The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2003, Volume 14

by Stephen Jones

  “And then in the very next moment, I just . . . I just noticed another load of lines – cracks that had always been there, you understand? Patterns in broken brick that I’d seen only a second before – that looked exactly like that same thing, a little closer to me. And in the next moment a third picture in the brick, a picture of the thing closer still.

  “Reaching for me.”

  “I broke free then,” she whispered. “I ran away from there in terror, with my hands in front of my eyes and I was screaming. I ran and ran.

  “And when I stopped and opened my eyes again, I had run to the edge of a park, and I took my hands slowly down and dared to look behind me, and saw that there was nothing coming from the alley where I’d been. So I turned to the little snatch of scrub and grass and trees.

  “And I saw the thing again.”

  Mrs Miller’s voice was stretched out as if she was dreaming. My mouth was open and I huddled closer to the door.

  “I saw it in the leaves,” she said forlornly. “As I turned I saw the leaves in such a way . . . Just a chance conjuncture, you understand? I noticed a pattern. I couldn’t not. You don’t choose whether to see faces in the clouds. I saw the monstrous thing again and it still reached for me, and I shrieked and all the mothers and fathers and children in that park turned and gazed at me, and I turned my eyes from that tree and whirled on my feet to face a little family in my way.

  “And the thing was there in the same pose,” she whispered in misery. “I saw it in the outlines of the fathers coat and the spokes of the baby’s pushchair, and the tangles of the mother’s hair. It was just another mess of lines, you see? But you don’t choose what you notice. And I couldn’t help but notice just the right lines out of the whole, just the lines out of all the lines there, just the ones to see the thing again, a little closer, looking at me.

  “And I turned and saw it closer still in the clouds, and I turned again and it was clutching for me in the rippling weeds in the pond, and as I closed my eyes I swear I felt something touch my dress.

  “You understand me? You understand?”

  I didn’t know if I understood or not. Of course now I know that I did not.

  * * *

  “It lives in the details,” she said bleakly. “It travels in that . . . in that perception. It moves through those chance meetings of lines. Maybe you glimpse it sometimes when you stare at clouds, and then maybe it might catch a glimpse of you too.

  “But it saw me full on. It’s jealous of . . . of its place, and there was I peering through without permission, like a nosy neighbour through a hole in the fence. I know what it is. I know what happened.

  “It lurks before us, in the everyday. It’s the boss of all the things hidden in plain sight. Terrible things, they are. Appalling things. Just almost in reach. Brazen and invisible.

  “It caught my glances. It can move through whatever I see.

  “For most people it’s just chance, isn’t it? What shapes they see in a tangle of wire. There’s a thousand pictures there, and when you look some of them just appear. But now . . . the thing in the lines chooses the pictures for me. It can thrust itself forward. It makes me see it. It’s found its way through. To me. Through what I see. I opened a door into my perception.”

  She sounded frozen with terror. I was not equipped for that kind of adult fear, and my mouth worked silently for something to say.

  “That was a long, long journey home. Every time I peeked through the cracks in my fingers, I saw that thing crawling for me.

  “It waited ready to pounce, and when I opened my eyes even a crack I opened the door again. I saw the back of a woman’s jumper and in the details of the fabric the thing leapt for me. I glimpsed a yard of broken paving and I noticed just the lines that showed me the thing . . . baying.

  “I had to shut my eyes quick.

  “I groped my way home.

  “And then I taped my eyes shut and I tried to think about things.”

  There was silence for a time.

  “See, there was always the easy way – that scared me rotten, because I was never one for blood and pain,” she said suddenly, and her voice was harder. “I held the scissors in front of my eyes a couple of times, but even bandaged blind as I was I couldn’t bear it. I suppose I could’ve gone to a doctor. I can pull strings, I could pull in a few favours, have them do the job without pain.

  “But you know I never . . . really . . . reckoned . . . that’s what I’d do,” she said thoughtfully. “What if you found a way to close the door? Eh? And you’d already put out your eyes? You’d feel such a fool, wouldn’t you?

  “And you know it wouldn’t be good enough to wear pads and eyepatches and all. I tried. You catch glimpses. You see the glimmers of light and maybe a few of your own hairs, and that’s the doorway right there, when the hairs cross in the corner of your eye so that if you notice just a few of them in just the right way . . . they look like something coming for you. That’s a doorway.

  “It’s . . . unbearable . . . having sight, but trapping it like that.

  “I’m not giving up. See . . .” Her voice lowered, and she spoke conspiratorially. “I still think I can close the door. I learnt to see. I can unlearn. I’m looking for ways. I want to see a wall as . . . as bricks again. Nothing more. That’s why you read for me,” she said. “Research. Can’t look at it myself, of course, too many edges and lines and so on on a printed page, so you do it for me. And you’re a good boy to do it.”

  I’ve thought about what she said many times, and still it makes no sense to me. The books I read to Mrs Miller were school textbooks, old and dull village histories, the occasional romantic novel. I think that she must have been talking of some of her other visitors, who perhaps read her more esoteric stuff than I did. Either that, or the information she sought was buried very cleverly in the banal prose I faltered through.

  “In the meantime, there’s another way of surviving,” she said slyly. “Leave the eyes where they are, but don’t give them any details.

  “That . . . thing can force me to notice its shape, but only in what’s there. That’s how it travels. You imagine if I saw a field of wheat. Doesn’t even bear thinking about! A million million little bloody edges, a million lines. You could make pictures of damn anything out of them, couldn’t you? It wouldn’t take any effort at all for the thing to make me notice it. The damn lurker. Or in a gravel drive or, or a building site, or a lawn . . .

  “But I can outsmart it.” The note of cunning in her voice made her sound deranged. “Keep it away till I work out how to close it off.

  “I had to prepare this blind, with the wrappings round my head. Took me a while, but here I am now. Safe. I’m safe in my little cold room. I keep the walls flat white. I covered the windows and painted them too. I made my cloak out of plastic, so’s I can’t catch a glimpse of cotton weave or anything when I wake up.

  “I keep my place nice and . . . simple. When it was all done, I unwrapped the bandages from my head, and I blinked slowly . . . and I was all right. Clean walls, no cracks, no features. I don’t look at my hands often or for long. Too many creases. Your mother makes me a good healthy soup looks like cream, so if I accidentally look in the bowl, there’s no broccoli or rice or tangled-up spaghetti to make lines and edges.

  “I open and shut the door so damned quick because I can only afford a moment. That thing is ready to pounce. It wouldn’t take a second for it to leap up at me out of the sight of your hair or your books or whatever.”

  Her voice ebbed out. I waited a minute for her to resume, but she did not do so. Eventually I knocked nervously on the door and called her name. There was no answer. I put my ear to the door. I could hear her crying, quietly.

  I went home without the bowl. My mother pursed her lips a little but said nothing. I didn’t tell her any of what Mrs Miller had said. I was troubled and totally confused.

  The next time I delivered Mrs Miller’s food, in a new container, she whispered harshly to me: “It prey
s on my eyes, all the white. Nothing to see. Can’t look out the window, can’t read, can’t gaze at my nails. Preys on my mind.

  “Not even my memories are left,” she said in misery. “It’s colonizing them. I remember things . . . happy times . . . and the thing’s waiting in the texture of my dress, or in the crumbs of my birthday cake. I didn’t notice it then. But I can see it now. My memories aren’t mine any more. Not even my imaginings. Last night I thought about going to the seaside, and then the thing was there in the foam on the waves.”

  She spoke very little the next few times I visited her. I read the chapters she demanded and she grunted curtly in response. She ate quickly.

  Her other visitors were there more often now, as the spring came in. I saw them in new combinations and situations: the glamorous young woman arguing with the friendly drunk; the old man sobbing at the far end of the hall. The aggressive man was often there, cajoling and moaning, and occasionally talking conversationally through the door, being answered like an equal. Other times he screamed at her as usual.

  I arrived on a chilly day to find the drunken cockney man sleeping a few feet from the door, snoring gutturally. I gave Mrs Miller her food and then sat on my coat and read to her from a women’s magazine as she ate.

  When she had finished her food I waited with my arms outstretched, ready to snatch the bowl from her. I remember that I was very uneasy, that I sensed something wrong. I was looking around me anxiously, but everything seemed normal. I looked down at my coat and the crumpled magazine, at the man who still sprawled comatose in the hall.

  As I heard Mrs Miller’s hands on the door, I realized what had changed. The drunken man was not snoring. He was holding his breath.

  For a tiny moment I thought he had died, but I could see his body trembling, and my eyes began to open wide and I stretched my mouth to scream a warning, but the door had already begun to swing in its tight, quick arc, and before I could even exhale the stinking man pushed himself up faster than I would have thought he could and bore down on me with bloodshot eyes.

  I managed to keen as he reached me, and the door faltered for an instant, as Mrs Miller heard my voice. But the man grabbed hold of me in a terrifying, heavy fug of alcohol. He reached down and snatched my coat from the floor, tugged at the jumper I had tied around my waist with his other hand, and hurled me hard at the door.

  It flew open, smacking Mrs Miller aside. I was screaming and crying. My eyes hurt at the sudden burst of cold white light from all the walls. I saw Mrs Miller rubbing her head in the corner, struggling to her senses. The staggering, drunken man hurled my checked coat and my patterned jumper in front of her, reached down and snatched my feet, tugged me out of the room in an agony of splinters. I wailed snottily with fear.

  Behind me, Mrs Miller began to scream and curse, but I could not hear her well because the man had clutched me to him and pulled my head to his chest. I fought and cried and felt myself lurch as he leaned forward and slammed the door closed.

  He held it shut.

  When I fought myself free of him I heard him shouting.

  “I told you, you slapper,” he wailed unhappily. “I bloody told you, you silly old whore. I warned you it was time . . .” Behind his voice I could hear shrieks of misery and terror from the room. Both of them kept shouting and crying and screaming, and the floorboards pounded, and the door shook, and I heard something else as well.

  As if the notes of all the different noises in the house fell into a chance meeting, and sounded like more than dissonance. The shouts and bangs and cries of fear combined in a sudden audible illusion like another presence.

  Like a snarling voice. A lingering, hungry exhalation.

  I ran then, screaming and terrified, my skin freezing in my T-shirt. I was sobbing and retching with fear, little bleats bursting from me. I stumbled home and was sick in my mother’s room, and kept crying and crying as she grabbed hold of me and I tried to tell her what had happened, until I was drowsy and confused and I fell into silence.

  My mother said nothing about Mrs Miller. The next Wednesday we got up early and went to the zoo, the two of us, and at the time when I would usually be knocking on Mrs Miller’s door I was laughing at camels. The Wednesday after that I was taken to see a film, and the one after that my mother stayed in bed and sent me to fetch cigarettes and bread from the local shop, and I made our breakfast and ate it in her room.

  My friends could tell that something had changed in the yellow house, but they did not speak to me about it, and it quickly became uninteresting to them.

  I saw the Asian woman once more, smoking with her friends in the park several weeks later, and to my amazement she nodded to me and came over, interrupting her companions’ conversation.

  “Are you all right?” she asked me peremptorily. “How you doing?”

  I nodded shyly back and told her that I was fine, thank you, and how was she?

  She nodded and walked away.

  * * *

  I never saw the drunken, violent man again.

  There were people I could probably have gone to to understand more about what had happened to Mrs Miller. There was a story that I could chase, if I wanted to. People I had never seen before came to my house and spoke quietly to my mother, and looked at me with what I suppose was pity or concern. I could have asked them. But I was thinking more and more about my own life. I didn’t want to know Mrs Miller’s details.

  I went back to the yellow house once, nearly a year after that awful morning. It was winter. I remembered the last time I spoke to Mrs Miller and I felt so much older it was almost giddying. It seemed such a vastly long time ago.

  I crept up to the house one evening, trying the keys I still had, which to my surprise worked. The hallway was freezing, dark and stinking more strongly than ever. I hesitated, then pushed open Mrs Miller’s door.

  It opened easily, without a sound. The occasional muffled noise from the street seemed so distant it was like a memory. I entered.

  She had covered the windows very carefully, and still no light made its way through from outside. It was extremely dark. I waited until I could see better in the ambient glow from the outside hallway.

  I was alone.

  My old coat and jumper lay spreadeagled in the corner of the room. I shivered to see them, went over and fingered them softly. They were damp and mildewing, covered in wet dust.

  The white paint was crumbling off the wall in scabs. It looked as if it had been left untended for several years. I could not believe the extent of the decay.

  I turned slowly around and gazed at each wall in turn. I took in the chaotic, intricate patterns of crumbling paint and damp plaster. They looked like maps, like a rocky landscape.

  I looked for a long time at the wall furthest from my jacket. I was very cold. After a long time I saw a shape in the ruined paint. I moved closer with a dumb curiosity far stronger than any fear.

  In the crumbling texture of the wall was a spreading anatomy of cracks that – seen from a certain angle, caught just right in the scraps of light – looked in outline something like a woman. As I stared at it it took shape, and I stopped noticing the extraneous lines, and focused without effort or decision on the relevant ones. I saw a woman looking out at me.

  I could make out the suggestion of her face. The patch of rot that constituted it made it look as if she was screaming.

  One of her arms was flung back away from her body, which seemed to strain against it, as if she was being pulled away by her hand and was fighting to escape, and was failing. At the end of her crack-arm, in the space where her captor would be, the paint had fallen away in a great slab, uncovering a huge patch of wet, stained, textured cement.

  And in that dark infinity of markings, I could make out any shape I wanted.

  DON TUMASONIS

  The Wretched

  Thicket of Thorn

  DON TUMASONIS, IN THE SHORT SPACE of his tarnished, yet louche career as a writer of speculative fiction, has established a
name – what sort, he will not say – through the publication of a number of short stories, reviews and articles in various magazines, including All Hallows, Supernatural Tales and Ghosts and Scholars, not to mention the anthologies Shadows and Silence and Dark Terrors 6. His translation of Christopher Hals Gylseth and Lars O. Toverud’s book Julia Pastrana: The Strange Life of the Victorian Ape Woman was recently published by Sutton UK, and more of the author’s stories are due to appear in All Hallows and John Pelan’s third Darkside anthology.

  As Tumasonis recalls: “ ‘The Wretched Thicket of Thorn’ was written as part of a yet-unfinished cycle of speculative fictions with the working title Seven Modern Deadly Sins. Two previously published stories, ‘The Graveyard’ and ‘What Goes Down’, dealt with infidelity and acrimony, respectively.

  “The title remotely derives from hearing Harlan Ellison once hold forth on his short story ‘The Whimper of Whipped Dogs’, which, not understanding West Coast, I took to be ‘The Whipper of Whipped Dogs’. The perceived malapropism had me bursting publicly into laughter, alone of an otherwise polite audience of a hundred or so. Which crime had Mr Ellison attempting my assassination by paper airplane. Being younger then, I artfully deflected the missile, foreshadowing the parrying skills of Bill the Butcher, but wisely left the room before the talk was finished. Long after, having found out my mistake, pace Ellison, I realized that alliteration might have its use in titles after all.

  “The setting and events of the story are for the most part true; the island exists, as does the thicket. Having taken one look inside, I never entered, but always wondered what I would have found had I done so.”

  THE LITTLE ISLAND harbour below, so enclosed from the winds by cliffs, was sickeningly hot and humid. Here above, where they had their small hotel, a breeze played constantly across the hilltop and made life bearable. Anticipating the plunge into the furnace, Charles, still acclimatizing to the bright Greek sun after a cold and rainy summer at home, stopped for a moment, wiped the accumulated sweat from his forehead, and looked about him.