The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2003, Volume 14

by Stephen Jones

  As Hoegbotton walked home, street lamps appeared out of the murk, illuminating fleeting figures: a priest holding his robe up as he ran so he wouldn’t trip on the hem; two Dogghe tribesmen hunched against the closed doors of a bank, their distinctive green spiraled hats pulled down low over their weathered faces. Of the Kalif’s recent Occupation, no sign remained except for painted graffiti urging the invaders to go home. But Hoegbotton still came upon the faintly glowing, six-foot-wide purplish circles that showed where, before the Silence, huge mushrooms had been chopped down by worried authorities.

  Hoegbotton’s wife was already asleep when he walked up the seven flights of stairs and entered their apartment. She had turned off the lamps because it gave her the advantage in case of an intruder. The faint scent of lilacs and honeysuckle told him that the flower vendor from the floor above them had been by to see Rebecca.

  A dim half-light shone from the living room to his left as he set down the cage, took off his shoes and socks, and hung his raincoat on the coat rack. Directly ahead lay the dining room, with its mold-encrusted window, the purple sheen burning darkly as the rain fed it. He had checked the fungi guard just a week ago and found no leakage, but he made a mental note to check it again in the morning.

  Hoegbotton found a towel in the hall closet and used it to dry his face, his hair, and then the outside of the cage. Again picking up the uncomfortable weight of the cage, he tiptoed into the living room, the rug beneath his feet thick but cold. A series of dark shapes greeted him, most of them items from his store: Lamps and side tables, a couch, a long low coffee table, a bookcase, a grandfather clock. Beyond them lay the balcony, long lost to fungi and locked up as a result.

  The fey light almost transformed the living-room’s contents into the priceless artifacts he had told her they were. He had chosen them not for their value but for their texture, their smell, and for the sounds they made when moved or sat upon or opened. Little of it appealed visually, but she delighted in what he had chosen and it meant he could store the most important merchandise at the shop, where it was more secure.

  Hoegbotton set the cage down on the living-room table. The palms of his hands were hot and raw from carrying it. He took off the rest of his clothes and laid them on the arm of the couch.

  The light came from the bedroom, which lay to the right of the living room. He walked into the bedroom and turned to the left, the closed window above the bed reflecting back the iridescent light that came from her and her alone. Rebecca lay on her back, the sheets draped across her body, exposing the long, black, vaguely tear-shaped scar on her left thigh. He ran his gaze over it lustfully. It glistened like obsidian.

  Hoegbotton walked around to the right side and eased himself into the bed. He moved up beside her and pressed himself against the darkness of the scar. An image of the woman from the mansion flashed through his mind.

  Rebecca turned in her sleep and put an arm across his chest as he moved onto his back. Her hand, warm and soft, was as delicate as the starfish that glided through the shallows down by the docks. It looked so small against his chest.

  The light came from her open eyes, although he could tell she was asleep. It was a silvery glow awash with faint phosphorescent sparks of blue, green, and red: shivers and hiccups of splintered light, as if a half-dozen tiny lightning storms had welled up in her gaze. What rich worlds did she dream of? And, for the thousandth time: What did the light mean? He had met her on a business trip to Stockton, after the fungal infection that had resulted in the blindness, the odd light, the scar. He had never known her whole.

  Who was this stranger, so pale and silent and beautiful? A joyful sorrow rose within him as he watched the light emanating from her. They had argued about having children just the day before. Every word he had thrown at her in anger had hurt him so deeply that finally he had been wordless, and all he could do was stare at her. Looking at her now, her face unguarded, her body next to his, he could not help loving her for the scar, the eyes, even if it meant he wished her to be this way.

  II

  The next morning, Hoegbotton woke to the fading image of the woman’s bloody bandages and the sounds of Rebecca making breakfast. She knew the apartment better than he did – knew its surfaces, its edges, the exact number of steps from table to chair to doorway – and she liked to make meals in a kitchen that had become more familiar to her than it could ever be to him. Yet she also asked him to bring back more furniture for the living room and bedroom or rearrange existing furniture. She became bored otherwise. “I want an unexplored country. I want a hint of the unknown,” she said once, and Hoegbotton agreed with her.

  To an extent. There were things Hoegbotton wished would stay unknown. On the mantel opposite the bed, for example, lay those of his grandmother’s possessions that his relatives in Morrow had sent to him: a pin, a series of portraits of family members, a set of spoons, a poorly copied family history. A letter had accompanied the heirlooms, describing his grandmother’s last days. The package had been waiting for him on the doorstep of the apartment one evening a month ago. His grandmother had died six weeks before that. He had not gone to the funeral. He had not even brought himself to tell Rebecca about the death. All she knew of it was the crinkling of the envelope as he had smoothed out the letter to read it. She might even have picked up the pin or the spoons and wondered why he had brought them home. Telling her would mean explaining why he hadn’t gone to the funeral and then he would have to talk about the bad blood between him and his brother Richard.

  The smell of bacon and eggs spurred him to throw back the covers, get up, put on a bathrobe, and stumble bleary-eyed through the living room to the kitchen. A dead sort of almost-sunlight – pale and green and lukewarm – suffused the kitchen window through the purple mold and thin veins of green. A watermark of the city appeared through the glass: grey spires, forlorn flags, the indistinct shapes of other anonymous apartment buildings.

  Rebecca stood in the kitchen, spatula in hand, framed by the dour light. Her black hair was brightly dark. Her dress, a green-and-blue sweep of fabric, fitted her loosely. She was intent on the skillet in front of her, gaze unblinking, mouth pursed.

  As Hoegbotton came up behind Rebecca and wrapped his arms around her, a sense of guilt made him frown. He had come so close last night, almost as close as the boy, the woman. Was that as close as he could get without . . . ? The question had haunted him throughout his quest. A sudden deep swell of emotion overcame him and he found that his eyes were wet. What if, what if?

  Rebecca snuggled into his embrace and turned toward him. Her eyes looked almost normal during the day. Flecks of phosphorescence shot lazily across the pupils.

  “Did you sleep well?” she asked. “You came home so late.”

  “I slept. I’m sorry I was late. It was a difficult job this time.”

  “Profitable?” Her elbow nudged him as she turned the eggs over with the spatula.

  “Not very.”

  “Really? Why not?”

  He stiffened. Would Rebecca have realized the mansion had become a death trap? Would she have smelled the blood, tasted the fear? He served as her eyes, her contact with the world of images, but would he truly deprive her by not describing its horrors to her in every detail?

  “Well . . .” he began. Hoegbotton shut his eyes. The sick gaze of the solicitor flickering over the scene of his own death washed over him. Even as he held Rebecca, he could feel a distance opening up between them.

  “You don’t need to shut your eyes to see,” she said, pulling out of his embrace.

  “How did you know?” he said, although he knew.

  “I heard you close them.” She smiled with grim satisfaction.

  “It was just sad,” he said, sitting down at the kitchen table. “Nothing horrible. Just sad. The wife had lost her husband and had to sell the estate. She had a boy with her who kept holding on to a little suitcase.”

  The remnants of the solicitor floating to the ground, curling up like conf
etti. The boy’s gaze fluttering between him and the cage.

  “I felt sorry for them. They had some nice heirlooms, but most of it was already promised to Slattery. I didn’t get much. They had a nice rug from Morrow, from before the Silence. Nice detail of Morrow cavalry coming to our rescue. I would have liked to have bought it.”

  She carefully slid the eggs and bacon onto a plate and brought it to the table.

  “Thank you,” he said. She had burned the bacon. The eggs were too dry. He never complained. She needed these little sleights of hand, these illusions of illumination. It was edible.

  “Mrs Bloodgood took me down to the Morhaim Museum yesterday,” she said. “Many of their artifacts are on open display. The textures were amazing. And the flower vendor visited, as you may have guessed.”

  Rebecca’s father, Paul, was the curator for a small museum in Stockton. Paul liked to joke that Hoegbotton was just the temporary caretaker for items that would eventually find their way to him. Hoegbotton had always thought museums just hoarded that which should be available on the open market. Rebecca had been her father’s assistant until the disease stole her sight. Now Hoegbotton sometimes took her down to the store to help him sort and catalog new acquisitions.

  “I noticed the flowers,” he said. “I’m glad the museum was nice.”

  For some reason, his hand shook as he ate his eggs. He put his fork down.

  “Isn’t it good?” she asked.

  “It’s very good,” he said. “I just need water.”

  He got up and walked to the sink. The faucet had been put in five weeks ago, after a two-year wait. Before, they had gotten jugs of water from a well down in the valley. He watched with satisfaction as the faucet spluttered and his glass gradually filled up.

  “It’s a nice bird or whatever,” she said from behind him.

  “Bird.” A vague fear shot through him. “Bird?” The glass clinked against the edge of the sink as he momentarily lost his grip on it.

  “Or lizard. Or whatever it is. What is it?”

  Hoegbotton turned, leaned against the sink. “What are you talking about?”

  “That cage you brought home with you.”

  The vague fear crept up his spine. “There’s nothing in the cage. It’s empty.” Was she joking?

  Rebecca laughed: a pleasant, liquid sound. “That’s funny, because your empty cage was rattling earlier. At first, it scared me. Something was rustling around in there. I couldn’t tell if it was a bird or a lizard or I would have reached through the bars and touched it.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No.”

  “There’s nothing in the cage.”

  Her face underwent a subtle change and he knew she thought he doubted her on something at which she was expert: the interpretation of sound. On a calm day, she had told him, she could hear a boy skipping stones down by the docks.

  For a moment, he said nothing. He couldn’t stay quiet for long. She couldn’t read his face without touching it, but he suspected that she knew the difference between types of silence.

  He laughed. “I’m joking. It’s a lizard – but it bites. So you were wise not to touch it.”

  Suspicion tightened her features. Then she relaxed and smiled at him. She reached out, felt for his plate with her left hand, and stole a piece of his bacon. “I knew it was a lizard!”

  He longed to go into the living room where the cage stood atop the table. But he couldn’t, not just yet.

  “It’s quiet in here,” he said softly, already expecting the reply.

  “No, it’s not. It’s not quiet at all. It’s loud.”

  The left corner of his mouth curled up as he replied by rote: “What do you hear, my love?”

  Rebecca’s smile widened. “Well, first, there’s your voice, my love – a nice, deep baritone. Then there’s Hobson downstairs, playing a phonograph as low as he can to avoid disturbing the Potaks, who are at this moment in an argument about something so petty I will not give you the details, while to the side, just below them” – her eyes narrowed – “I believe the Smythes are also making bacon. Above us, old man Clox is pacing and pacing with his cane, muttering about money. On his balcony, there’s a sparrow chirping, which makes me realize now that the animal in your cage must be a lizard, because it sounds like something clicking and clucking, not chirping – unless you’ve got a chicken in there?”

  “No, no – it’s a lizard.”

  “What kind of lizard?”

  “It’s a Saphant Click-Spitting Fire Lizard from the Southern Isles,” Hpegbotton said. “It only ever grows in cages, which it makes itself by chewing up dirt, changing it into metal, and regurgitating it. It can only eat animals that can’t see it.”

  Rebecca laughed in appreciation and got up and hugged him. Her scent made him forget his fear. “It’s a good story, but I don’t believe you. I do know this, though – you are going to be late to work.”

  Once on the ground floor, where he did not think it would make a difference if Rebecca heard, Hoegbotton set down the cage. The awkwardness of carrying it, uneven and swaying, down the spiral staircase had unnerved him. He was sweating under his raincoat. His breath came hard and fast. The musty quality of the lobby, the traces of tiny rust mushrooms that had spread along the floor like mouse tracks, the mottled green-orange mold on the windows in the front door, did not put him at ease.

  Someone had left a worn umbrella leaning against the front door. He grabbed it and turned back to stare at the cage. Was this the moment that Ungdom and Slattery’s ill wishes caught up with him? He drove the umbrella tip between the bars. The cover gave a little, creasing, and then regained its former shape as he withdrew the umbrella. Nothing came leaping out at him. He tried again. No response.

  “Is something in there?” he asked the cage. The cage did not reply.

  Umbrella held like a sword in front of him, Hoegbotton pulled the cover aside – and leapt back.

  The cage was still empty. The perch swung back and forth madly from the violence with which he had pulled aside the cover. The woman had said, “The cage was always open.” The boy had said, “We never had a cage.” The solicitor had never offered an opinion. The swinging perch, the emptiness of the cage, depressed him. He could not say why. He drew the cover back across the cage.

  Footsteps sounded on the stairs behind him and he whirled around, then relaxed. It was just Sarah Willis, their landlady, walking down from her second-floor apartment.

  “Good morning, Mrs Willis,” he said, leaning on the umbrella.

  Mrs Willis did not bother to respond until she was standing in front of him, staring up at him through her thick glasses. A flower-pattern hat covered her balding head. A matching flower dress, faded, covered her ancient body, even her presumably shoed feet.

  “No pets allowed,” she said.

  “Pets?” Hoegbotton was momentarily bewildered. “What pets?”

  Mrs Willis nodded at the cage. “What’s in there?”

  “Oh, that. It’s not a pet.”

  “No animals allowed, pets or meat.” Mrs Willis cackled and coughed at her own joke.

  “It’s not . . .” He realized it was useless. “I’m taking it out now. It was just there for the morning.”

  Mrs Willis grunted and pushed past him.

  At the door, just as she walked out into the renewed patter of rain, apparently counting on her hat to protect her, she offered Hoegbotton the following advice: “Miss Constance? On the third floor? She’ll have your head if you don’t put back her umbrella.”

  Located on Albumuth Boulevard, half way between the docks and the residential sections that descended into a valley ever in danger of flooding, Hoegbotton’s store – ROBERT HOEGBOTTON & SONS: QUALITY IMPORTERS OF FINE NEW & USED ITEMS FROM HOME & ABROAD – took up the first floor of a solid two-storey wooden building owned by a monk in the Religious Quarter. The sign exhibited optimism; there were no sons. Not yet. The time was not right, the situation too uncertain, no matter
what Rebecca might say. Someday his shop might serve as the headquarters for a merchant empire, but that wouldn’t happen for several years. Always in the back of his mind, spurring him on: his brother Richard’s threat to swoop down with the rest of the Hoegbotton clan to save the family name should he fail.

  The display window, protected from the rain by an awning, held a battered mauve couch, an opulent, gold-leaf-covered chair (nicked by Hoegbotton, along with several other treasures, during the panicked withdrawal of the Kalif’s troops), a phonograph, a large red vase, an undistinguished-looking saddle, and Alan Bristlewing, his assistant.

  Bristlewing knelt inside the display, carefully placing records in the stand beside the phonograph. He had already wiped the window clean of fungi that had accumulated the night before. The detritus of the cleaning lay on the sidewalk in curled-up piles of red, green, and blue. A sour smell emanated from these remnants, but the rain would wash it all away in an hour or two.

  When Bristlewing saw Hoegbotton, he waved and inched his wiry frame out of the window. A moment later, shielding his head from the rain with a newspaper, he was opening the huge lock in the iron grille of the door, his mouth set in the familiar laconic grin that itself displayed some antiques, courtesy of a sidewalk dentist. A few button-shaped mushrooms, a fiery red, tumbled out of the lock as the key withdrew, rolling to a stop on the wet sidewalk.

  Bristlewing was a scruffy, short, animated man who smelled of cigar smoke and often disappeared for days on end. Stories of debaucheries with prostitutes and week-long fishing trips down the River Moth buzzed around Bristlewing without settling on him. Hoegbotton could not afford to hire more dependable help.

  “Morning,” Bristlewing said.

  “Good morning,” Hoegbotton replied. “Any customers last night?”

  “None with any money . . .” Bristlewing’s grin vanished as he saw the cage. “Oh. I see you went to another one.”