The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2003, Volume 14

by Stephen Jones

  Well, there was mystery. Mystery, ancient and modern, with Seaography: then Drawling – the Drawling-Master was an old conger eel . . .

  An old conjure eel—

  Don’t ever look at the windows even when the scarecrow fingers, the dry-grass bundled fingers, are tap-tap-tapping their song upon the glass. And she has seen the women dancing naked by the autumn moon, dancing in the tall, moonwashed sheaves, bare feet where her father’s scythe has fallen again and again, every reaping stroke to kill and call the ones that live at the bottom of the pool deep below the house. Calling them up and taunting them and then sending them hungrily back to down to Hell again. Hell or the deep, fire or icedark water, and it makes no difference whatsoever in the end.

  Would not, could not, would not, could not, would not join the dance.

  Julia’s still standing at the wavesmoothed edge of the absinthe pool, or she’s only a whispering, insubstantial ghost afraid of parlor windows, smokegrey ghost muttering from nowhen, from hasn’t-been or never-will-be, and the child turns slowly towards her voice as the hurting thing chained to the rock begins to tear and stretches itself across the widening gulf.

  “Julia, please.”

  “You will be their queen, in the cities beneath the sea,” the old man says. “When I am not even a memory, child, you will hold them to the depths.”

  . . . And they all dead did lie, And a million million slimy things Liv’d on – and so did I . . .

  “Open your eyes.” And Julia does, these sights like the last frame of a movie or a dream that might never have ended, and she’s lying in Anna’s arms, lying on her back in the weedy patch between the car and the brooding, spiteful house.

  “I thought you were dead,” Anna says, holding on to her so tight that she can hardly breathe and Anna sounds relieved and frightened and angry all at once, the tears rolling down her sunburned face and dripping off her chin onto Julia’s cheeks.

  “You were so goddamn cold. I thought you were dead. I thought I was alone.”

  Alone, alone, all, all alone . . .

  “I smell flowers,” Julia says. “I smell roses.” Because she does and she can think of nothing else to say, no mere words ever to make her forget, and she stares up past Anna, past the endless, sea-hued sky, at the summerwarm sun staring back down at her like the blind and blazing eye of Heaven.

  GRAHAM JOYCE

  The Coventry Boy

  ALTHOUGH IT WORKS AS a stand-alone story, “The Coventry Boy” is an extract from Graham Joyce’s most recent novel, The Facts of Life, published by Victor Gollancz in 2002. His other most recent book is Smoking Poppy, and he has also scripted an adaptation of his book The Tooth Fairy for a Hollywood movie.

  “This story tells of the fearful night of the Coventry Blitz,” reveals Joyce, who grew up in modern Coventry, “when the medieval and Georgian historical town was reduced to rubble by the Luftwaffe.”

  EVERYONE SUSPECTED THAT THE BIG STORM was coming, but Cassie seemed to know exactly when. There had already been numerous raids between June and October 1940, when bombs had rained down on Coventry. Factories, shops and cinemas left twisted and smoking. There were even incidents of German planes machine-gun strafing civilians in the street. The civilian injury list was high, and almost two hundred people were killed outright in these early raids.

  After all, Coventry was located exactly at the heart of the country and Adolf Hitler wanted to show what a surgeon he was; show how the heart could be cut out. A beautiful medieval and Georgian rosette town boasting resplendent cathedrals and antiquarian buildings, Coventry was a heritage showpiece of the English Midlands. And after all again, Coventry manufactured the Armstrong-Whitworth Whitley bomber, the first plane to penetrate German airspace, and the main instrument of the torment of Munich. No, not surgery: the Führer wanted to show he could bring his fist down and turn it to dust. The storm would come, but if only the city might know when then the fatalities might be minimized.

  But Cassie knew. Sixteen years old, going on seventeen, exactly how she knew was unspeakable, but she knew it in her water, in her bowels. Her blood coursed differently. Perhaps the moon fattening in the night sky spoke to her; whatever it was, she knew better than to tell. She’d already learned that if she did try to tell, no one would believe her; and that after they’d failed to listen they would call her a jitterbug. So she knew with certainty, but did not speak.

  Like the dead.

  “The dead can hear you,” her mother Martha had said. Martha, who smoked a pipe and who never moved from her place by the fireside. “But they can’t speak. They can’t get their words out.”

  It started for Cassie when she woke early one morning with music playing in her head. Her sleep patterns, already disrupted by the nights spent in the Anderson shelter at the bottom of the back garden and by the sirens, had broken like an egg yolk, spilling something of her. She felt a mild flow inside her and put her hands between her legs. The wetness she found there made her think of the residue of sleep, a slippery vernix left behind by her dreams. While elder sister Beatie and Martha still slept she pulled on her dressing gown and went downstairs.

  The haunting music was still playing in her head. It was a piece she’d heard several times, familiar, comforting. Cassie switched on the radio. It was tuned to the BBC Home Service, and the same piece was playing, perfectly segued with the version sounding in her head. She switched the radio off and although it became fainter, she continued to hear the music, without it missing a beat or dropping a note. After switching the radio back again she sat on a chair and stared hard at the set until the piece had finished playing. When the music stopped on the radio, it stopped inside her head, too.

  Cassie went upstairs to her room, dressed hurriedly and reached under her bed for a tin tea-caddy, Japanese lacquer-style. In it were her savings. After emptying the caddy into her purse she went downstairs again, put on her coat and allowed the door to click quietly behind her as she let herself out. The morning was cold and sharp and there was a rime of frost on the ground. She walked into the city.

  Up Trinity Street to the top of the town and directly to Paynes’ music shop. Too early: it was closed. She stood in the doorway and waited. It was an hour and a half before the manager of the store arrived to open up. “You’re keen,” he said, producing his glittering bunch of keys. He had to wave his hand at Cassie to get her to stand aside for him.

  “I want a record player,” Cassie said as soon as they’d got inside the shop. “A new one.”

  The store manager switched on the lights. “Let me get my coat off,” he said. “Where’s the fire?”

  Coming, said the voice in Cassie’s head.

  He took her over to the latest box-players. Cassie was mesmerized by the little explosions of hair in his nostrils and earholes. “This is an HMV gramophone. It has a Bakelite playing arm and it comes in this beech cabinet—”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes. I’ll have it.”

  “You haven’t asked me how much it is.” The manager eyed this slip of a girl suspiciously. “How much can you afford?”

  Cassie emptied her savings out of her purse. The manager sighed. “I’ve got some second-hand cabinets over here. Let’s see what we can do.”

  Cassie could just afford one of the machines on offer. It took her last penny. Then she said, “I want a record. I don’t know what it’s called. But you’ll know it. It goes like this.” She hummed the music that had been playing both on the radio and in her head that morning.

  “ ‘Moonlight Serenade’. I’ve got it in stock but how are you going to pay for it? I’ve just let you off a few shillings on that cabinet and that’s cleaned you out, hasn’t it?”

  Cassie merely fixed her eyes on the man and crossed her legs at the ankles. She swayed, very slightly.

  The manager seemed cross, but he stepped behind his counter and sorted through the discs until he found the Glenn Miller recording. “I’ll let you have it but you’re
going to have to bring the money in when you’ve got it. Understand? I don’t know why I’m doing this.”

  It’s because I’ve got power over you.

  Cassie lugged the record-playing cabinet home by its carrying-handle. It was heavy and she had to keep stopping to switch hands, but she was unwavering. On the way home an ARP officer in a tin hat, hands on hips, positioned himself on the pavement in front of her. “Oi, girlie, where’s your gas mask?” he shouted in a bullying tone.

  She stepped round the ARP man, leaving him to gaze after her.

  Martha and Beatie were up and about when she got home. Cassie bustled into the sitting room and squeezed by them without a word. “Where’ve you been?” Martha called. “Do you want some breakfast?”

  “Whatever have you got there?” Beatie said, eyeing the record player. But Cassie only bumped upstairs without a word. “She’s getting to be a proper moody girl.” Beatie complained.

  “Not like someone I could name,” Martha said.

  Beatie was about to fire back an answer, but there came to stop her lips the strains of Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade”, drifting from Cassie’s room. The sound filled the house like a dew-backed mist.

  In the next few days, Cassie played the piece over and over and over. She would lie on her bed, sometimes naked, listening. At first, Beatie and Martha were merely irritated. Martha quizzed her daughter, without getting an answer, about why she’d blown her savings on the record player. Beatie actually went out and bought Cassie two more Glenn Miller hits, and an armload of stuff a friend at the bomber factory – where Beatie punched rivets for the war effort – had found too sad to keep because it had all belonged to a brother in the navy killed at sea. But Cassie didn’t play any of it. She sat upstairs in her room, spinning “Moonlight Serenade”. And if Martha or Beatie complained too aggressively, then she merely went out, and stayed out, for long periods of time.

  At night, wide awake with whatever it was that had broken her sleep and when her mother and sister absolutely would not tolerate any sound coming from her room, she huddled in a blanket on the edge of her bed, watching the moon fattening slowly, maturing, feeding her with more energy as if through a silver umbilical cord. If the sirens came she was ready, and would help the others pull a few things together for the shuffle to the Anderson shelter; have the kettle boiled for a flask of tea while they were still blinking and complaining; especially helpful to Beatie who was doing ten-hour shifts riveting bombers and who needed the sleep, unlike Cassie. Most of the sirens at that time were false alarms, and Cassie knew it; knew they might as well sleep on, that it would be Birmingham or maybe Liverpool catching a tanning that night. But even in the shelter she couldn’t nap. One night sometime before dawn Beatie got up to relieve herself in the tin pail. Martha, blinking, dozy, said, “Hark! Is that the all-clear?”

  “No, Mum, it’s Beatie pissing in the bucket. Go back to sleep.”

  Beatie was having a hard time for sleep. Like many of the women of Coventry she was under pressure to work ten- and sometimes twelve-hour shifts for the war effort. Buck up, girls! Let’s bomb the Hun! This she did readily, and since the pay was good she’d never had so much money in her pocket; but the sirens going off on so many nights like this left her exhausted and irritable.

  One evening Cassie heard her sister calling up the stairs, “Cassie, if you play that bloody thing one more time – just one more time – I’m coming up these stairs to sort you out! You hear me, Cassie?”

  Cassie didn’t answer. She lay on her bed in bra and pants. “Moonlight Serenade” played on. When it stopped, Cassie reached over languidly to put it on again. After a moment, the thundering of shoes on the stairs. Beatie threw open the door, made straight for the record player, lifted the needle arm, plucked up the record from the turntable and broke it over her knee. Then she turned to look Cassie in the eye.

  Cassie didn’t flinch. Beatie screamed and went thundering back down the stairs. Cassie didn’t mind. She’d got the music lodged in her head, and perfectly, note for note, beat for beat. She could switch it on or off any time she wanted to.

  What’s more, she could repeat that trick with the radio over and over. Many times she heard music playing in her head, would go to switch on the Home Service and find the same tune broadcasting loud and clear. Without saying anything she tested this ability scientifically. It was clear to her that she could somehow “hear” radio broadcasts in the thin air. She didn’t need radio-receiving equipment. She somehow was the equipment.

  Though she was not so stupid as to try to tell anyone about this.

  Other things were going on in her body. Her breasts had plumped slightly, and her nipples were tender and sensitive. The lips of her vagina, too, were swollen, and she felt an itch or a trickle deep inside her. She needed to masturbate often, and before Beatie snapped the shellac disc she would lie under a sheet on her bed stroking her clitoris and squeezing her nipples while “Moonlight Serenade” teased her on. And in the street, too, it was obvious that all this wasn’t just one-way. Even as a virgin she knew the effect she was having on men. Off-duty soldiers and sailors and airmen were burning for her, it was plain from the way they sized her up. Plus she could make men’s heads turn – not in the usual figure of speech but literally: all she had to do was focus her gaze on the back of the neck of a man somewhere in her vicinity, perhaps on the bus or while waiting in a queue with her ration card, and after a moment the subject would have to turn and look at her. It worked without fail. She was accreting powers to herself, she knew that. What powers they were she had no idea, but they were extraordinary. She’d used them on that man in the record shop, but he didn’t know it. They never did know. They were easy. Men were easy.

  And that was just part of it. It was knowing that the storm was coming that most excited her. Terrified and excited her.

  On the night of 12 November Cassie went to a dance with Beatie. Martha had stopped worrying about what the girls got up to a long time ago. Though Cassie was only sixteen she could easily pass for a twenty-year-old, and Martha had given up trying to keep her in. Though she’d been stricter with her other daughters, something about the incidence of death all around had relaxed her with Cassie; and she’d learned early that Cassie would go her own way whatever obstacles were placed before her. But she did extract a promise from both her daughters that they would seek proper shelter, and not to try to find their way home should they get caught in a raid.

  Cassie was in a highly excitable state as the two stepped into town together. The moon was moving into its fullness, like an autumn gourd, and though it was a clear and rather frosty night, the searchlights sweeping the starry sky passed across the three spires of the city, prickling the night. Beatie was trying to get Cassie to calm down.

  She might as well not have bothered. As soon as they barrelled into the dance hall, Cassie heard the band and broke away from Beatie’s side. When Beatie caught up with her she was already jiving with an airman, his hair slicked back and his eyes dripping with ardour. “Don’t give it all away too quick,” was all Beatie could whisper, but Cassie was spinning and waving her hands in the air.

  That jitterbug.

  Within the hour Cassie was in the shadows of the great Gothic cathedral in Bayley Lane, her back against the cold, damp medieval wall and her skirt up around her waist. There were no street lights because of the blackout. “Wow, you’re in a hurry,” said her airman as she fumbled with his belt.

  “We might never see each other again,” Cassie said, clinging to the fleecy collar of his leather flying jacket. “Imagine that. And then we’d have missed the chance to fuck.” And I’d never lose my cherry, she thought.

  “Hey, and you think like a bloke,” he said.

  “Does it put you off?”

  “No, no . . . it’s just . . . and, oh you smell good.”

  “Stop talking. Let’s do it.”

  A siren began moaning, very close. “Fuckanddamn.”

  “Ignore
it,” Cassie said. “It’s not tonight.”

  “What?”

  “Maybe tomorrow night. Or the next night. But it’s not coming tonight.”

  “Hey, they should have you down at Bletchley, if you know all that. You know, Telligence service. I’m sorry – I can’t do much with that siren going off in my ears. How old are you, anyway?”

  Cassie dug her hand into the airman’s trousers, stroking the bell-end of his cock with her thumbnail. He flinched, and settled back into her arms again. “Can’t do what?” Cassie shouted. She was having to bellow to make herself heard above the siren. Someone ran past them on their way to a shelter. Then she put her tongue in his ear.

  “Christ! God, you’re lovely!”

  Cassie glanced up at the cathedral spire and at the searchlights raking the sky overhead. She knew the airman wanted get himself off to the nearest air-raid shelter, but with his cock fattening in her hand he couldn’t tear himself away. “Do it,” she said.

  He tugged his trousers down and he hooked the back of Cassie’s leg over his arm. He had to push her knickers out of the way and come at her from the side, almost lifting her from the ground as he made to enter her, their gaze locked together in that ancient place, under the sky-pricking spire, under the intersecting beams of the searchlights, inside the demonic and melancholy howl of the siren. He fell back. “It’s no good. I can’t – not with that thing going off right in my ear.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  The airman fumbled. He looked up at the sky, at the searchlights raking the clouds. Then he looked down again. “It’s just not happening for me. Can we please go to the shelter? My arse is getting cold.”

  Cassie pulled up his trousers for him. Hand in hand, they strolled towards the shelter on Much Park Street. An ARP man standing outside the shelter said, “Don’t ’urry yourselves, will you?”