The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 24 (Mammoth Books)

by Stephen Jones

  Distantly, the sound of revels reached him and Fillingham wondered about going back and joining them and then decided against it. By the time he had left, most of the people there had been drunk and pairing off, and he’d end up feeling left behind, stood to one side and watching but unable to join in. He’d end up miserable, wishing he’d brought his camera and seeing things in terms of their composition, their visual attractiveness as flat images; the lens stood between him and these things, even when it wasn’t actually there. He sighed again and put his shoes on.

  Although it was late, the shop along the road was still open and happy to serve him; Fillingham bought a bottle of white wine, taking one from the refrigerator so that it was cold. He didn’t drink alone often, but tonight he would, and try not to think of the women in their shift dresses covering muddy legs and taut thighs and high breasts. There was no one to betray if he did so, no wife or girlfriend; he simply knew that thinking about them would make him feel worse.

  Walking back to the hotel, Fillingham smelled the scents of the day’s games and the ongoing party, burning wood and paper and powder, meat, malty beer, spices and wine. The skyline ahead of him glowed orange, the dark shapes of buildings painted in shadow between him and the bonfire at Dover’s Hill. Here and there, tiny yellow flickers bobbed through the gloom as people moved distantly with their candles. It would make a good picture, he thought, fireflies of light set against the solidity of the angular buildings, skittering and indistinct, a perfect metaphor for the way folk traditions survived in the modern world. He wished he’d brought his camera, and then sighed again at his own inability to detach himself from his lens.

  Fillingham’s room was on the third floor of the hotel, the uppermost, on the opposite side from the entrance. He was too tired to take the stairs so used the lift, emerging into a corridor decorated with featureless watercolours. He went past doors with DO NOT DISTURB signs hanging over their handles, past the muffled dissonance of televisions and conversations, before coming around the corner to the stretch that contained his room.

  One of the women was at the far end of the corridor.

  It wasn’t the one Fillingham had spoken to earlier in the evening; this one was taller, blonde instead of dark, fuller-figured, but she too was carrying a beaten flask and had a bag hanging at her side. As Fillingham watched, she took a small plastic cup from the bag and poured a measure of liquid into it from the flask; the drink looked thick and viscid.

  “A libation,” she said, holding the cup out. Her voice was deep and mellow, filled with sly amusement. He glanced down at his bottle of wine, sheened with condensation, the neck cold in his fist, and said, “Thank you, but no. I don’t like to mix my drinks.” He sounded prissy, even to himself, but couldn’t help it; it was late and he was tired and miserable, and whatever opportunities he had hoped the night might present felt old and lost to the past. This woman was a tendril of the event occurring down the road without him, reaching out, and her presence in the hotel was jarring, throwing his lowering mood into even sharper relief.

  “You refuse?” she asked.

  “Yes,” said Fillingham, and went to his room door. As he unlocked it, he was conscious of the woman simply watching him; just before he opened it, she said, “It is a small thing, a simple toast. Join me?”

  “No,” said Fillingham again. Even from the other end of the corridor, he could smell the drink, pungent and spicy, and the mud that was smeared across the woman’s legs. The odour was cloying, unpleasant, made saliva squirt into his mouth as though he was about to vomit. He swallowed, glancing at the woman to find her still staring at him and holding the cup out. Her nipples were prominent through the material of her dress and he had a sudden strong impression that she was naked under the thin cloth. She stepped forwards, still holding the cup out towards him. Fillingham swallowed his own spit, warm and swollen, and then opened his door, stepping into the room without looking at the woman again.

  Its banality was reassuring. Fillingham poured some of his wine into one of the cheap white porcelain mugs and took a large swallow, unsure of what had just happened. Why was he so bothered? Ordinarily, the sight of an attractive woman, and she had been attractive, no doubt about it, would have pleased him. Even if nothing had come of it, he could have flirted, hopefully made her smile. Instead, she had disturbed him in a way that was unclear even to himself. She was out of context, yes, away from the games and celebrations, but that couldn’t have been it. Her smell was strong, not pleasing but, again, it couldn’t have been just that. He took another mouthful of wine and realised.

  Darkness. The woman had been in darkness.

  The hotel, like all the others in the chain, had corridors whose lights did not remain on all the time; instead, they were triggered by movement, yet the woman had been standing in a pool of shadow. She had come into the corridor, moved along it as she spoke to Fillingham, and the lights had remained off. He drank more wine, was surprised to find he’d emptied the mug, and then started as someone knocked hard on his room door.

  Hot saliva leapt into Fillingham’s mouth and he swallowed again, tasting something like electricity and an afterimage of wine, and thought, Why am I afraid? It’s a woman, and a near-naked one at that! What harm can she do me? He went to the door as the knocking sounded again, picking up his camera off the bed as he went.

  The woman was standing away from his door, perhaps twenty feet along the corridor, still in darkness. Her dress glimmered in the shadows, a white smear toped by her pale face. Her lips were red, almost as dark as the shadows crowding her shoulders, and she was smiling.

  “What do you want?” asked Fillingham.

  “You to celebrate with us,” she replied, holding out the cup again. The liquid inside slithered up and then down again, and even in the poor light Fillingham saw the residue it left on the clear plastic sides, glistening and clinging like oil. “Devotions must be paid.”

  “What?” said Fillingham. “Look, I appreciate you’ve got this weird acting gig at the games and you’re only doing your job but, please, it’s late and I’m tired and I don’t want to drink whatever that is.”

  “A last enquiry: you refuse?”

  “Yes! I refuse! Now, just leave me alone.” To emphasise what he was saying, Fillingham lifted his camera and took a photograph, the light of the flash filling the corridor with a leaching whiteness that painted the woman into a colourless mass for a moment. As the dancing ghostlights cleared from his eyes, the woman nodded and then lifted the cup to her lips and drank the liquid it contained. Keeping the cup at her lips, she thrust her tongue out into it and Fillingham saw it writhe within, licking at the remaining drips of drink. It should have been erotic, he thought; he was sure it was meant as erotic, but somehow it wasn’t, it was crude and unpleasant. Her tongue was dark and looked slimy, glittering inside the clear plastic walls of the cup. Finally, she dropped the cup to the floor, lowered her head and muttered something that sounded Latin or Greek. Before she could look up at him again, Fillingham shut his door.

  Still unsettled, Fillingham sat at the counter that ran across the room under the window, shifting the mess of magazines and coins that he had dropped there and putting the camera in its place. He poured himself another mug of wine and sat, intending to look through the pictures he had taken that day. He always found it calming, seeing his images scrolling before him, seeing the life in them reduced to tiny rectangles of colour and composition like butterflies pinned to card. He hoped that he had managed to capture the sense and energy of the Olimpick Games and the celebrations afterwards, and anticipated that he could sell some of the pictures and use others for his portfolio.

  The last picture he had taken, of the woman in the corridor, was the first one he looked at, and he saw immediately that it was . . . wrong. It was difficult to see it clearly on the small screen, but the air around the central figure of the woman was filled with shapes. No, with a single shape that had lots of pieces, he thought, something that writhed behin
d the woman with too many limbs to count. He wished he had brought his laptop with him in order to look at the image on its larger screen, but he hadn’t wanted to carry the extra weight for an overnight trip, so he was left with the camera’s display. Squinting, he tried to make out details; was that skin? Fur? Teeth? Hands, or clawed feet? There were things curling around the woman’s legs from behind her, as though the dirt on her skin had gained mass and was lifting itself towards the camera. What was going on here?

  The woman herself seemed normal except for her eyes, which were entirely black and much wider than he remembered them being; it made little sense, because if she was reacting to the flash, her pupils should have contracted not expanded. Quickly, he scrolled back to the earlier pictures, to the ones of the other woman distributing drinks and then to the ones of the five females standing together by the dancing men; the same distortions were evident in all the photographs, things fluttering and shifting in the air behind them. They were clearest in the picture he had taken of the woman bending her head after giving the group of people her drinks; it was still impossible to see what it was, but it gave an impression of limbs, too many limbs, claws that curved back on themselves, eyes that gleamed like dark bone, a pelt, or skin that was rough and ridged, or possibly feathers.

  Fillingham pushed his chair back and went to rise, and that was when the hands fell on his shoulders.

  They pushed him down into his chair, clenching around his shoulders painfully. Fillingham tried to twist and managed to shift a few inches, craning his neck around. His room door was open and the five women were standing in his room; the blonde one was holding him and the brunette he had photographed earlier was by the door. The others were motionless by the bed. “What—” he started but the women, speaking as one, interrupted him.

  “You must pay obeisance to partake in Dover’s Bacchanalia,” they said, a single voice from coming from all their mouths. “You refuse to partake in the tribute yet drink wine. This cannot be.” One of the women, shorter and redhaired, reached out without appearing to move and lifted his wine from the table. She lifted it to her nose and sniffed and then upturned it, pouring the remaining liquid across his bed, dropping the bottle into the puddle when it was empty.

  “Who are you?” Fillingham said, gritting his teeth against the pain of the grip; the woman’s hands were extraordinarily strong and felt unlike a human hold, as though her skin were a mere covering for something else, something muscular and old and venomous.

  “We are Dover’s Children,” they said, still in unison. Outside the room, something heavy crashed and the floor vibrated. “He is our father, the father of games themselves.” There was another crash and a long, low noise like a howl scrambled and put back together with its innards showing.

  “I don’t understand,” Fillingham said, still trying to twist free of the woman’s hold. There was yet another crash from somewhere out of the room but closer, and this time everything shook, the wine bottle rolling to the edge of the bed and falling to the floor with a dull thud.

  “The games were a gift to Dover from that which comes, given to him in dreams so that he might, in turn, gift it on,” the women said. “A gift, and all that people need do on this one night is to take the drink in honour of the gift-giver, to drink and then to worship in inebriation and heat and the movement of flesh. You refused the drink three times.”

  There was another crash from the corridor, still closer. Another, and the door shuddered, dust vibrating from its top and hanging in the air. The lights flickered. Another crash and the lights went out completely. In the sudden darkness, one of the women moved and the blind was torn from the window, falling to the desk in a noisy tangle. Leaping orange reflections filled the room. How is no one hearing this? Thought Fillingham, pulling uselessly against a grip that was getting tighter, was digging into him and tearing.

  “It only comes for you,” said the women, as though hearing his thoughts. “All others have given honour, or do not join the revels. All around, those who drank the tribute and heard the prayer are communing with each other through song and flesh and note, or they sleep undisturbed because they take no wine or beer.” The room was suddenly filled with noises, with grunts and shouts and moans and tunes, with the images of dancing and clothed flesh and naked flesh, of people losing themselves to pleasure, and then the sounds and images began falling away, layer after layer stripped to nothing as though lenses were falling between Fillingham and them, distancing him, swaddling him away from the rest of the world.

  “Give me the drink now,” he managed to say.

  “Offence is already taken,” the women said, and the one holding him let go of his shoulders and stepped back. Fillingham snatched up his camera as he started to rise but something lashed into him, a hand tipped with claws or bone, and he pitched sideways into the wall, falling to his knees as he bounced away from it.

  “He comes,” intoned the women. There were more crashes from the corridor, closer and closer, faster and faster, and then the doorway was filled with a huge figure.

  It was Robert Dover, only it wasn’t. It was massive, having to stoop as it entered the room, and the women took up a low moan, swaying. Its head brushed the ceiling as it straightened, the huge moon of its mask face glowing palely. Its eyes were completely black and in them Fillingham saw something roiling and twisting about itself, something that glittered and rasped and sweated. It stepped fully into the small space, and green and red and blue fire boiled across the ceiling above it, gathering in streamers and falling to the floor in long, sinuous fronds. Fillingham screamed and tried to rise but again one of the women struck him, sending him sprawling. He managed to raise his fist, still holding the camera, and fired off a single picture. The glare of the flash leaped across the room and for a brief moment the fire was gone, the women reduced to pale shades, Dover to a ragged and spindly thing that capered in the light, and then the fires were back and Dover’s shape was gathering, thickening, the mask dancing with the colours of the flames and it was coming towards Fillingham with its arms open wide in a lover’s embrace.

  I cannot tell what planet ruled, when I

  First undertook this mirth, this jollity,

  Nor can I give account to you at all,

  How this conceit into my brain did fall.

  Or how I durst assemble, call together

  Such multitudes of people as come hither.

  – Robert Dover, 1616

  LYNDA E. RUCKER

  Where the Summer Dwells

  LYNDA E. RUCKER is an American writer currently living in Dublin, Ireland. Her fiction has appeared in such places as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, Shadows and Tall Trees, Nightmare Magazine and PostScripts. She is a regular columnist for Black Static, and her first collection, The Moon Will Look Strange, was recently released from Karōshi Books, an imprint of Noose & Gibbet publishing.

  “This story was, I suppose, born the summer that I was fifteen years old,” recalls the author, “which my best friend Scott and I spent driving all over the dirt back roads of Elbert County, Georgia, where I grew up, exploring old cemeteries and fallen-down houses.

  “A couple of decades later, I started writing ‘Where the Summer Dwells’ when I was living in Portland, Oregon, and feeling homesick for the South. Although I ended up putting it away for awhile, and not returning to it until I actually moved back to Georgia, where I was finally able to finish it.

  “A title eluded me for nearly as long as the story itself, because I couldn’t get the one already claimed by the late, great, fellow Southerner Karl Edward Wagner out of my head – ‘Where the Summer Ends’ – which told a much darker tale of what lurks beneath the kudzu.

  “Once I figured out that the summer in the story wasn’t so much at an end as it was simply elsewhere, I finally had my title – and a nod to one of my favorite horror writers.”

  LITTLE WAS LEFT now of the abandone
d railway save for the rails themselves, two steel bars emerging from brambles and weedy clumps of grass. Seth, walking backward, followed them, clutching his digital camera (“1440 by 1080 pixels,” he’d told Charlotte breathlessly, like she was supposed to know what that meant, and be impressed), calling for Larkin to lie down between them so he could film her. The first hint of unease brushed Charlotte then, stroked her hair, caressed her cheek, and was gone almost as quickly – for no unease could exist here on this cloudless day, with skinny overeager Seth springing about, his hair flopping in his eyes, Lee perched on the hood of the car, head thrown back so his face was turned up toward the sun, and Larkin in her white eyelet sundress, stretched between the rails, arms above her head, miming bound wrists and revealing dark unshaven underarms, unexpectedly erotic.

  Seth said, “Charlotte, give her your necklace thing to wear.”

  She knew what he was after: against Larkin’s pale skin, the three copper disks would glint golden in the sun, but Charlotte, already wandering, pretended not to hear. The heavy grass, grown high enough to graze her fingertips dangling at her sides, scratched her bare legs. Seth said again, “Charlotte, Charlotte,” but she didn’t stop, snatching her hands back from the tops of the grasses and slipping her fingers round the disks.