The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

by Stephen Jones (ed. )

  “His father saw it, too, and he started screaming. He wasn’t even making words, but I was. I had my arms wide open, and I was calling my husband. ‘Come down. Come home, my love.’ I saw his arms disentangle themselves, his legs slide free. The ship sagged beneath him. If he so much as touched that water, I thought, it would be too much. The cold would have him at the last. He halted, and his father stopped screaming, and I went silent. He hung there so long I thought he’d died after all, now that he’d heard our voices one last time. Then, hand over hand, so painfully slowly, like a spider crawling down a web, he began to edge upside-down over the ropes. He reached the Kendall boy’s poor, naked body and bumped it with his hip. It swung out and back, out and back. Charlie never even looked, and he didn’t slow or alter his path. He kept coming.

  “I don’t even remember how he got over the rail. As he reached the deck, he disappeared a moment from our sight. We were trying to figure how to get up there to him. Then he just climbed over the edge and fell to the sand at our feet. The momentum from his body gave the wreck a final push, and it slid off the sandbar into the water and sank, taking the Kendall boy’s body with it.

  “The effort of getting down had taken everything Charlie had. His eyes were closed. His breaths were shallow, and he didn’t respond when we shook him. So Charlie’s father lifted him and dropped him in the rowboat. I hopped in the bow with my back to the shore, and Charlie’s father began to pull desperately for the mainland. I was sitting calf-deep in water, cradling my husband’s head facedown in my lap. I stroked his cheeks, and they were so cold. Impossibly cold, and bristly, and hard. Like rock. All my thoughts, all my energy, all the heat I had I was willing into my fingers, and I was cooing like a dove. Charlie’s father had his back to us, pulling for everything he was worth. He never turned around. And so he didn’t . . .”

  Once more, Mrs Marchant’s voice trailed away. Out the filthy windows, in the grey that had definitely darkened into full-blown dusk now, Selkirk could see a single trail of yellow-red, right at the horizon, like the glimpse of eye underneath a cat’s closed lid. Tomorrow the weather would clear. And he would be gone, on his way home. Maybe he would stay there this time. Find somebody he didn’t have to pay to keep him company.

  “It’s a brave thing you’ve done, Mrs Marchant,” he said, and before he could think about what he was doing, he slid forward and took her chilly hand in his. He meant nothing by it but comfort, and was surprised to discover the sweet, transitory sadness of another person’s fingers curled in his. A devil’s smile of a feeling, if ever there was one. “He was a good man, your husband. You have mourned him properly and well.”

  “Just a boy,” she whispered.

  “A good boy, then. And he loved you. You have paid him the tribute he deserved, and more. And now it’s time to do him the honor of living again. Come back to town. I’ll see you somewhere safe and warm. I’ll see you there myself, if you’ll let me.”

  Very slowly, without removing her fingers, Mrs Marchant raised her eyes to his, and her mouth came open. “You . . . you silly man. You think . . . But you said you knew the story.”

  Confused, Selkirk squeezed her hand. “I know it now.”

  “You believe I have stayed here, cut off from all that is good in the world, shut up with my nuns all these years like an abbess, for love? For grief?”

  Now Selkirk let go, watching as Mrs Marchant’s hand fluttered before settling in her lap like a blown leaf. “There’s no crime in that, surely. But now—”

  “I’ve always wondered how the rowboat flipped,” she said, in a completely new, expressionless tone devoid of all her half-sung tones, as he stuttered to silence. “All the times I’ve gone through it and over it, and I can’t get it straight. I can’t see how it happened.”

  Unsure what to do with his hands, Selkirk finally settled them on his knees. “The rowboat?”

  “Dead calm. No ghost wave this time. We were twenty yards from shore. Less. We could have hopped out and walked. I was still cooing. Still stroking my husband’s cheeks. But I knew already. And I think his father knew, too. Charlie had died before we even got him in the boat. He wasn’t breathing. Wasn’t moving. He hadn’t during the whole, silent trip back to shore. I turned toward land to see exactly how close we were. And just like that I was in the water.

  “If you had three men and were trying, you couldn’t flip a boat that quickly. One of the oars banged me on the head. I don’t know if it was that or the cold that stunned me. But I couldn’t think. For a second, I had no idea which way was up, even in three feet of water, and then my feet found bottom, and I stood and staggered toward shore. The oar had caught me right on the scalp, and a stream of blood kept pouring into my eyes. I wasn’t thinking about Charlie. I wasn’t thinking anything except that I needed to be out of the cold before I became it. I could feel it in my bloodstream. I got to the beach, collapsed in the sun, remembered where I was and what I’d been doing, and spun around.

  “There was the boat, floating right-side up, as though it hadn’t flipped it all. Oars neatly shipped, like arms folded across a chest. Water still as a lagoon beneath it. And neither my husband nor his father anywhere.

  “I almost laughed. It was impossible. Ridiculous. So cruel. I didn’t scream. I waited, scanning the water, ready to lunge in and save Charlie’s dad if I could only see him. But there was nothing. No trace. I sat down and stared at the horizon and didn’t weep. It seemed perfectly possible that I might freeze to death right there, complete the event. I even opened the throat of my dress, thinking of the Kendall boys shedding their coats that first day. That’s what I was doing when Charlie crawled out of the water.”

  Selkirk stood up. “But you said—”

  “He’d lost his hat. And his coat had come open. He crawled right up the beach, sidewise, like a crab. Just the way he had down the rigging. Of course, my arms opened to him, and the cold dove down my dress. I was laughing, Mr Selkirk. Weeping and laughing and cooing, and his head swung up, and I saw.”

  With a single, determined wriggle of her shoulders, Mrs Marchant went completely still. She didn’t speak again for several minutes. Helpless, Selkirk sat back down.

  “The only question I had in the end, Mr Selkirk, was when it had happened.”

  For no reason he could name, Selkirk experienced a flash of Amalia’s cruel, haunted face, and tried for the thousandth time to imagine where she’d gone. Then he thought of the dead town behind him, the debris disappearing piece by piece and bone by bone into the dunes, his aunt’s silent death. His uncle. He’d never made any effort to determine what had happened to his uncle after Amalia vanished.

  “I still think about those boys, you know,” Mrs Marchant murmured. “Every day. The one suspended in the ropes, exposed like that, all torn up. And the one that disappeared. Do you think he jumped to get away, Mr Selkirk? I think he might have. I would have.”

  “What on earth are you—?”

  “Even the dead’s eyes reflect light,” she said, turning her bright and living ones on him. “Did you know that? But Charlie’s eyes . . . Of course, it wasn’t really Charlie, but . . .”

  Selkirk almost leapt to his feet again, wanted to, wished he could hurtle downstairs, flee into the dusk. And simultaneously he found that he couldn’t.

  “What do you mean?”

  For answer, Mrs Marchant cocked her head at him, and the ghost of her smile hovered over her mouth and evaporated. “What do I mean? How do I know? Was it a ghost? Do you know how many hundreds of sailors have died within five miles of this point? Surely one or two of them might have been angry about it.”

  “Are you actually saying—?”

  “Or maybe that’s silly. Maybe ghosts are like gods, no? Familiar faces we have clamped on what comes for us? Maybe it was the sea. I can’t tell you. What I can tell you is that there was no Charlie in the face before me, Mr Selkirk. None. I had no doubt. No question. My only hope was that whatever it was had come for him after he was gone
, the way a hermit crab climbs inside a shell. Please God, whatever that is, let it be the wind and the cold that took him.”

  Staggering upright, Selkirk shook his head. “You said he was dead.”

  “So he was.”

  “You were mistaken.”

  “It killed the Kendall boy, Mr Selkirk. It crawled down and tore him to shreds. I’m fairly certain it killed its own father as well. Charlie’s father, I mean. Luis took one look at him and vanished into the dunes. I never saw the dog again.”

  “Of course it was him. You’re not yourself, Mrs Marchant. All these years alone . . . It spared you, didn’t it? Didn’t he?”

  Mrs Marchant smiled one more time and broke down weeping, silently. “It had just eaten,” she whispered. “Or whatever it is it does. Or maybe I had just lost my last loved ones, and stank of the sea, and appeared as dead to it as it did to me.”

  “Listen to me,” Selkirk said, and on impulse he dropped to one knee and took her hands once more. God, but they were cold. So many years in this cold, with this weight on her shoulders. “That day was so full of tragedy. Whatever you think you . . .”

  Very slowly, Selkirk stopped. His mind retreated down the stairs, out the lighthouse door to the mainland, over the disappearing path he’d walked between the dunes, and all the way back into Winsett. He saw anew the shuttered boarding houses and empty taverns, the grim smile of the stable-boy. He saw the street where his uncle’s cabin had been. What had happened to his uncle? His aunt? Amalia? Where had they all gone? Just how long had it taken Winsett to die? His mind scrambled farther, out of town, up the track he had taken, between the discarded pots and decaying whale-bones toward the other silent, deserted towns all along this blasted section of the Cape.

  “Mrs Marchant,” he whispered, his hands tightening around hers, having finally understood why she had stayed. “Mrs Marchant, please. Where is Charlie now?”

  She stood, then, and twined one gentle finger through the tops of his curls as she wiped at her tears. The gesture felt dispassionate, almost maternal, something a mother might do to a son who has just awoken. He looked up and found her gazing again not out to sea but over the dunes at the dark streaming inland.

  “It’s going to get even colder,” she said. “I’ll put the kettle on.”

  KIM NEWMAN

  The Man Who Got Off the Ghost Train

  KIM NEWMAN IS A NOVELIST, critic and broadcaster. His published fiction includes The Night Mayor, Bad Dreams, Jago, the Anno Dracula novels and stories, The Quorum, The Original Dr Shade and Other Stories, Famous Monsters, Seven Stars, Unforgivable Stories, Dead Travel Fast, Life’s Lottery, Back in the USSA (with Eugene Byrne), Where the Bodies Are Buried, Doctor Who: Time and Relative, The Man from the Diogenes Club and Secret Files of the Diogenes Club under his own name, and The Vampire Genevieve and Orgy of the Blood Parasites as “Jack Yeovil”.

  His non-fiction books include Nightmare Movies, Ghastly Beyond Belief (with Neil Gaiman), Horror: 100 Best Books and Horror: Another 100 Best Books (both with Stephen Jones), Wild West Movies, The BFI Companion to Horror, Millennium Movies and BFI Classics studies of Cat People and Doctor Who.

  He is a contributing editor to Sight & Sound and Empire magazines and has written and broadcast widely on a range of topics. His short story “Week Woman” was adapted for the TV series The Hunger and he has directed and written a tiny short film, Missing Girl.

  Newman has won the Bram Stoker Award, the International Horror Critics Award, the British Science Fiction Award and the British Fantasy Award. He was born in Brixton (London), grew up in the West Country, went to University near Brighton and now lives in Islington (London).

  As the author reveals: “ ‘The Man Who Got Off the Ghost Train’ was written for my collection The Man from the Diogenes Club – mostly to fill in background for Richard Jeperson, the hero of those stories (while keeping a few mysteries back for later).

  “Also, I happen to like stories set on trains and wanted to do one. I dimly remember being taken with a British TV Sexton Blake serial in the 1960s set on a train, and I make a connection here with Terror by Night, a 1946 Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes film that follows a similar route.

  “In Throw Momma from the Train, Billy Crystal’s character claims ‘Every great mystery or romance has a train in it somewhere’.”

  Culler’s Halt

  “TEN HOURS, GUV’NOR,” said Fred Regent. “That’s what the time-table says. Way this half-holiday is going, next train mightn’t come for ten months.”

  Richard Jeperson shrugged. A cheek-muscle twitched.

  Pink-and-grey-streaked autumn skies hung over wet fields. Fred had scouted around. No one home. Typical British Rail. He only knew Culler’s Halt was in use because of the uncollected rubbish. Lumpy plastic sacks were piled on the station forecourt like wartime sandbags. The bin-men’s strike was settled, but maybe word hadn’t reached these parts. A signpost claimed CULLER 3m. If there were a village at the end of the lane, it showed no lamps at the fag-end of this drab afternoon.

  Fred wasn’t even sure which country Culler was in.

  On the platform, Richard stood by their luggage, peering at the dying sunlight through green-tinted granny glasses. He wore a floor-length mauve travel coat with brocade frogging, shiny PVC bondage trousers (a concession to the new decade) and a curly-brimmed purple top hat.

  Fred knew the Man From the Diogenes Club was worried about Vanessa. When a sensitive worried about someone who could famously take care of herself, it was probably time to panic.

  At dawn, they’d been far South, after a nasty night’s work in Cornwall. They had been saddled with Alastair Garnett, a civil servant carrying out a time-and-motion study. In a funk, the man from the ministry had the bad habit of giving orders. If the local cops had listened to Richard rather than the “advisor”, there’d have been fewer deaths. The hacked-off body parts found inside a stone circle had to be sorted into two piles – goats and teenagers. An isolated family, twisted by decades of servitude to breakfast food corporations, had invented their own dark religion. Ceremonially masked in cornflakes packets with cut-out eyeholes, the Penrithwick Clan made hideous sacrifice to the goblins Snap, Crackle and Pop.

  Bloody wastage like that put Richard in one of his moods, and no wonder. Fred would happily have booted Garnett up his pin-striped arse, but saw the way things were going in the 1980s.

  Trudging back to seaside lodgings in Mevagissey, hardly up for cooked breakfast and sworn off cereal for life, they were met by the landlady and handed Vanessa’s telegram, an urgent summons to Scotland.

  Abandoning the Penrithwick shambles to Garnett, Richard and Fred took a fast train to Paddington. They crossed London by taxi without even stopping off at homes in Chelsea and Soho for a change of clothes or a hello to the girlfriends – who would of course be ticked off by that familiar development – and rattled out of Euston in a slam-door diesel.

  The train stank of decades’ worth of Benson & Hedges. Since giving up, Fred couldn’t be in a fuggy train or pub without feeling queasily envious. At first, they shared their first-class compartment with a clear-complexioned girl whose T-shirt (sporting the word “GASH”, with an Anarchy Symbol for the A) was safety-pinned together like a disassembled torso stitched up after autopsy. She quietly leafed through Bunty and The Lady, chain-smoking with a casual pleasure that made Fred wish a cartoon anvil would fall from the luggage rack onto her pink punk hairdo. At Peterborough, she was collected by a middle-aged gent with a Range Rover. Fred and Richard had the compartment to themselves.

  Outside Lincoln, something mechanical got thrown. The train slowed to a snail’s pace, overtaken by ancient cyclists, jeered at by small boys (“Get off and milk it!”), inching through miles-long tunnels. This went on for agonising hours. Scheduled connections were missed. The only alternative route the conductor could offer involved getting off at York, a stopping train to Culler’s Halt, then a service to Inverdeith, changing there for Portnacreirann. In th
eory, it was doable. In practice, they were marooned. The conductor had been working from a time-table good only until September the 1st of last year. No one else had got off at Culler’s Halt.

  Beyond the rail-bed was a panoramic advertising hoarding. A once-glossy, now-weatherworn poster showed a lengthy dole queue and the slogan LABOUR ISN’T WORKING – VOTE CONSERVATIVE. Over this was daubed NO FUTURE. A mimeographed sheet, wrinkled in the fly-posting, showed the Queen with a pin through her nose.

  “There’s something wrong, Frederick,” said Richard.

  “The country’s going down the drain, and everyone’s pulling the flush.”

  “Not just that. Think about it: ‘God Save the Queen’ came out for the Silver Jubilee, two years before the election. So why are ads for the single pasted over the Tory poster?”

  “This is the wilds, guv. Can’t expect them to be up with pop charts.”

  Richard shrugged again. The mystery wasn’t significant enough to be worth considered thought.

  They had more pressing troubles. Chiefly, Vanessa.

  Their friend and colleague wasn’t a panicky soul. She wouldn’t have sent the telegram unless things were serious. A night’s delay, and they might be too late.

  “I’m not happy with this, Frederick,” said Richard.

  “Me neither, guv.”

  Richard chewed his moustache and looked at the time-table Fred had already checked. Always gaunt, he was starting to seem haggard. Deep shadow gathered in the seams under his eyes