The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

by Stephen Jones (ed. )

  The nameless grandmaster released my soul from the endgame. The unseen puppeteer unloosed my strings. I was no longer clockworked.

  I turned, and fled the Memorial Church as it burst into flame. In the portico, I was confronted by a tall white apparition. It was the marble tablet, commemorating the names of the dead who perished on this site amidst the burning Richmond Theatre. I was tempted to add one more soul to the death-list: the name of my father, David Poe.

  I awoke to the strong vapours of distilled spirits. I found myself sprawled on the floor of my room in Mrs Yarrington’s lodging-house The door is latched. The derangement of my clothes, and the spasmodic trembling of my limbs, give token that once more I have succumbed to intemperance. My shirtfront is soaked with bourbon, and a shattered bottle lies nearby.

  On the table in front of me is an unproofed manuscript, its ink still wet. The handwriting I recognise as my own, but the penmanship is wild and abandoned, and the ink has spattered several passages where the pen-nibs have torn entirely through the paper.

  Reading the pages, I find that they contain the above narrative . . . excepting these last paragraphs. But have I written fiction, or reportage? This manuscript is filled with incident, yet my memory is a blank page. I remember nothing of these recent hours.

  Are these words on the page truth, or falsehood? Have I nightmared all of this, or some portion? Or is all of it real, in cold sanity? Did I go to Memorial Church tonight? Have I confronted Maelzel’s Automaton? Is the man inside that clockwork hoax the unmourned David Poe? Have I murdered my father? Did I set the church ablaze?

  There are shouts in the hall. Someone is pounding on the door, and there are voices.

  I must see what they require of me.

  RICHARD CHRISTIAN MATHESON

  Making Cabinets

  RICHARD CHRISTIAN MATHESON IS A NOVELIST, short story writer and screenwriter/producer. He has written and produced hundreds of episodes of television, for over thirty dramatic and comedic primetime network series and, at nineteen, was the youngest writer ever put under contract by Universal Studios.

  He has written feature film and television projects for Richard Donner, Mel Brooks, Joel Silver, Ivan Reitman, Steven Spielberg and many others. To date, Matheson has written and sold twelve original, spec feature scripts; considered a record. He has also written over twenty pilots for comedy and dramatic series for Showtime, Fox, NBC, ABC, Spike and CBS.

  Matheson recently wrote three scripts for Showtime’s Masters of Horror (the first two directed by Tobe Hooper), while for TNT’s Nightmares & Dreamscapes he wrote the critically acclaimed adaptation of Stephen King’s short story “Battleground”, a one-hour episode starring William Hurt. His decision to write the entire script with no dialogue amazed critics and The New York Times called the episode “. . . a minor masterpiece.” He is currently scripting two feature films and an eight-hour mini-series for director Bryan Singer.

  Thirty stories are collected in Matheson’s Scars and Other Distinguishing Marks, with an introduction by Stephen King. Dystopia, a hardcover collection of sixty stories is introduced by Peter Straub. His debut novel, Created By, was Bantam’s hardcover lead, a Bram Stoker Award winner and a Book-of-the-Month Club lead selection. It has been translated into several languages.

  “In a culture intoxicated by extreme,” observes Matheson, “serial killers, inevitably, are fabled. In their ghastly, photogenic wakes, are collateral victims; those, still living, who knew the killer as routine participant in life – children, co-workers, friends, wives. Once news coverage, funerals and death penalties are eclipsed by fresher abduction and atrocity, the serial killer’s inner circle must continue, despite betrayal which inverts their world.

  “ ‘Making Cabinets’ spends time with such a person. Its first draft was fleshless outline. Details were added, though few. In all, I wanted the feelings of aftermath to be a traumatised void.”

  ICE WATER; a diamond stalk on white linen.

  The clearness tastes warm, red. The thin woman chokes, covers mouth with napkin.

  One table over, a boy eats pie, eyes unblinking. Watches her hold menu in pale hands.

  She scans gourmet adjectives. Imagines soups, meats. Their dark succulence, piquant sauces.

  All of it horror.

  She searches more dishes, stomach a sick pit.

  Maybe a salad, no dressing.

  But the tomatoes; the cook would slice them open, their seeded flesh unprotected, seeping helplessly.

  The waitress approaches. Perhaps the Special of the Day? Lamb. Unspiced; a meticulous blank.

  The thin woman’s stomach twists. She imagines the dead flesh using her mouth like a coffin; fights nausea.

  Why hadn’t she heard them?

  The waitress tilts head. The thin woman needs another minute. The waitress nods; the same conversation everyday.

  A couple, at the next table, excavate lobster, amused by lifeless claws. The busboy sweeps; a metronome.

  The thin woman sees the boy eating pie, his lips berry-blue like a corpse.

  Electric saws, pounding hammers.

  Maybe the vermicelli. Plain.

  But the long strands, like fine, blonde hair.

  She tries to sip water, again. But the cubes have melted; water like dread-warm saliva.

  His gentle smile, serving his recipes. The perfect husband.

  The waitress reminds her she must eat. She loses more weight every day. She’s so pretty. It was almost a year ago. She must move on. The thin woman listens, nods. Tries not to look at the boy.

  Making cabinets, he’d said; basement door always locked.

  The thin woman looks up at the waitress. The young woman’s lipstick resembles a tortured mouth.

  She runs between the red lips, down lightless corridor to the banned door. Inside, music deafens. She presses ear to door; hears blades severing. Pounds on door until it gives.

  Finds two little boys, hanging upside down from ropes, screaming through gagged mouths, half peeled. He turns, goggles freckled red, black rubber apron stained. The stove behind him gurgles with spiced stews.

  The thin woman tells the waitress she’s lost her appetite.

  Maybe tomorrow.

  The boy’s smile falls as he watches her leave, bones and veins visible through her starved skin.

  GEOFF RYMAN

  Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy)

  GEOFF RYMAN WAS BORN in Canada, but he has lived most of his life in Britain. The author has won the British Science Fiction Award, the World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the James Tiptree, Jr. Award and the Nebula Award.

  Ryman’s science fiction and fantasy books include The Warrior Who Carried Life, The Unconquered Country, The Child Garden, Was, Lust and Air. His 253, or Tube Theatre was initially published electronically before appearing in print, and his latest novel, The King’s Last Song, is set in Cambodia’s past and present.

  “In 1975 I read a from-the-scene dispatch in The Times of the evacuation of Phnom Penh and that absolutely gripped my imagination,” remembers Ryman. “In 2000 I was invited by an Australian friend to stay at an Australian archaeological dig. Returning to do research, I fell in love with Cambodia all over again, and the way it was healing. I still haven’t managed to write about the healing, but two long short stories and one novel did follow.”

  One of those long stories was “Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy)”, which was nominated for a science fiction Hugo Award. “Didn’t they realise it was a ghost story?” asks the author.

  IN CAMBODIA PEOPLE ARE used to ghosts. Ghosts buy newspapers. They own property.

  A few years ago, spirits owned a house in Phnom Penh, at the Tra Bek end of Monivong Boulevard. Khmer Rouge had murdered the whole family and there was no one left alive to inherit it. People cycled past the building, leaving it boarded up. Sounds of weeping came from inside.

  Then a professional inheritor arriv
ed from America. She’d done her research and could claim to be the last surviving relative of no fewer than three families. She immediately sold the house to a Chinese businessman, who turned the ground floor into a photocopying shop.

  The copiers began to print pictures of the original owners.

  At first, single black and white photos turned up in the copied dossiers of aid workers or government officials. The father of the murdered family had been a lawyer. He stared fiercely out of the photos as if demanding something. In other photocopies, his beautiful daughters forlornly hugged each other. The background was hazy like fog.

  One night the owner heard a noise and trundled downstairs to find all five photocopiers printing one picture after another of faces: young college men, old women, parents with a string of babies, or government soldiers in uniform. He pushed the big green off-buttons. Nothing happened.

  He pulled out all the plugs, but the machines kept grinding out face after face. Women in beehive hairdos or clever children with glasses looked wistfully out of the photocopies. They seemed to be dreaming of home in the 1960s, when Phnom Penh was the most beautiful city in Southeast Asia.

  News spread. People began to visit the shop to identify lost relatives. Women would cry, “That’s my mother! I didn’t have a photograph!” They would weep and press the flimsy A4 sheets to their breasts. The paper went limp from tears and humidity as if it too were crying.

  Soon, a throng began to gather outside the shop every morning to view the latest batch of faces. In desperation, the owner announced that each morning’s harvest would be delivered direct to The Truth, a magazine of remembrance.

  Then one morning he tried to open the house-door to the shop and found it blocked. He went round to the front of the building and rolled open the metal shutters.

  The shop was packed from floor to ceiling with photocopies. The ground floor had no windows – the room had been filled from the inside. The owner pulled out a sheet of paper and saw himself on the ground, his head beaten in by a hoe. The same image was on every single page.

  He buried the photocopiers and sold the house at once. The new owner liked its haunted reputation; it kept people away. The FOR SALE sign was left hanging from the second floor.

  In a sense, the house had been bought by another ghost.

  This is a completely untrue story about someone who must exist.

  Pol pot’s only child, a daughter, was born in 1986. Her name was Sith, and in 2004, she was eighteen years old.

  Sith liked air conditioning and luxury automobiles. Her hair was dressed in cornrows and she had a spiky piercing above one eye. Her jeans were elaborately slashed and embroidered. Her pink T-shirts bore slogans in English: CARE KOOKY. PINK MOLL.

  Sith lived like a woman on Thai television, doing as she pleased in lip-gloss and Sunsilked hair. Nine simple rules helped her avoid all unpleasantness.

  1.

  Never think about the past or politics.

  2.

  Ignore ghosts. They cannot hurt you.

  3.

  Do not go to school. Hire tutors. Don’t do homework. It is disturbing.

  4.

  Always be driven everywhere in either the Mercedes or the BMW.

  5.

  Avoid all well-dressed Cambodian boys. They are the sons of the estimated 250,000 new generals created by the regime. Their sons can behave with impunity.

  6.

  Avoid all men with potbellies. They eat too well and therefore must be corrupt.

  7.

  Avoid anyone who drives a Toyota Viva or Honda Dream motorcycle.

  8.

  Don’t answer letters or phone calls.

  9.

  Never make any friends.

  There was also a tenth rule, but that went without saying.

  Rotten fruit rinds and black mud never stained Sith’s designer sports shoes. Disabled beggars never asked her for alms. Her life began yesterday, which was effectively the same as today.

  Every day, her driver took her to the new Soriya Market. It was almost the only place that Sith went. The colour of silver, Soriya rose up in many floors to a round glass dome.

  Sith preferred the 142nd Street entrance. Its green awning made everyone look as if they were made of jade. The doorway went directly into the ice-cold jewellery rotunda with its floor of polished black and white stone. The individual stalls were hung with glittering necklaces and earrings.

  Sith liked tiny shiny things that had no memory. She hated politics. She refused to listen to the news. Pol Pot’s beautiful daughter wished the current leadership would behave decently, like her dad always did. To her.

  She remembered the sound of her father’s gentle voice. She remembered sitting on his lap in a forest enclosure, being bitten by mosquitoes. Memories of malaria had sunk into her very bones. She now associated forests with nausea, fevers, and pain. A flicker of tree-shade on her skin made her want to throw up and the odour of soil or fallen leaves made her gag. She had never been to Angkor Wat. She read nothing.

  Sith shopped. Her driver was paid by the government and always carried an AK-47, but his wife, the housekeeper, had no idea who Sith was. The house was full of swept marble, polished teak furniture, iPods, Xboxes, and plasma screens.

  Please remember that every word of this story is a lie. Pol Pot was no doubt a dedicated communist who made no money from ruling Cambodia. Nevertheless, a hefty allowance arrived for Sith every month from an account in Switzerland.

  Nothing touched Sith, until she fell in love with the salesman at Hello Phones.

  Cambodian readers may know that in 2004 there was no mobile phone shop in Soriya Market. However, there was a branch of Hello Phone Cards that had a round blue sales counter with orange trim. This shop looked like that.

  Every day Sith bought or exchanged a mobile phone there. She would sit and flick her hair at the salesman.

  His name was Dara, which means Star. Dara knew about deals on call prices, sim cards, and the new phones that showed videos. He could get her any call tone she liked.

  Talking to Dara broke none of Sith’s rules. He wasn’t fat, nor was he well dressed, and far from being a teenager, he was a comfortably mature twenty-four years old.

  One day, Dara chuckled and said, “As a friend I advise you, you don’t need another mobile phone.”

  Sith wrinkled her nose. “I don’t like this one anymore. It’s blue. I want something more feminine. But not frilly. And it should have better sound quality.”

  “Okay, but you could save your money and buy some more nice clothes.”

  Pol Pot’s beautiful daughter lowered her chin, which she knew made her neck look long and graceful. “Do you like my clothes?”

  “Why ask me?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s good to check out your look.”

  Dara nodded. “You look cool. What does your sister say?”

  Sith let him know she had no family. “Ah,” he said and quickly changed the subject. That was terrific. Secrecy and sympathy in one easy movement.

  Sith came back the next day and said that she’d decided that the rose-coloured phone was too feminine. Dara laughed aloud and his eyes sparkled. Sith had come late in the morning just so that he could ask this question. “Are you hungry? Do you want to meet for lunch?”

  Would he think she was cheap if she said yes? Would he say she was snobby if she said no?

  “Just so long as we eat in Soriya Market,” she said.

  She was torn between BBWorld Burgers and Lucky7. BBWorld was big, round, and just two floors down from the dome. Lucky7 Burgers was part of the Lucky Supermarket, such a good store that a tiny jar of Maxwell House cost US$2.40.

  They decided on BBWorld. It was full of light and they could see the town spread out through the wide clean windows. Sith sat in silence.

  Pol Pot’s daughter had nothing to say unless she was buying something.

  Or rather she had only one thing to say, but she must never say it.

&
nbsp; Dara did all the talking. He talked about how the guys on the third floor could get him a deal on original copies of Grand Theft Auto. He hinted that he could get Sith discounts from Bsfashion, the spotlit modern shop one floor down.

  Suddenly he stopped. “You don’t need to be afraid of me, you know.” He said it in a kindly, grownup voice. “I can see, you’re a properly brought up girl. I like that. It’s nice.”

  Sith still couldn’t find anything to say. She could only nod. She wanted to run away.

  “Would you like to go to K-Four?”

  K-Four, the big electronics shop, stocked all the reliable brand names: Hitachi, Sony, Panasonic, Philips, or Denon. It was so expensive that almost nobody shopped there, which is why Sith liked it. A crowd of people stood outside and stared through the window at a huge home entertainment centre showing a DVD of Ice Age. On the screen, a little animal was being chased by a glacier. It was so beautiful!

  Sith finally found something to say. “If I had one of those, I would never need to leave the house.”

  Dara looked at her sideways and decided to laugh.

  The next day Sith told him that all the phones she had were too big. Did he have one that she could wear around her neck like jewelry?

  This time they went to Lucky7 Burgers, and sat across from the Revlon counter. They watched boys having their hair layered by Revlon’s natural beauty specialists.

  Dara told her more about himself. His father had died in the wars. His family now lived in the country. Sith’s Coca-Cola suddenly tasted of anti-malarial drugs.

  “But . . . you don’t want to live in the country,” she said.