The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2003, Volume 14

by Stephen Jones

  “So what?” I said.

  “That’s it, the disused line I was talking about.”

  I looked at him.

  Footsteps approached from Hammersmith Grove. We each turned and watched a young woman of medium height coming towards us. She crossed the road to avoid us and carried on down towards the railway arches.

  “Too short, I suppose?” I said, when she had turned the corner.

  “By a good six inches.”

  If I had known then why he was interested in tall women, I would never have made the comment.

  For the next few days I concentrated on my own project, my film about Sinclair Road, which I was hoping to flog to one of the new BBC digital channels that were soon to come online. Nobody would see it, but that wasn’t the point. I’d get paid, there’d be a bit of press and the next one might actually get commissioned. It was a plan, not an especially clever one, but a plan nevertheless, which I’d come up with after several years of trying to set stuff up with the BBC and countless small production companies. I’d been to enough meetings to last a lifetime, all of them fruitless.

  The conceit of the film was that everybody in London has lived in Sinclair Road or will do so at some point in the future. It seemed a neat way in to make a little film about a road that actually is a bit special. It does have an unusually high turnover of residents. I am forever meeting people who live there, or who tell me they’ve lived there in the past. An academic I met at a party a year ago, and an architect she knew who lived there too; a musician I met via some writer friends; a lad to whom I gave a lift home after playing football under the Westway. It got to the point where I was expecting people to say “Sinclair Road” when I asked them where they lived.

  At home I edited various bits of footage on the iBook while working my way through a bottle of vodka. I replayed a panning shot of top-floor flats along Sinclair Road and it struck me how similar it was to a clip I’d shot the day before of a train on the Hammersmith & City line near Latimer Road. Playing both clips forward and back and varying the speeds, I remembered what Marco had said about streets full of houses being divided up horizontally rather than vertically. His theory ended up influencing the way I edited the film, as I intercut shots of Sinclair Road with shots of the train.

  Tired and half-pissed, I decided to log on to the net for half an hour before crashing out. I looked into Marco’s story about a disused line and discovered that it was true. There had been a line, going from Addison Road station (now Kensington Olympia) to Hammersmith and then on to Richmond. It had run north alongside the West London line, parallel with Sinclair Road, as far as Addison Gardens, then had peeled off to the left.

  Normally, in the mornings, I waited for the post before going out anywhere, and especially around that time, as I had placed an ad for an actress or model in the Stage. “Possible nudity,” I had specified, and “no fee upfront”, so the CVs were not exactly flooding in. First thing the next day, however, before the post came, I wandered over to Sinclair Road with the camera.

  The line’s former route was easy to identify. Because it had run in a cutting just below street level, there were noticeable humps where various roads had bridged the line. On the west side of Shepherd’s Bush Road there was even a parapet where you could look down on to a row of lock-up garages where once there had been a station serving Shepherd’s Bush. On the east side of the road, an imposing block of flats, the Grampians, had been built in the Art Deco style of the day only fifteen years or so after the line’s closure in 1916. It occurred to me that I had walked over that former bridge hundreds of times and wondered why it was there. When you looked west you somehow expected a slightly grander view than a line of lock-ups and a few old cars. It had always seemed an unsatisfactorily resolved landscape.

  The old line had passed underneath the Hammersmith & City line just south of Goldhawk Road station and then straightened to mount its own viaduct, a fragment of which Marco had shown me at Trussley Road.

  I headed back towards Sinclair Road via the Green, then cut behind the petrol station, but as I did so I noticed a figure disappearing up the ramp into the residents’ car park at the foot of one of the tower blocks. It’s funny how with some people you think you recognize them in the street, but you’re not quite sure, even though you can see them right there in front of you, and so you don’t know whether or not to acknowledge them, and if you do and it’s not them you look stupid, and you look no less stupid if you fail to acknowledge someone you do know; and yet with other people, you recognize them in a split second, a hundred per cent, even from the back as they’re disappearing into a car park.

  Instead of hailing Marco, I followed him. I had never had reason to enter this or any other nearby car park. I lived in a two-bedroom flat that cost more than I could afford above a twenty-four-hour supermarket on the north side of the Green and parked my Mazda in the street.

  At the top of the ramp there was a covered section. I waited until Marco had reached the other end and turned left into daylight again. I passed a couple of 4 × 4s and a newish Jaguar. Smart cars for a block of council flats. Beyond the covered area was an open-air extension to the car park. At the far side, a low wall and a wire-mesh fence separated the parked cars, among them two new Minis, from a twenty-foot drop to the rear of the Deco apartment block, the Grampians. I realized this represented part of the track-bed of the disused line. Marco was standing close to the fence further along. From what I could make out, he was trying to see into the flats. Every few seconds he lowered his gaze to the cutting where, a hundred years before, trains would have run. It was at that point that I started to suspect that his interest in the old line went beyond that of a local historian. Before I knew what I was doing I had the camera to my eye and was filming him. Local nutter or neighbourhood visionary, he’d look good in the film, whether his taking part was agreed to or not. If he fancied it, we could shoot some more stuff in Sinclair Road; if not, he’d just be a long-haired bystander in a dirty coat, a tatty figure in a scruffy landscape. There’d be a stark contrast with the female nude, if ever I found one.

  Marco registered my presence. I lowered the camera, but he didn’t seem that bothered. I walked over to him.

  “I’m making a film,” I said, “about Sinclair Road. Since you told me about the old line, I realize that’s got to be in it. It ran just down here, didn’t it?”

  “Can you hear them, too?”

  I raised my eyebrows at him.

  “The trains.”

  “Did one just go by? Did I miss it?”

  He laughed to himself, somewhat hollowly.

  “There’s a good view from my place,” he said.

  “Where’s that?”

  “Where do you think?”

  We walked together to Sinclair Road. His place was on the east side close to Addison Gardens and the bridge over the railway. We climbed to the top floor, where he had a studio flat that smelled of incense and damp.

  “Nice place,” I said.

  “It’s a shit-hole,” he muttered.

  My brain went into overdrive. My visits to estate agents had served two purposes. I wanted to gather evidence that Sinclair Road had an unusually high turnover, as I’ve said, but I was also on the lookout for a cheap flat to rent, to use in the film. Maybe I’d found it, rent free. The studio room was relatively uncluttered: a vinyl settee, a portable TV and a free-standing bookcase full of books on magic and biographies of Aleister Crowley. I looked out of the front window. It was only really when you saw the road from this angle that you appreciated how big these houses were and how many people must live in the street at any one time. What looked like three-storey houses to the casual passer-by in fact comprised five storeys if you counted the lower-ground floor and the attics that most of them seemed to have.

  Hearing the sound of tearing paper, I turned to look at Marco. He was opening his post by ripping the tops and bottoms of envelopes right across.

  “Do you always open your mail like that?�
�� I asked him.

  “Of course,” he said.

  “Why ‘of course’?”

  Again he laughed to himself and held up a brown A5-size envelope.

  “Open one of these in a darkened room,” he said, “and you’ll see why.”

  When I continued to look baffled, he went and pulled the curtains, front and back, plunging the room into semi-darkness. He tossed the envelope to me.

  “You open it,” he said. “Pull it apart where the glue’s stuck together.”

  I realized what he was going on about, but opened the envelope, all the same, according to his instructions. As I expected, where the glue parted, in long stringy filaments, a faint phosphorescent glow appeared. I’d seen this before, but had no idea what caused it.

  “You don’t like that, then?” I asked him. “The phosphorescent thing?”

  “What’s there to like? That they’re trying ever more bizarre ways to get at me? I’m not stupid, you know.”

  “No. I can see that,” I said, opening the curtains at the rear and looking down at the railway line. “So that’s the West London line?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “And the disused line ran alongside?”

  “On this side, yes. And can I sleep at night? No. The noise of it is constant. Constant. The trains never stop. They never stop.”

  Marco was pressing the heel of his hand to his forehead like a method actor with a headache.

  “Right,” I said. “And what’s this, if you don’t mind my asking?” I pointed to a small pile of soil on the carpet near the window, and an indecipherable series of chalk marks on the wall.

  “That’s my business,” he said darkly.

  “Whatever.”

  Walking home, I thought about the soil. I vaguely recalled reading up on magic and divination for an unsuccessful pitch to Channel Four. Geomancy had something to do with seeing the future in patterns of scattered soil. The contents of Marco’s bookshelves attested to more than a passing interest in the dark arts. I wondered how far he took it.

  I pictured the flat and imagined ripping up the ratty carpet to expose the bare boards that must lie beneath. All I needed was the right face, and more, to situate in that space and have it looking out at Sinclair Road from the inside.

  And when I got home I found that face.

  There was a small pile of mail on the doormat. I took the mail into the front room. Then I did something I’d never done before. I don’t know why I did it – whether in homage to Marco or as a way of rather pointlessly taking the piss out of the poor fucker – but I selected the biggest item and opened it in the way I’d seen him do it, by ripping off the top and the bottom. Too late I realized that the envelope had contained a response to my ad in the Stage: a letter, a CV and a black and white ten-by-eight.

  I gingerly withdrew what remained of the photo. The respondent had taken heed of my warning about nudity and had gamely got herself snapped in the buff. Her arms and legs looked dark, making me think she might be Asian or Arab. Her torso and abdomen were awash with light from the adjacent open window. It could have been the window in Marco’s flat. Between her breasts and her navel was a series of broken-up horizontal lines that I assumed to be some sort of henna pattern. Her left hand was placed across her breastbone, just below her throat, which seemed a strangely vulnerable gesture for a woman willingly posing nude.

  I picked the remaining contents of the envelope up off the floor. The woman’s head, which I had so cavalierly ripped from her body, was turned towards the window, a distant, melancholy look on her face. On the other strip that I’d unwittingly torn from the photograph were the model’s feet. Around her ankles were more henna designs like dotted lines. Only when I reassembled the three pieces did I appreciate fully her tall, statuesque figure.

  I looked at the letter and CV. Her name was Vita Ray, which I took to be a stage name. She wanted the work, she said, because she wanted to get into films. Modelling for the picture had demonstrated that she was at ease in front of a camera. She gave a mobile number and what looked like a temporary address in Paddington.

  I knew that I should really give it a few more days for some more CVs to come in, but I felt bad about mistreating Vita Ray’s portrait, and she looked right for Sinclair Road, so I picked up the phone.

  Our first meeting took place in Sinclair Road itself. Vita Ray arrived by cab. As she stepped out and paid the driver, I saw for the first time how tall she was. At least two inches taller than my five foot seven. We walked the length of Sinclair Road while I explained to her what the film was about. As we approached the far end I glanced up at the attic window of number 148. Did I see the curtain move? It was impossible to be sure, especially with the sun reflecting off the glass.

  I found her a little nervous, but keen to get started. I got her to walk towards me while looking into the windows she was passing.

  “I want you to appear curious about who lives here and what they do,” I explained.

  She was a natural. Unaware of the camera and a graceful mover. I began, prematurely, to congratulate myself on having chosen her. I asked her to unbutton her coat. As soon as she did so I saw that she had another intricate henna pattern, one that postdated the photograph, around her throat like a necklace. I then wondered if it could have been there, after all, and I had torn along the line of it when opening the envelope.

  As we reached the bottom of the street, we ran into Marco, who was walking up from the Olympia end, so either I’d been mistaken about the curtain in his flat or he’d seen us and come straight out, going the long way round and doubling back. I introduced them to each other. The way Marco stole glances at Vita, while she was looking elsewhere, appeared sly and calculating. It was only later that I realized precisely how calculating.

  “So you’re working on his film?” he asked her, somehow managing to offend both of us at the same time. “Me too.”

  Vita looked less than thrilled at the prospect.

  “We’ve got to go,” I said, taking her arm. “I’ll be in touch.”

  I walked Vita down to Olympia and put her in a black cab. She turned round to watch me through the rear window as the cab pulled away. I gave a self-conscious wave. It was the last time I would see her alive.

  I fixed a meeting for a couple of days later at Marco’s place. If I could actually get Marco out of the flat for half an hour, get him to run some invented errand, then Vita and I would be able to shoot some stuff. I didn’t need long and my instinct told me she’d be a fast worker, too.

  My plan was to get there first, so she didn’t have to hang around on her own with Marco. Typically, however, a BBC producer rang me on the morning of the day when we were to do the filming. Some woman I’d had a couple of inconclusive meetings with in the past. Something had just come up, she said, an opportunity that was too good to miss. A BBC2 thing. Could I come in and knock a few ideas around? She suggested a time. I asked if we could make it any earlier or even the following day.

  “It’s just come up,” she repeated, from which I inferred that it could just as quickly go away again.

  “Okay, I’ll be there,” I said. “But I’ve got to be away by three.”

  I should have said no, but I didn’t know that then. Obviously I know it now, but I didn’t know it then, although you could argue, and I often do, that I should have done.

  I was still pacing up and down in the White City lobby at ten to three when Amanda finally showed up, trotting down to the security barriers. I considered telling her I had to go, but these meetings have a way of sucking you in, draining you of the power to resist. I went through and we went upstairs and we knocked a few ideas around and she said she’d get back to me and I knew she wouldn’t. Or she would, but it would be six weeks down the line and she’d remind me I knew what it was like.

  It was four p.m. when I got to Sinclair Road. There was no response to my repeated leaning on Marco’s bell, nor to my hammering on the door.

  “You gave her to me,”
Marco would later whisper, when I visited him.

  Vita’s body was found by the lock-up garages on the west side of Shepherd’s Bush Road. She lay across the track-bed of the disused line, albeit on asphalt laid down over its long-dead remains. Her feet were found closest to the garages, severed just above the ankle. Her head had rolled a few inches in the direction of the block of flats served by the garages. It was quickly established, from the amount of blood spilled at the site, not only that the beheading and double amputation had taken place right there in broad daylight and in full view of residents and passers-by, but that Vita had still been alive at the time.

  Marco was picked up soaked in blood outside Vesbar. He never denied taking Vita to the lock-up garages and being present at the moment of her death, which he attributed not to his own efforts and the hacksaw bearing his bloody fingerprints found on the roof of one of the garages but to a train that had emerged from the tunnel under Shepherd’s Bush Road and failed to stop. It should have stopped at the station, he maintained.

  In the opinion of the court, Marco was not insane, merely trying his hardest to give that impression. I asserted otherwise, having cooperated fully with the authorities. Not only did I believe there was a danger that I might face charges myself, I would have welcomed them. As it was, I was cleared of any impropriety and left free to judge myself. It wasn’t long before the offers started coming in. Meetings would be an informality this time, it seemed. I could choose my own projects. Set my own budgets. Publicity guaranteed.

  I turned down the offers, despite the fact that I had even less work now than before. My landlord gave me notice to quit the flat.

  Whenever I began to feel that I had sacrificed enough and might try to return to a normal life, I arranged to visit Marco.

  “You gave her to me,” he whispered.