. He also seemed to be laughing anxiously, like a donkey, with his mouth wide open. The man in the doorway slid back a few inches, like a man on roller skates, and Danny could see his feet were definitely not touching the ground. His body even seemed to float up a little way as he receded, and Danny remembered that he had no bones, no substance.
Danny shouted wordlessly at Grandad, who froze. The man in the doorway glanced at Danny, sneered, and vanished. He went out in an instant, like a fused light.
Danny grabbed Grandad’s arm and yanked him away, almost pulling the old man off his feet. He seemed to get the idea for once, however, and, to Danny’s surprise, started running quite fast. So fast in fact, the boy found it hard to steer him. He urged him in the right direction by pushing and pulling, a procedure that constantly threatened to entangle their legs and trip them both.
The man at the barrier, who had watched the whole performance with some amusement, let them through and signalled to the guard at the far end of the station that the train could go.
It started moving almost at once, sending Danny into a panic. There was no sign of his parents or the luggage, so he assumed that they had got on board. One of the doors of the nearest carriage was hanging invitingly open. Danny urged Grandad towards it, then trotted alongside as the old man climbed up the step to the corridor. As he did so he glanced back and saw his mother struggling towards him clutching the luggage. Behind her, running desperately through the ticket barrier, was his father, his face purple with unaccustomed effort. Both his parents looked very angry.
For a moment Danny thought he was going to start to scream and cry in protest against the waves of confusion and frustration that were sweeping over him.
He turned to pull Grandad back. It was obvious that his parents would not reach the train in time to get aboard, since the carriage next to him was now moving at running speed. He shouted to Grandad to get down, then realized that it would be very dangerous if he did try to disembark. Nevertheless, the old man turned and appeared to make some confident attempt to get back off the step.
As he did so an arm reached out from the carriage door and the big hand at the end of it took firm hold of Grandad’s shoulder and started to pull him in. A second hand emerged to take a grip on the other shoulder and Grandad was lifted up off his feet altogether and hauled into the darkness beyond the door. Then a figure leaned out for the handle of the door and quickly pulled it shut. Danny saw the hawk-like nose and receding forehead of the bear-like m
an for just a second, peering out at him from behind the window at the upper part of the door, then the train gathered speed, retreated along the line, and snaked away out of the platform.
Then Danny did begin to scream and cry. He cried even louder when his mother caught up with him and started to blame him for what had occurred. Her face was a damp, white puffy blotch of grief and anger. His father, when he joined them, tried to calm things down.
“We can phone ahead, down the line, and get someone to go on the train at the next stop and bring him off,” he said, but his wife didn’t seem to hear him.
“He’s senile,” she protested. “He doesn’t know where he is or what he’s doing. He might just open a door and walk out while the train is moving. Anything could happen.”
“It’s not just that,” Danny yelled, now quite beside himself. “One of those men was in the carriage. They’ve got him now. They’ve been trying to get him all week.”
“What men, Danny?” his father said, trying to conceal his impatience.
“The ones I told you about,” Danny said, “but you wouldn’t listen.”
On the very edge of anger, his father said, “And why would these men want an old man like Grandad, for God’s sake?”
“For his blood,” said Danny, “and some of them want his bones.”
Then his mother dropped all the luggage that she was carrying and stepped very close to Danny. “How could you talk such rubbish?” she yelled. “At a time like this . . . on the day of my mother’s death?”
She spluttered to a halt, overwhelmed with indignation and rage.
A surge of intense and actually painful thirst, a craving for a drink that was not available, a liquid he could not obtain, cut into Danny, and made him gag. He put his fingers into his mouth to touch his tongue to see if it was as dry as it seemed to be. It was.
His father, alarmed by the expression on Danny’s face, asked him what was wrong.
“I’m drying up inside Dad,” Danny said, suddenly afraid to hear his own words. “I’ve got a terrible . . .” his tongue clicked against his palate, “. . . a terrible, awful thirst.”
His mother regained her voice then. Her face was wet, wild, and dangerous, like a storm at sea. She howled at Danny wordlessly, and held her shaking hands, half-clenched like claws, in front of her face. “What are you trying to do to me?” she screamed at last. “How can you stand there and . . . talk . . . such . . . nonsense? After all that’s happened, at a time like this, you stand there whining about your thirst!”
Danny, shattered, feeling quite alone, stood grey-faced and devastated by the injustice of it all. Something in his expression must have pushed his mother over the edge of her patience at that moment, because, for the first time in her life, she slapped Danny hard across the face. Her ring cut the flesh of his cheek.
Danny broke away and ran. His mouth gaped open in a scream that only he could hear. Warm blood trickled down his cheek and into his mouth. The taste of it was at once familiar. It was like, but not quite the same as, what he was seeking. What he needed to quench his thirst.
Thinking about the dying girl back at the hotel, Danny ran right out of the station into the slowly moving holiday crowds passing back and forth along the front of Todley Bay. He darted through them like a wraith. Nobody seemed to notice him. He moved so fast, he thought he might be invisible.
He hoped the staff back at the hotel would understand, and be kind to him.
When he got there he found they were only too happy to receive him. They took him in, concealed him, and urged him to be patient.
The feast, they told him, though not of the rare old vintage of the night before, was almost ready. It would soon be served.
So, for the present, Danny had to content himself with that.
1997
Emptiness Spoke Eloquent
Caitlín R. Kiernan
WITH VOLUME NINE the publisher decided that Best New Horror needed a new look. Unfortunately, it got one. But at least the trite Photoshopped image that finally appeared on the cover was not as garish as the version they originally wanted to use.
They also decided that, in the UK at least, the series should be folded into Robinson’s very successful series of “Mammoth Book” titles, which they (not unreasonably) believed would give the volume a higher profile amongst booksellers and readers. Carroll & Graf obviously needed a bit more persuading and, as a result, only the British edition was retitled The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror.
By now the Introduction had reached sixty-two pages and the Necrology was hovering around twenty-eight. For the ninth volume I concentrated my ire on those practitioners of so-called “extreme horror”.
I find most literary “movements” slightly incestuous and cliquey anyway, but this loosely connected band of misogynistic and gratuitous horror writers belonged to a club that I certainly had no interest in joining. Like the “Splatterpunks” a decade before them, I predicted that they were destined to end up as a marginal footnote in the history of the genre. I’m delighted to say that it looks as if I was correct.
Champions of the equally pointless “New Weird” please take note . . .
The book featured just nineteen stories – the lowest number since the series began. However, this was partially due to the inclusion of Douglas E. Winter’s satirical novella “The Zombies of Madison County”.
Veteran 1960s author John Burke was also represented, as was David Langford, a former contributor to the Fontana and Armada horror anthologies who is better known for his multiple Hugo Award-winning non-fiction.
Every year I read countless vampire or Cthulhu Mythos stories for possible inclusion in Best New Horror. Rarely do they achieve anything new or different within their respective sub-genres (this statement obviously excludes Kim Newman’s ongoing Anno Dracula series, about which more later). There usually has to be something very special about such stories for me to even consider including them in the anthology.
With Caitlín R. Kiernan it is all about the language. “Emptiness Spoke Eloquent” is a sequel to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (or, as the author readily admits, Francis Ford Coppola’s uneven 1992 movie adaptation). “Eloquent” is the right word to describe Caitlín’s first contribution to Best New Horror, which supplies an answer for those readers who – like the author – ever wondered what happened next to Mina Harker . . .
LUCY HAS BEEN AT the window again, her sharp nails tap-tapping on the glass, scratching out there in the rain like an animal begging to be let in. Poor Lucy, alone in the storm. Mina reaches to ring for the nurse, but stops halfway, forcing herself to believe all she’s hearing is the rasping limbs of the Crape Myrtle, whipped by the wind, winter-bare twigs scritching like fingernails on the rain-slick glass. She forces her hand back down onto the warm blanket. And, she knows well enough, that this simple action says so much. Retreat, pulling back from the cold risks; windows kept shut against night and chill and the thunder.
There was so much of windows.
On the colour television bolted high to the wall, tanks and soldiers in the Asian jungle and that bastard Nixon, soundless.
Electric-white flash and almost at once, a thunderclap that rattles the sky, and sends a shudder through the concrete and steel skeleton of the hospital and the windows and old Mina, safe and warm, in her blanket.
Old Mina.
She keeps her eyes open, avoiding sleep, and memories of other storms.
And Lucy at her window.
Again she considers the nurse, that pale angel to bring pills to grant her mercy, blackness and nothingness, the dreamless space between hurtful wakings. Oh, if dear Dr Jack, with his pitiful morphine, his chloral and laudanum, could see the marvels that men have devised to unleash numbness, the flat calm of mind and body and soul. And she is reaching then, for the call button and for Jonathan’s hand, that he should call Seward, anything against the dreams and the scritching at the window.
This time she won’t look, eyes safe on the evening news, an
d the buzzer makes no sound in her room. This time she will wait for the soft rubber-soled footsteps, she will wait for the door to open and Andrea or Neufield or whoever is on duty to bring oblivion in a tiny paper cup.
But after a minute, a minute-and-a-half, and no response, Mina turns her head, giving in by turtle-slow degrees, and she watches the rain streaking the dark glass, the restless shadows of the Crape Myrtle.
June 1904
The survivors of the Company of Light stood in the rubble at the base of the castle on the Arges and looked past iron and vines, at the empty, soulless casements. It seemed very little changed, framed now in the green froth of the Carpathian summer instead of snow, ice, and bare grey stone.
The trip had been Jonathan’s idea, had become an obsession, despite her protests and Arthur’s and in the end, seeing how much the journey would cost her, even Van Helsing’s. Jack Seward, whose moods had grown increasingly black since their steamer had docked in Varna, had refused to enter the castle grounds and stood alone outside the gates. Mina held little Quincey’s hand perhaps too tightly and stared silently up at the moss-chewed battlements.
There was a storm building in the east, over the mountains. Thunder rumbled like far-off cannon, and the warm air smelled of rain and ozone and the heavy purplish blooms hanging from the creepers. Mina closed her eyes and listened, or tried to listen the way she had that November day years before. Quincey squirmed, restless six, by her side. The gurgle and splash of the swollen river, rushing unseen below them, and the raucous calls of birds, birds she didn’t recognize. But nothing else.
And Van Helsing arguing with Jonathan.
“. . . now, Jonathan, now you are satisfied?”
The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Horror Page 28
