The Best New Horror 7

by Stephen Jones

  The telephone in Cochrane’s bungalow dead, and so was the modem connection, but his computer was showing a message from Howie Zaslow. It was Dr Pretorius’s last business transaction; he’d become the major shareholder in Resurrection, Inc., a company that froze heads or whole bodies of the terminally ill or newly dead until they could be revived and cured.

  Dr Pretorius had made his escape.

  The lights in the bungalow went out. The computer died; the phosphor glow of its screen faded to black.

  Outside, the spotlights along the front of the house went out, too. In the distance, a human laugh rose and rose, its hysterical pitch breaking into a frenzied yelping.

  The 9mm automatic in his hand, Cochrane stalked out into the dark garden. There was just enough light by the stars to see the white road running away down the black hillside. In the other direction, howls rose from somewhere behind the house. The things in the basement were coming out into the night.

  Cochrane thought of running, but he’d never run from anything in his life. He knew that Pretorius’s creatures could be killed – that was the important thing. He couldn’t read a word of Latin – as Dr Pretorius had pointed out, he’d always left that kind of thing to drones like Zaslow – and maybe he wouldn’t even find the fucking Book of Hours and its precious scrap of parchment. But the prize was so great that he had to take the chance. He’d get some down-at-heel scholar to help him riddle the secret, and this time Astorath would be called up by someone who really knew how to cut a deal. Pretorius had said it: Cochrane was one of Astorath’s children. He knew the score. Information technology. There were places to go with that, with a demon at your back. The whole world, just to start with.

  Howls braided the night, nearer now, closing in. Cochrane raised his pistol and howled back, and sprinted towards the house. His blood sang in his veins. He had never felt so alive as at this moment. When Pretorius woke from his long sleep, he was in for a bad surprise.

  GRAHAM MASTERTON

  The Grey Madonna

  GRAHAM MASTERTON IS the author of more than thirty horror novels, including The Manitou, Black Angel, Flesh and Blood, Spirit and The House that Jack Built. His latest book, The Chosen Child, is a horror story set in Warsaw. A former editor of Mayfair and Penthouse, he has also written a dozen bestselling “how-to” books on sex, of which there are over ten million copies in print. He lives in Epsom, Surrey, with his wife and literary agent Wiescka, and is currently working on a new series of horror novels, Rook, also to be adapted for television.

  “I have been a frequent visitor to all parts of Belgium ever since I was a child,” says Masterton, “but the atmosphere of Bruges (especially out-of-season Bruges) always brings me back there. There is something desolate and creepy about its history: the river silting up so that it became a medieval port that was no longer a port, caught in a time-warp from which it never escaped, and still redolent with medieval mysticism. The idea for ‘The Grey Madonna’ came in a nightmare I had while I was staying in Bruges, and the only way to exorcise it was to write it down.”

  The following story has a genuinely creepy, dream-like ambience that is guaranteed to linger in the imagination long after you have finished reading it . . .

  HE HAD ALWAYS, known that he would have to return to Bruges. This time, however, he chose winter, when the air was foggy and the canals had turned to the colour of breathed-on pewter, and the narrow medieval streets were far less crowded with shuffling tourists.

  He had tried to avoid thinking about Bruges for three years now. Forgetting Bruges – really forgetting – was out of the question. But he had devised all kinds of ways of diverting his attention away from it, of mentally changing the subject, such as calling his friends or turning on the TV really loud or going out for a drive and listening to Nirvana with the volume set on Deaf.

  Anything rather than stand on that wooden jetty again, opposite the overhanging eaves and boathouses of the fourteenth-century plague hospital, waiting for the Belgian police frogmen to find Karen’s body. He had stood there so many times in so many dreams, a bewildered sun-reddened American tourist with his shoulder bag and his camcorder, while diseased-looking starlings perched on the steep, undulating tiles up above him, and the canal slopped and gurgled beneath his feet.

  Anything rather than watch the medical examiner with her crisp, white uniform and her braided blonde hair as she unzipped the black vinyl body-bag and Karen’s face appeared, not just white but almost green. “She would not have suffered much,” in that guttural back-of-the-throat Flemish accent. “Her neck was broken almost at once.”

  “By what?”

  “By a thin ligature, approximately eight millimetres in diameter. We have forensic samples, taken from her skin. It was either hemp or braided hair.”

  Then Inspector Ben De Buy from the Politie resting a nicotine-stained hand on his arm and saying, “One of the drivers of the horse-drawn tourist carriages says that he saw your wife talking to a nun. This was approximately ten minutes before the boatman noticed her body floating in the canal.”

  “Where was this?”

  “Hoogstraat, by the bridge. The nun turned the corner around Minderbroederstraat and that was the last the driver saw of her. He did not see your wife.”

  “Why should he have noticed my wife at all?”

  “Because she was attractive, Mr Wallace. All of these drivers have such an eye for good-looking women.”

  “Is that all? She talked to a nun? Why should she talk to a nun? She’s not a Catholic.

  He had paused, and then corrected himself. “She wasn’t a Catholic.”

  Inspector De Buy had lit up a pungent Ernte 23 cigarette, and breathed smoke out of his nostrils like a dragon. “Perhaps she was asking for directions. We don’t know yet. It shouldn’t be too difficult to find the nun. She was wearing a light grey habit, which is quite unusual.”

  Dean had stayed in Belgium for another week. The police came up with no more forensic evidence; no more witnesses. They published photographs of Karen in the newspapers, and contacted every religious order throughout Belgium, southern Holland and northern France. But nobody came forward. Nobody had seen how Karen had died. And there were no nunneries where the sisters wore grey; especially the whitish-grey that the carriage driver claimed to have seen.

  Inspector De Buy had said, “Why not take your wife back to America, Mr Wallace? There’s nothing more you can do here in Bruges. If there’s a break in the case, I can fax you, yes?”

  Now Karen was lying in the Episcopalian cemetery in New Milford, Connecticut, under a blanket of crimson maple leaves, and Dean was back here, in Bruges, on a chilly Flanders morning, tired and jet-lagged, and lonelier than he had ever felt before.

  He crossed the wide, empty square called ’t Zand, where fountains played and clusters of sculptured cyclists stood in the fog. The real cyclists were far busier jangling their bells and pedalling furiously over the cobbles. He passed cafés with steamy, glassed-in verandahs, where doughy-faced Belgians sat drinking coffee and smoking and eating huge cream-filled pastries. A pretty girl with long black hair watched him pass, her face as white as an actress in a European art movie. In an odd way, she reminded him of the way that Karen had looked, the day that he had first met her.

  With his coat collar turned up against the cold and his breath fuming, he walked past the shops selling lace and chocolates and postcards and perfume. In the old Flemish tradition, a flag hung over the entrance of every shop, bearing the coat of arms of whoever had lived there in centuries gone by. Three grotesque fishes, swimming through a silvery sea. A man who looked like Adam, picking an apple from a tree. A white-faced woman with a strange suggestive smile.

  Dean reached the wide cobbled marketplace. On the far side, like a flock of seagulls, twenty or thirty nuns hurried silently through the fog. Up above him, the tall spire of Bruges’s Belfry loomed through the fog, over three hundred tightly spiralling steps to the top. Dean knew that because he and Karen had climb
ed up it, panting and laughing all the way. Outside the Belfry the horse-drawn tourist carriages collected, as well as ice cream vans and hot dog stalls. In the summer, there were long lines of visitors waiting to be given guided tours around the town, but not today. Three carriages were drawn up side by side, while their drivers smoked and their blanketed horses dipped their heads in their nose-bags.

  Dean approached the drivers and lifted one hand in greeting.

  “Tour, sir?” asked a dark-eyed unshaven young man in a tilted straw hat.

  “Not today, thanks. I’m looking for somebody . . . one of your fellow drivers.” He took out the folded newspaper clipping. “His name is Jan De Keyser.”

  “Who wants him? He’s not in trouble, is he?”

  “No, no. Nothing like that. Can you tell me where he lives?”

  The carriage drivers looked at each other. “Does anybody know where Jan De Keyser lives?”

  Dean took out his wallet and handed them 100 francs each. The drivers looked at each other again, and so Dean gave them another 100.

  “Oostmeers, about halfway down, left-hand side,” said the unshaven young man. “I don’t know the number but there’s a small delicatessen and it’s next to that, with a brown door and brown glass vases in the window.”

  He coughed, and then he said, “You want a tour, too?”

  Dean shook his head. “No, thanks. I think I’ve seen everything in Bruges I ever want to see; and more.”

  He walked back along Oude Burg and under the naked lime trees of Simon Stevin Plein. The inventor of decimal currency stood mournfully on his plinth, staring at a chocolate shop across the street. The morning was so raw now that Dean wished he had brought a pair of gloves. He crossed and recrossed the canal several times. It was smelly and sullen and it reminded him of death.

  They had first come to Bruges for two reasons. The first was to get over Charley. Charley hadn’t even talked, or walked, or seen the light of day. But a sound-scan had shown that Charley would be chronically disabled, if he were ever born; a nodding, drooling boy in a wheelchair, for all of his life. Dean and Karen had sat up all evening and wept and drank wine, and finally decided that Charley would be happier if he remained a hope; and a memory; a brief spark that illuminated the darkness, and died. Charley had been terminated and now Dean had nobody to remember Karen by. Her china collection? Her clothes? One evening he had opened her underwear drawer and taken out a pair of her panties and desperately breathed them in, hoping to smell her. But the panties were clean and Karen was gone; as if she had never existed.

  They had come to Bruges for the art, too: for the Groeninge Museum with its fourteenth-century religious paintings and its modern Belgian masters, for Rubenses and Van Eycks and Magrittes. Dean was a veterinarian, but he had always been a keen amateur painter; and Karen had designed wallpaper. They had first met nearly seven years ago, when Karen had brought her golden retriever into Dean’s surgery to have its ears checked out. She had liked Dean’s looks right from the very beginning. She had always liked tall, gentle, dark-haired men (“I would have married Clark Kent if Lois Lane hadn’t gotten in first”). But what had really persuaded her was the patience and affection with which he had handled her dog Buffy. After they were married, she used to sing Love Me, Love My Dog to him, and accompany herself on an old banjo.

  Buffy was dead now, too. Buffy had pined so pitifully for Karen that Dean had eventually put him down.

  Oostmeers was a narrow street of small, neat, row houses, each with its shining front window and its freshly painted front door and its immaculate lace curtains. Dean found the delicatessen easily because – apart from an antique dealer – it was the only shop. The house next door was much shabbier than most of its neighbours, and the brown glass vases in the window were covered in a film of dust. He rang the doorbell, and clapped his hands together to warm them up.

  After a long pause, he heard somebody coming downstairs, and then coughing, and then the front door was opened about two inches. A thin, soapy-looking face peered out at him.

  “I’m looking for Jan De Keyser.”

  “That’s me. What do you want?”

  Dean took out the newspaper cutting and held it up. “You were the last person to see my wife alive.”

  The young man frowned at the cutting for nearly half a minute, as if he needed glasses. Then he said, “That was a long time ago, mister. I’ve been sick since then.”

  “All the same, can I talk to you?”

  “What for? It’s all in the paper, everything I said.”

  “I’m just trying to understand what happened.”

  Jan De Keyser gave a high, rattling cough. “I saw your wife talking to this nun, that’s all, and she was gone. I turned around in my seat, and saw the nun walk into Minderbroederstraat, into the sunshine, and then she was gone, too, and that was all.”

  “You ever see a nun dressed in grey like that before?” Jan De Keyser shook his head.

  “You don’t know where she might have come from? What order? You know, Dominican or Franciscan or whatever?”

  “I don’t know about nuns. But maybe she wasn’t a nun.”

  “What do you mean? You told the police that she was a nun.”

  “What do you think I was going to say? That she was a statue? I have two narcotics offences already. They would have locked me up, or sent me to that bloody stupid hospital in Kortrijk.”

  Dean said, “What are you talking about, statue?”

  Jan De Keyser coughed again, and started to close the door. “This is Brugge, what do you expect?”

  “I still don’t understand.”

  The door hovered on the point of closing. Dean took out his wallet again, and ostentatiously took out three 100-franc notes, and held them up. “I’ve come a long way for this, Jan. I need to know everything.”

  “Wait,” said Jan De Keyser; and closed the door. Dean waited. He looked down the foggy length of Oostmeers, and he could see a young girl standing on the corner of Zonnekemeers, her hands in her pockets. He couldn’t tell if she were watching him or not.

  After two or three minutes, Jan De Keyser opened the door again and stepped out into the street, wearing a brown leather jacket and a chequered scarf. He smelled of cigarettes and liniment. “I’ve been very sick, ever since that time. My chest. Maybe it was nothing to do with the nun; maybe it was. But you know what they say: once a plague, always a plague.”

  He led Dean back the way he had come, past the canals, past the Gruuthuuse Museum, along Dijver to the Vismarkt. He walked very quickly, with his narrow shoulders hunched. Horses and carriages rattled through the streets like tumbrils; and bells chimed from the Belfry. They had that high, strange musical ring about them that you only hear from European bells. They reminded Dean of Christmases and wars; and maybe that was what Europe was really all about.

  They reached the corner of Hoogstraat and Minderbroederstraat; by the bridge. Jan De Keyser jabbed his finger one way, and then the other. “I am carrying Germans; five or six-member German family. I am going slow because my horse is tired, yes? I see this woman in tight white shorts, and a blue T-shirt, and I look at her because she is pretty. That was your wife, yes? She has a good figure. Anyway, I turn and watch because she is not only pretty, she is talking to a nun. A nun in grey, quite sure of that. And they are talking as if they are arguing strongly. You know what I mean? Like, arguing, very fierce. Your wife is lifting her arms, like this, again and again, as if to say, ‘What have I done? What have I done?’ And the nun is shaking her head.”

  Dean looked around, frustrated and confused. “You said something about statues; and the plague.”

  “Look up,” said Jan De Keyser. “You see on the corner of almost every building, a stone madonna. Here is one of the largest, life-size.”

  Dean raised his eyes, and for the first time he saw the arched niche that had been let into the corner of the building above him. In this niche stood a Virgin Mary, with the baby Jesus in her arms, looking sa
dly down at the street below.

  “You see?” said Jan De Keyser. “There is so much to see in Brugge, if you lift your head. There is another world on the second storey. Statues and gargoyles and flags. Look at that building there. It has the faces of thirteen devils on it. They were put there to keep Satan away; and to protect the people who lived in this building from the Black Death.”

  Dean leaned over the railings, and stared down into the water. It was so foggy and gelid that he couldn’t even see his own face; only a blur, as if somebody had taken a black-and-white photograph of him, and jogged the camera.

  Jan De Keyser said, “In the fourteenth-century, when the plague came, it was thought that the people of Brugge were full of sin, yes? and that they were being given a punishment from God. So they made statues of the Holy Mary at every corner, to keep away the evil; and they promised the Holy Mary that they would always obey her, and worship her, if she protected them from plague. You understand this, yes? They made binding agreement.”

  “And what would happen if they didn’t stick to this binding agreement?”

  “The Holy Virgin would forgive; because the Holy Virgin always forgives. But the statue of the Holy Virgin would give punishment.”

  “The statue? How could the statue punish anybody?”

  Jan De Keyser shrugged. “They made it, in the false belief. They made it with false hopes. Statues that are made with false hopes will always be dangerous; because they will turn on the people who made them; and they will expect the payment for their making.”

  Dean couldn’t grasp this at all. He was beginning to suspect that Jan De Keyser was not only physically sick but mentally unbalanced, too; and he was beginning to wish that he hadn’t brought him here.

  But Jan De Keyser pointed up to the statue of the Virgin Mary; and then at the bridge; and then at the river, and said, “They are not just stone; not just carving. They have all of people’s hopes inside them; whether these hopes are good hopes, or whether these hopes are wicked. They are not just stone.”