The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Horror

by Stephen Jones

  “Mademoiselle Murray. Please, one moment.”

  Mina matched the man’s glare a second longer, and then, slowly, turned, recognizing Adrienne Monnier; her own shop, the Maison des Amis des Livres, stood, dark-windowed tonight, across the street. It was generally acknowledged that Mlle Monnier shared considerable responsibility for the success of Shakespeare and Company.

  “I have here someone who would very much like to meet you.” The red-haired woman was standing at Adrienne’s side, sipping dark wine. She smiled, and Mina saw that she had hazel-green eyes.

  “This is Mademoiselle Carmichael from New York. She says that she is a great admirer of your work, Mina. I was just telling her that you’ve recently placed another story with the Little Review.”

  “Anna Carmichael,” the woman said, eager and silken-voiced, offering Mina her hand. Detached, drifting, Mina watched herself accept it.

  Anna Carmichael, from New York. Not Lucy.

  “Thank you,” Mina said, her voice gone the same dead calm as the sea before a squall.

  “Oh, Christ no, thank you, Miss Murray.”

  Not Lucy, not Lucy at all, and Mina noticed how much taller than Lucy Westenra this woman was, her hands more slender, and there was a small mole at the corner of her rouged lips.

  Then Adrienne Monnier was gone, pulled back into the crowd by a fat woman in an ugly ostrich-plumed hat, leaving Mina alone with Anna Carmichael. Behind her, the divided Surrealists argued, a threadbare quarrel and wearisome zeal.

  “I’ve been reading you since ‘The White Angel of Carfax’, and last year, my God, last year I read ‘Canto Babel’ in Harper’s. In America, Miss Murray, they’re saying that you’re the new Poe, that you make Le Fanu and all those silly Victorians look—”

  “Yes, well,” Mina began, uncertain what she meant to say, only meaning to interrupt. The dizziness, sharpening unreality, was rushing back, and she leaned against a shelf for support.

  “Miss Murray?” And a move, then, as if to catch someone who had stumbled, long fingers alert. Anna Carmichael took a cautious step forward, closing the space between them.

  “Mina, please. Just Mina.”

  “Are you—?”

  “Yes,” but she was sweating again. “Forgive me, Anna. Just a little too much wine on an empty stomach.”

  “Then please, let me take you to dinner.”

  Lips pursed, Mina bit the tip of her tongue, biting hard enough to bring a salted hint of blood, and the world began to tilt back into focus, the syrupy blackness at the edges of her vision with drawing by degrees.

  “Oh, no. I couldn’t,” she managed. “Really, it’s not . . .”

  But the woman was taking her by the arm, her crescent-moon smile baring teeth like perfectly spaced pearls, every bit the forceful American. She thought of Quincey Morris, and wondered if this woman had ever been to Texas.

  “But I insist, Mina. It’ll be an honour, and in return, well, I won’t feel so guilty if I talk too much.”

  Together, arm in arm, they elbowed their way through the Surrealist blockade, the men choosing to ignore them. Except her gaunt albino, and Mina imagined something passing between him and Anna Carmichael, unspoken, or simply unspeakable.

  “I hate those idiot bastards,” Anna whispered, as the door jangled shut behind them. She held Mina’s hand tightly, squeezing warmth into her clammy palm, and surprising her self, Mina squeezed back.

  Out on the gaslit rue de l’Odéon, a warm spring breeze was blowing, and the night air smelled like coming rain.

  The meal had been good, though Mina had hardly tasted the little she’d eaten. Cold chicken and bread, salad with wild thyme and goat cheese, chewed and swallowed indifferently. And more than her share from a large carafe of some anonymous red Bordeaux. She’d listened to the woman who was not Lucy talk, endless talk of Anna Carmichael’s copious ideas on the macabre and of Mina’s writing.

  “I actually went to the Carfax estate,” she’d said, and then paused, as if she had expected some particular reaction. “Just last summer. There’s some restoration underway now, you know.”

  “No,” Mina answered, sipping her wine, and picking apart a strip of breast meat with her fork. “No, I wasn’t aware of that.”

  Finally, the waitress had brought their bill, and Anna had grudgingly allowed Mina to leave the tip. While they’d eaten, the shower had come and gone, leaving the night dank and chilly and unusually quiet. Their heels sounded like passing time on the wet cobble stones. Anna Carmichael had a room in one of the less expensive Left Bank hotels, but they walked together back to Mina’s flat.

  When Mina woke, it was raining again, and for a few uncounted minutes she lay still, listening, smelling the sweat and incense, a hint of rose and lilac in the sheets. Finally, there was only a steady drip, falling perhaps from the leaky gutters of the old building, and maybe from the eaves, striking the flagstones in the little garden. She could still smell Anna Carmichael on her skin. Mina closed her eyes, and thought about going back to sleep, realizing only very slowly that she was now alone in the bed.

  The rain was over and the drip – the minute and measured splash of water on water, that clockwork cadence – wasn’t coming from outside. She opened her eyes and rolled over, into the cold and hollow place made by Anna’s absence. The lavatory light was burning; Mina blinked and called out her name, calling

  Lucy

  “Anna?”

  drip and drip and drip and

  “Anna?” and her throat tightened, whatever peace she’d awakened with suddenly leached away by fear and adrenaline. “Anna, are you all right?”

  did you call for Lucy, at first, did I

  drip and drip and

  The floor was cold against her feet. Mina stepped past the chiffonier, bare floorboards giving way to a time- and mildew- and foot-dulled mosaic of ceramic polygons. Some of the tiles were missing, leaving dirty liver-coloured cavities in the design. The big tub, chipped alabaster enamel and the black cast iron showing through, lion’s feet claws frozen in moulded rictus, grappling for some hold on the slick tiles.

  Lucy Westenra lay, empty again, in the tub filled almost to overflowing. Each drop of water swelled like an abscess until its own weight tore it free of the brass faucet, and so it fell, losing itself in the crimson water. The suicide’s wrists hung limply over the sides, hands open; her head tilted back at a broken angle. And there were three bright smiles carved into her flesh, all of them offered to heaven, or only to Mina.

  The straight razor lay, wet and its blade glinting sticky scarlet, on the floor where it had fallen from Lucy’s hand. And, like the dripping water, Mina stood until gravity pulled her free, and she fell.

  October 1946

  After the war and the ammonia antiseptic rooms where electrodes bridged the writhing space between her eyes with their deadening quick sizzle, after the long years that she was kept safe from herself and the suicidal world kept safe from her, Mina Murray came back to London.

  A new city to embrace the mop-water grey Thames, changed utterly, scarred by the Luftwaffe’s fire storms and aged by the twenty-four years of her absence. She spent three days walking the streets, destruction like a maze for her to solve or discard in frustration. At Aldermanbury, she stood before the ruins of St Mary’s and imagined – no, wished – her hands around Van Helsing’s neck. His brittle, old bones to break apart like charred timbers and shattered pews. Is this it, you old bastard? Is this what we saved England for?

  And the question, recognizing its own intrinsic senselessness, its inherent futility, had hung nowhere, like all those blown-out windows framing the autumn-blue sky, the hallways ending only in rubble. Or her reflection, the woman a year from seventy looking back from a windowpane that seemed to have somehow escaped destruction especially for this purpose, for this moment. Mina Murray was a year from seventy, and she almost looked it.

  The boy sitting on the wall watched the woman get out of the taxi, an old woman in black stockings and a blac
k dress with a high collar, her eyes hidden behind dark spectacles. He absently released the small brown lizard he’d been tormenting, and it skittered gratefully away into some crack or crevice in the tumbledown masonry. The boy thought the woman looked like a widow, but better to pretend she was a spy for the Jerries on a clandestine rendezvous, secrets to be ex changed for better secrets. She walked in short steps that seemed like maybe she was counting off the distance between them. In the cool, bright morning, her shoes clicked, a coded signal click, possibly, Morse-code click, and he thought perhaps he should quickly hide himself behind the crumbling wall, but then she saw him, and it was too late. She paused, then waved hesitantly as the taxi pulled away. Too late, so he waved back, and, there. She was just an old woman again.

  “Hello,” she said, fishing about for something in her handbag. She took out a cigarette out, and when he asked, the widow gave him one, also. She lit it for him with a silver lighter and turned to stare at the gutted ruins of Carfax Abbey, at the broken, precarious walls braced against their inevitable collapse. Noisy larks and sparrows sang to themselves in the limbs of the blasted trees, and further on, the duck pond glinted in the sun.

  The woman leaned against the wall and sighed out smoke. “They didn’t leave much, did they?” she asked him.

  “No, Ma’am,” he said. “It was one of them doodlebugs last year that got it,” and he rocket-whistled for her, descending octaves and sticking a big rumbling boom stuck on the end. The woman nodded and crushed her cigarette out against a raw edge of mortar, ground it back and forth, the black ash smear against oatmeal grey, and she dropped the butt at her feet.

  “It’s haunted, you know,” the boy told her, “Mostly at night, though,” and she smiled, and he glimpsed her nicotine-stained teeth past the lipstick bruise of her lips. She nodded again.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes. I guess that it is, isn’t it?”

  Mina killed the boy well back from the road, the straight razor she’d bought in Cheapside slipped out of her purse while he was digging about for bits of shrapnel to show her, jagged souvenirs of a pleasant autumn afternoon in Purfleet. One gloved hand fast over his mouth and only the smallest muffled sound of surprise before she drew the blade quick across his throat, and the boy’s life sprayed out dark and wet against the flagstones. He was the first murder she’d done since returning to England, and so she sat with him a while in the chilly shade of the tilted wall, his blood drying to a crust around her mouth.

  Once, she heard a dog barking excitedly off towards the wreck that had been Jack Seward’s asylum such a long time ago. There was a shiver of adrenaline, and her heart skipped a beat and raced for a moment because she thought maybe someone was coming, that she’d been discovered. But no one came, and so she sat with the boy and wondered at the winding knot of emptiness still inside her, unchanged and, evidently, unchangeable.

  An hour later, she’d left the boy beneath a scraggly hedgerow and went to wash her hands and face in the sparkling pool. If there were ghosts at Carfax, they kept their distance.

  August 1955

  The cramped and cluttered office on West Houston was even hotter than usual, the venetian blinds drawn shut to keep the sun out, so only the soft glow from Audry Cavanaugh’s brass desk lamp, a gentle incandescence through the green glass shade. But the dimness went unheeded by the sticky, resolute Manhattan summer. The office was sweltering, and Mina had to piss again. Her bladder ached, and she sweated and wrinkled her nose at the stale, heavy smell of the ex pensive English cigarettes the psycho analyst chain-smoked. A framed and faded photograph of Carl Jung dangled on its hook behind the desk, and Mina felt his grey and knowing eyes, wanting inside her, wanting to see and know and draw reason from insanity.

  “You ’re looking well today, Wilhelmina,” Dr Cavanaugh said, then offered a terse smile. She lit another cigarette, and exhaled a great cloud into the torpid air of the office. The smoke settled about her head like a shroud. “Sleeping any better?”

  “No,” Mina told her, which was true. “Not really.” Not with the nightmares and the traffic sounds all night outside her SoHo apartment, and not with the restless voices from the street that she could never be sure weren’t meant for her. And not the heat, either. The heat like a living thing to smother her, to hold the world perpetually at the edge of conflagration.

  “I’m very sorry,” and Dr Cavanaugh was squinting at her through the gauze of smoke, her stingy smile already traded for familiar concern. Audry Cavanaugh never seemed to sweat, always so cool in her mannish suits, her hair pulled back in its neat, tight bun.

  “Did you speak with your friend in London?” Mina asked. “You said that you would . . .” and maybe the psychoanalyst heard the strain in Mina’s voice because she sighed a loud, impatient sigh and tilted her head backwards, gazing up at the ceiling,

  “Yes,” she answered. “I’ve talked with Dr Beecher. Just yesterday, actually.”

  Mina licked her lips, her dry tongue across drier lips, the parched skin of dead fruit. There was a pause, a moment if silence, and then Audry Cavanaugh said, “He was able to find a number of references to attacks on children by a ‘bloofer lady’, some articles dating from late in September, 1897, in The Westminster Gazette and a few other papers. A couple of pieces on the wreck at Whitby, also. But, Mina, I never said I doubted you. You didn’t have to prove anything.”

  “I had those clippings,” Mina mumbled around her dry tongue. “I used to have all the clippings.”

  “I always believed that you did.”

  There was more silence, then, and only street sounds ten storeys down to fill the void, Dr Cavanaugh put on her reading glasses and opened her yellow stenographer’s pad. Her pencil scritched across the paper to record the date. “The dreams, are they still about Lucy? Or is it the asylum again?”

  And a drop of sweat ran slowly down Mina’s rouged cheek, pooling at the corner of her mouth, offering an abrupt tang of salt and cosmetics to tease her thirst. She looked away, at the worn and dusty rug under her shoes, at the barrister shelves stuffed with medical books and psychological journals. The framed diplomas and, almost whispering, she said, “I had a dream about the world.”

  “Yes?” and Audry Cavanaugh sounded a little eager, because here was some thing new, perhaps, something novel in old Mina Murray’s tiresome parade of delusions. “What did you dream about the world, Wilhelmina?”

  Another drop of sweat dissolved on the tip of Mina’s tongue, leaving behind the musky, fleeting taste of herself and fading too soon. “I dreamed that the world was dead,” she said. “That the world ended a long, long time ago. But it doesn’t know it’s dead, and all that’s left of the world is the dream of a ghost.”

  For a few minutes, neither of them said anything more, and so there was only the sound of the psychoanalyst’s pencil, and then not even that. Mina listened to the street, the cars and trucks, the city. The sun made blazing slashes through the aluminium blinds, and Audry Cavanaugh struck a match, lighting another cigarette. The stink of sulphur made the insides of Mina’s nostrils burn.

  “Do you think that’s true, Mina?”

  And Mina closed her eyes, wanting to be alone with the weary, constant rhythm of her heart, the afterimages like burn-scar slashes in the dark behind her vellum eyelids. She was too tired for confession or memory today, too uncertain to commit her scattered thoughts to words; she drifted, and there was no intrusion from patient Cavanaugh, and in a few minutes she was asleep.

  April 1969

  After she’s swallowed the capsules and a mouthful of plastic-flavoured water from the blue pitcher on her nightstand, after Brenda Neufield and her white shoes have left the hospital room, Mina sits up. She wrestles the safety bar down and her legs swing slowly, painfully, over and off the edge of the bed. She watches her bare feet dangling above the linoleum floor, her ugly yellowed toenails, age spots and skin parchment-stretched too tightly over kite-frame bones.

  A week ago, after her heart attack and t
he ambulance ride from her shitty little apartment, there was the emergency room and the doctor who smiled at her and said, “You ’re a pip, Miss Murray. I have sixty-year old patients who should be glad to look half so good as you.”

  She waits, counting the nurse’s footsteps – twelve, thirteen, fourteen, and surely Neufield’s at the desk by now, going back to her magazines. And Mina sits, staring across the room, her back to the window, cowardice to pass for defiance. If she had a razor, or a kitchen knife, or a few more of Neufield’s tranquillizer pills.

  If she had the courage.

  Later, when the rain has stopped and the Crape Myrtle has settled down for the night, the nurse comes back and finds her dozing, still perched upright on the edge of her bed, like some silly parakeet or geriatric gargoyle. She eases Mina back, and there’s a dull click as the safety bar locks again. The nurse mumbles something so low Mina can’t make out the words. So, she lies very still, instead, lies on those starch-stiff sheets and her pillowcase and listens to the drip and patter from the street outside, the velvet sounds after the storm almost enough to smooth the edges off Manhattan for a few hours. The blanket tucked rough be neath her chin and taxi wheels on the street, the honk of a car horn, a police siren blocks away. And footsteps on the side walk below her window, and, then, the soft and unmistak able pad of wolf paws on asphalt.

  “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

  The ceremony of innocence is drowned . . .”

  – W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

  1998

  Mr Clubb and Mr Cuff

  Peter Straub

  JUST BECAUSE I THOUGHT vampires had become a cliché did not mean that the publisher was in any way averse to putting them on the cover. However, it was perhaps unfortunate that they chose to do so with the Tenth Anniversary edition which, unlike the previous volume, did not actually contain any stories featuring the undead.