The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2003, Volume 14

by Stephen Jones

  “And don’t we?”

  Poole shrugged. “Maybe some. Not most.”

  “But surely the whole purpose of civilization, its primary virtue, is to escape those very cruelties of nature. To celebrate our unique ability to rise above such cruelty, to transcend nature. Even if it’s our own nature.”

  “Think so? Think anyone rises above their nature? That that’s possible to do?” Poole turned his gaze back on Stevenson, who wanted to respond in the affirmative but who didn’t fancy arguing with a man who’d just saved his life, who suddenly looked very intense. Poole answered his own questions anyway: “Just ask the Donners,” he said.

  As the storm swelled again Stevenson felt a fresh cough coming on, so Poole led him back inside and out of the rain. Mr Balfour raised his head, scowled, and went back to sleep beside his still-slumbering wife. Jackworth and Grey continued to snore on the floor. Mrs Reilly hadn’t so much as stirred from behind her curtain.

  “I got something here that might help you out a bit,” Poole whispered, and led Stevenson back to his collection of jars and beakers. He had to stand on a chair to get a bottle of clear liquid down from a high shelf. “Try this.”

  “What is it?”

  “Laudanum. Mostly. Ever try it?”

  Stevenson nodded. “The effects are salubrious, but short-lived. The aftermath is like drinking a barrel of cheap gin.”

  “Get you through the night,” Poole suggested.

  Stevenson considered, then nodded. Poole poured him a measured glassful, which Stevenson raised to his host in a toast. “You don’t regard this as too intrusive of civilization on nature?” Stevenson asked. He meant it as a joke.

  “Some interventions are necessary. And it’ll get you through the night,” Poole repeated, mirthlessly.

  Stevenson downed the drink, which was extremely potent. Poole had to help him back to his makeshift bed.

  Breathing comfortably, Stevenson was asleep within seconds.

  And awoke to the familiar smell of blood.

  Stevenson was so used to spitting up blood in the night that he didn’t think much of it. He had trouble, thanks to the laudanum, thinking straight at all. The storm had passed and the morning sunlight pierced his eyes like knitting needles. Stevenson tried to lift his head, but couldn’t do it. He lay there for a while, breathing deeply but without difficulty. Bits of dried mud spotted the furs and floor beneath him, flaked off his hands and arms as he raised them to rub at his bleary eyes.

  The smell of blood was very strong.

  Stevenson forced himself to a half-sitting position and glanced down at the front of his shirt. He saw more mud there, but no sign of having bled from his mouth in the night. He touched his fingers to his lips, came away with no trace of red there, either. The scent, however, was overpowering.

  Stevenson looked behind him, saw the arc of Poole’s sleeping back, the slight rise and fall of his round shoulders. Glancing across the room, he could make out Grey and Jackworth’s legs poking out from the far end of the counter. They didn’t appear to have moved at all in the night. The Balfours were silent, as well. As he groggily got to his feet he stole a guilty glance at Mrs Reilly’s curtained corner.

  The calico lay on the floor, revealing the exposed flesh of the young woman sprawled across the bed of furs. Embarrassed, Stevenson looked away, but even as he did so, he knew that something was very wrong.

  That bloody smell had to be coming from somewhere.

  Stevenson turned back toward Mrs Reilly. He took a tentative step, saw that the pile of hides on which she slept was dark and wet. She was entirely naked, and though his gaze fell at first on the swell of her exposed breast, he saw that something dark sat upon her abdomen. As he drew nearer, his head began to swim with the sanguinary odor that wafted off of and out of her. There was nothing atop her stomach, he saw as he neared her bed, but rather her abdomen had been cut open; peeled apart and turned inside out. She’d been slit from between the legs up to her navel. Most of what had been contained within was untidily piled without.

  “Jackworth,” Stevenson whispered.

  He spun around, but there was no movement from the pairs of legs on the floor. Stevenson grabbed at an empty whiskey bottle, holding it by the neck like a club. He advanced along the counter, raising the bottle high above his head as he turned the corner.

  The legs were unattached to any bodies. The bloody stumps had been neatly arranged on the floor, but the bulk of neither Grey nor Jackworth was anywhere to be seen. Stevenson dropped the bottle, opened and closed his eyes several times, convinced that he must be trapped in some laudanum-inspired nightmare.

  The sight – and smell – of the Balfours’ bodies, husband’s head on wife’s shoulders and vice versa, eventually convinced him otherwise. The old woman’s carefully splinted leg was untouched.

  Stevenson stared at the carnage around him, his head still fuzzy from the drug and the shock.

  What had happened? Who could have done this? What kind of animal—

  Poole.

  Stevenson grabbed the bottle again and smashed it against the counter. Holding the jagged edge in front of him he advanced on his host – his savior of only hours previous – who still lay in his bed.

  Stevenson could hear the fat man’s heavy breathing, saw now that his blanket and straw mattress were drenched in drying blood.

  Poole rolled over slowly as Stevenson approached. His eyes were glazed, his features dotted with splotches of red.

  Stevenson moved closer, saw that the man’s hands were cupped over his chest, something wet and dark clutched within.

  Stevenson raised up the broken bottle.

  Poole stared dully at him; made no move to attack or get up. He just lay there in his blood-soaked bedclothes.

  “Why?” Stevenson asked.

  Poole didn’t respond, didn’t so much as blink.

  “Why?” Stevenson demanded, voice breaking. “Why did you do this?”

  “Eaten alive,” Poole whispered. “Eaten alive.”

  Stevenson waited for more. He had to blink away the fuzziness that continued to dance at the edge of his consciousness.

  “. . . alive,” Poole croaked.

  Stevenson lowered his weapon. He looked into Poole’s eyes and saw only a reflection of the morning sunlight.

  “Why not me?” Stevenson begged.

  Poole swallowed hard, and his eyes flicked down to his chest. Stevenson followed his gaze.

  Poole opened his hands to show Stevenson what he held. So tiny but so unmistakable in form.

  He shovelled it into his fat mouth.

  Stevenson screamed.

  He lifted the sharp-edged glass high above his head.

  Fanny’s skin glowed in the lamplight with the sweat of their exertions. A snail’s trail of semen dried on her thigh, matted the softness between her legs. Her head rested on his shoulder and he stroked her long hair. She held his spent organ delicately in her hand; his arm beneath her, his hand cupping the outer curve of her breast.

  “He must have been alone out there for a very long time,” she said.

  “The stagecoaches passed by, stopped in when they had to. The driver, Grey, knew the place, knew the man’s name. He wasn’t a hermit.”

  “I’m trying to think how he could have . . .”

  “Do ye think I’m not? Don’t ye know I can’t think of anything else now?”

  She didn’t reply.

  “Other than ye,” he added. And kissed her hair.

  “He could have taken you, too,” she said and shuddered. “So easily. Why didn’t he, Robbie? Why did he spare you?”

  “I haven’t a clue. Perhaps because he saved my life in the night.”

  “He saved the old woman, too. It didn’t help her.”

  “Aye. I don’t know. That’s why I say. There was nothing but madness in his act, so where do ye look for the logic, for the reason in such a thing?”

  “And there was no clue? No sense of, I don’t know, danger or m
enace from him?”

  “Not a bit. Like I say, the conversation we had in the night, about human nature and the quality of civilization, was a bit peculiar, but it was just words in the night. Or so I thought. And if ye’d seen him treating that old woman – he seemed so clearheaded, so knowledgeable. But it’s like there was some other man hiding inside the one I could see, ye ken? Imprisoned within the first, waiting to come out. But damned if I know what the key was that opened the door and set the monster free. Was it something I said to him in the night? Is that why he spared me? Damned if I know anything at all about people.”

  “Eaten alive,” Fanny whispered.

  “What’s that?”

  “Isn’t that what he kept repeating to you? Eaten alive?”

  “Aye. That’s all I could understand. Not that I do understand.”

  “Perhaps he was describing himself. Perhaps he was talking about something that . . . happened to him?”

  “Or something that he’d done. I don’t know, love. I feel like I don’t know anything anymore. I just feel lost. Like a stranger even within myself.”

  “Eaten alive,” Fanny repeated.

  Stevenson turned his head, but in spite of the topic of conversation he had grown hard again in her hand. She slipped out of his grasp and climbed astride him, slipping him back inside herself. She rocked slowly back and forth on top of him.

  “Robbie?”

  “Aye,” he groaned.

  “You didn’t tell me what you did.”

  “Eh?” he said, understandably distracted.

  “You didn’t finish the story. After you saw . . . unnh . . . what he held in his hands, what he . . . ate. You said you had the broken bottle, and that you raised it up. But you didn’t tell me what you did. What happened to Poole.”

  “Oh, Fanny. Oh, my, Fanny.”

  She grasped his head and looked hard into his eyes.

  “Tell me what you did, Robbie. You know that you can tell me anything. You can tell your Fanny.”

  “Eaten alive,” Stevenson gasped, and exploded inside her.

  “Robbie?”

  RAMSEY CAMPBELL

  The Unbeheld

  RAMSEY CAMPBELL HAS RECEIVED more awards for horror fiction than any other writer. He has been named Grand Master by the World Horror Convention and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writers Association.

  Latest projects include a film of his novel Pact of the Fathers, which was filmed in Spain last year as El Segundo Nombre (Second Name); Told by the Dead is his new collection of short stories; The Darkest Part of the Woods is his latest supernatural novel, and he is currently working on another, The Overnight.

  The author’s M.R. Jamesian anthology Meddling With Ghosts is published by The British Library, and he has co-edited Gathering the Bones with Jack Dann and Dennis Etchison. S.T. Joshi’s study Ramsey Campbell and Modern Horror Fiction is available from Liverpool University Press, while Ramsey Campbell, Probably is a large non-fiction collection from PS Publishing which recently won the International Horror Guild Award.

  About the following story, Campbell admits that: “The idea came from nowhere and I found a character to fit it, as tends to be the case. The tale wasn’t even written anywhere exotic, but in my office facing the dawn over the Mersey.”

  ON THE FIRST DAY OF THE AUTUMN TERM the traffic seemed more reluctant than ever to acknowledge Leonard. Many drivers didn’t slow even when he stepped into the road, raising his sign. As his hands on the metal pole grew slippery with anger, a silver Volvo with a rusty indentation in the driver’s door added itself to the rank of cars parked opposite the school. He was stalking towards it when the driver dashed around the car to let a child out, leaving a furious terrier to yap. The woman led her daughter by the hand to Leonard. “Are you here all the time?” she asked him.

  “As long as there are children. Would you mind—”

  “May I have your name?”

  “All the children call me Leonard.”

  “I see, and it’s Mr . . .”

  “Bailey. I was just going to say—”

  “Polly, this is Mr Bailey. You can always go to him if for any reason I’m not here.”

  “Hello, Mr Bailey,” the little girl said, taking his hand. She was about eight, with a plump face that looked uncertain whether to be pert and large blue eyes adorned with the longest lashes he’d ever seen on a child. “Hello, Polly,” he said. “Some people would pay for those eyelashes.”

  Apparently that failed to appeal to her or her mother. “I thought there was one like them on my pillow this morning,” Leonard said, still hoping for a laugh.

  “Shall we see if that’s one of your teachers in the playground, Polly? She looks nice.”

  “A false one, I mean,” Leonard insisted, since he was telling the truth, “but it was only an old dead spider.”

  Polly giggled and her fingers squirmed. “It was dead, Polly,” her mother said – unnecessarily, Leonard thought. “Come along now. You don’t want to be late on your first day or any other either.”

  Soon the long building the colour of the scabs on half a dozen of that morning’s knees reduced the shrill uproar in the playground to a murmur before sucking it into a hush. While Leonard ushered latecomers across the road, the Volvo shook and yapped as the dog leapt within, all the more vigorously when Polly’s mother returned. “Thank you for guarding my car,” she said.

  She might have been speaking to rather than over the dog. Once she’d eased the car forward into a vacated space, however, she lowered her window. “I’m sorry I stopped where I shouldn’t. I wanted to be sure she had time to settle in.”

  “So long as it was just this once. Have you moved far?”

  “From London.”

  “That’s a good way, isn’t it? What brought you?”

  “My job and my husband’s. Social work.”

  “There’s a lot of that about these days. I hope you won’t find us Northerners too different. I’ve not long moved myself.”

  “Aren’t you local?”

  “Some wouldn’t say so. They think if you were born the other side of town you’re a foreigner.”

  “You’re telling me about yourself.”

  “Born and lived there till the kids next door started keeping me awake half the night. Any road, I didn’t need all that space without my mam and dad, and now I’m just up the street from the school.”

  “Is that the appeal? Quiet now, Sheba,” Polly’s mother said, twisting round to pat or slap the dog.

  “She had her way with Solly, didn’t she, Sheba?”

  The woman pushed the dog down on the seat and frowned at Leonard. “Have you a pet, Mr Bailey?”

  “The landlord won’t allow them. When I was Polly’s age—”

  “How old is that?”

  “Eight, isn’t it?”

  “Seven.” Having stared at him, Polly’s mother said “I should introduce myself. I’m Mrs Marsh.”

  “Pleased to meet you, I’m sure.”

  When the Volvo sped away as though powered by yapping he used his pole to make himself a gap in the relentless rush-hour traffic. He felt like a knight issuing a challenge to anyone who tried to cross his path. He stored his pole and his fluorescent orange coat in the office, where Miss Devine, the school secretary, leaned her lanky upper half over her strewn desk at him. “Off somewhere good now?” she enquired, and seemingly in case he hadn’t understood her “Off somewhere good?”

  “Home to see who’s written to me.”

  Only computers had. At the end of his walk through three increasingly narrow streets to the midmost of a clump of houses squeezed together, all the envelopes on the muddy cork doormat were brown. His name peeked out of two cellophane windows; another bill was for his deceased predecessor, and the last for Mr Flanagan upstairs, whose cigarettes Leonard always smelled on entering the house. He thought he heard Mr Flanagan panting on the stairs, but there was no sign of him, and the noise ceased as Leonard unlocked
his apartment door.

  He sipped tea at the table in the kitchen that was also the dining room and wrote letters contesting the utility bills. Even if he had to agree the amounts eventually, his bank balance would have put on an extra few pence. At the post office the morose postmaster pretended to think Leonard was there for his pension, though he must know by now that Leonard was a Monday man. Outside the post office Leonard caught a bus that delivered him as close to the nearest cinema as public transport was allowed.

  Five minutes’ walk past elephantine branches of a very few stores brought him to the cinema, only to find that little on the ten screens attracted him. “A fairy tale in another galaxy” sounded too childish, and he wasn’t to be tricked by “A movie for anyone who’s ever felt gay”. Even less tempting were “The most grossest comedy ever”, “A crime film to terrify us all”, “A ninety-minute roller-coaster ride” . . . He had his suspicions about “A sensitive study of modern relationships”, but at least nobody was heading for it armed with enormous tubs of popcorn. He displayed his bus pass to a regally indifferent ticket clerk who bestowed a ticket on him.

  Perhaps the sensitivity of the film was meant to lie in how all the lovers were hugely overweight, but it only made him feel dwindled. It contained lashings of language that he heard too many children use these days and masses of rampant flesh. The sly movement of the exit doors beside the screen was a welcome distraction until an usher appeared through the doors and clanked the bar into place. The man plodded up the aisle, and Leonard was reluctantly attending to a renewed surge of blubber on the screen when he glimpsed a shape making its four-legged way along the row of seats to him.

  It wasn’t his dog, he told himself – just a dog. He wished he could remember his dog’s name and a good deal else. He leaned down to pat the animal’s head. It flinched back, and his hand encountered its wet nose. He cried out with disgust as it did too. “What are you doing with that child?” a grandam demanded behind him.