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

by Stephen Jones

  There’s something happening, he says, at last, after a hushed, one-sided conversation. In the city. I have to go.

  And a minute later, it’s just you and the bones again.

  Jutras is out of contact for most of the next day, which means he isn’t there for the undersea quake that rattles the island. Minor as tremors go, the epicentre’s out by the black smoker ring that keeps Carcosa’s shores so fertile, so teeming with fish and kelp-forests; closer to Carcosa City than Funeral Rock, thankfully, so the back-slop doesn’t do much more than submerge the causeway far faster and for far longer than expected. You didn’t even notice it yourself until you came out of the tent and found Ken and Judy on the horn with Jutras, yelling at him about being stuck on-site for the night until the causeway emerges again. Said prospect bothers you less than it should, but that could just be sheer exhaustion. Who knew watching mould grow could be so draining.

  What does bother you – silencing Ken and Judy as well – is what Jutras finally tells you, when he gets a word in edgewise: the quake brought in a mini-tsunami that cracked the hospital apart, shearing off the wall of the contagious ward. In the confusion, most massacre suspects cut and ran, disappearing into a sympathetic web of back-rooms, basements, cliff-caves and other assorted hidey-holes. Surprisingly few injuries amongst the military guards, and all from natural causes rather than any sort of hostile action, but all of you can read between the lines; the garrison is confused and demoralised from the bottom up, perhaps even fixing to cut and run, and the islanders themselves . . . well, they aren’t happy. To say the least.

  They’ve heard what you’re doing here, Ringo tells you, after Jutras signs off. Putting the King back together – that’s why this happened. They want to stop you.

  Ken snorts. So these dudes in jail, what, called up a wave and surfed on out of there? C’mon, man. Army’ll pick ’em up by tomorrow; this place ain’t big enough to hide in, not for long.

  You don’t know that. You don’t know anything about us.

  I know enough, man.

  No. Ringo shakes his head, visibly struggling to keep polite. It’s . . . not safe for you here, not now, any of you. You should go.

  Go where? you ask, waving Ken silent, while Judy hugs herself. Where should we go, Ringo?

  Without hesitation: Away, of course. And take me with you, when you do.

  Though you’re hardly a mycologist or sapro-phytologist by trade, anyone who works enough decomp learns to ID the key fungal players soon enough. The stuff that’s growing over “the King”’s bones still doesn’t match anything you recognise: too tough, spreading too fast, especially without an identifiable nutrient-source. You take a moment to look up the region on your tablet, looking for a local flora-andfauna rundown, and pause at Wikipedia’s disambiguation page for “Hyades”. There are four entries: the islands, the band, the Greek mythological figures, and a star cluster in the constellation Taurus.

  You look up in the dusk light, out across the lake. The “twin suns” sink towards the horizon in a blurry shimmer. A mirage, an illusion; the same thing that makes the suns look almost bluish-white, rather than red-gold. So Ringo says. You look back down to your tablet, and click on the entry for the star cluster. Thinking, as you do, about articles some of your geekier friends have sent to you, essays about such things as static wormholes, and equipotential spacetime points; quantum tunnelling, black branes and folded space, negative energy densities.

  The Hyades cluster is more than six hundred million years old, far older than most such stellar groups, a survivor of the aeons by orbiting far from galactic centre. At least twenty of its stars are A-type white giants, with seventeen or eighteen of them thought likely to be binary – double-star – systems. It appears in the Iliad on the shield that Hephaestus made for Achilles, and is named for the daughters of Atlas, who wept so hard over the death of their brother Hyas they eventually became the patron stars of rain.

  Twilight deepens, and your tablet’s glow increases in the growing dark. But your shadow grows sharp to one side, beyond what the tablet could illuminate, and you look up once more.

  Above the centre of the lake, where the volcano exploded centuries ago, lights glow in a scattered matrix of green, blue, gold and red, clear and cold. The darkness between them seems to outline shapes – structures, blocks, towers. They’re hard to look at, defying your eyes’ focus almost painfully. Can’t tell if the blur is distance, or atmosphere mirage, or the wake of motion too fast to follow. The bluegreen, poisonous light of the setting suns behind it twists your stomach. You feel the whole thing pulling, physically, like a hook in the gut: some second force of gravity, pressing you towards the lake and the place you know isn’t there, can’t be there—

  —not because it isn’t real, but because it’s somewhere else. Some utter, alien elsewhere, so far away its light is older than your species.

  It’s that pull, that nausea and that disbelief, which keeps you from hearing the tumult until it’s too late. Distracted by Other Carcosa City’s spectacular appearance, you simply haven’t noticed the boats’ approach, silent and sure – pontooned sea-canoes, anchoring themselves at Funeral Rock’s base so their passengers can shinny up the handholdpocked cliff and emerge through those cave-entrances you never even knew were there, almost under your feet.

  A burst of bullets, muzzle-flare in the night, and Ringo’s already up, hauling on your arm: Alice, come, come on, Alice – now, now now, they’re here! Leave everything!

  But – Ken, Judy, Jesus, Ringo! What about . . .

  Too late, come on! We have to go—

  Across Hali, behind Other Carcosa City’s gleaming shoreline, you can just glimpse the “real” capitol going up in flames, a series of controlled explosions. Is one of those Jutras’ field-office, the garrison, the sea-plane that brought you here? Over near the grave, meanwhile, Ken’s scrabbling for his data, uploading frantically; one shot catches him in the shoulder, another in the upper back, sending him straight over the lip. You can hear him thrashing down below, desperately trying to cover himself in enough sand-muck to turn invisible. Ringo pulls you headlong while the attackers rush the camp, smashing and tearing, hurling equipment and evidence alike into the sea. Ripping up the tents, they riddle every prepped body-bag they uncover with yet more gunfire, as though they think something might be hiding in there.

  Good thing I moved him, you find yourself thinking. Good thing, good thing . . .

  Ringo drops to his knees, dragging you along with him; your knees jolt, painfully. In here, Alice, he says. Come on! This one goes out the opposite side – we can swim, they’ll never see us.

  Swim? Where the hell to?

  Other Carcosa City, of course; no one will expect it. Can’t you see them, beckoning?

  But: that’s just a bit too much crazy to stomach, even now. So here you pull back, wrenching yourself free, even as Ringo worms his way slickly down into the earth, gone in seconds – you’d never make it anyways, is what you tell yourself. The gap’s far too narrow, too twisting; you’d simply lodge fast, bruised and scraped and strained to breaking, to die crushed like a bug. You let him go instead, whispering Goodbye.

  Why? Judy yells from behind you, uselessly, drawing another burst. Why, why?

  Because some things are meant to stay buried, a voice replies, from deep inside.

  Then: spotlights stab down out of the growing dusk, helicopter rotors roaring, as speakers filter what must be orders far past the point of comprehensibility. More gunfire strafes the camp, this time vertically; Judy’s head explodes outright, GSW damage simultaneously shock-hammering away one half of your body in a series of consecutive hits to forearm, shoulder, hip, thigh. The downdraft wraps you in alreadytorn tent-fabric like a plastic bag shroud, momentum rolling you straight into the scrub where you stowed “the King”’s reassembled body, so you sprawl almost nose to whatever it uses for a nose with it.

  No pain, simply shock, cold and huge enough to sharpen your observational skil
ls to inhuman levels. The not-fungus has finished its work. The creature’s skin is black everywhere but its pallid mask of a face, slick and soft, oily to the touch, almost warm; that’s your blood it’s soaking up, sponge-like, as if every pore is a feeding orifice, swelling with the sacrifice.

  And its massive, horned head turns, yellow eyes cracking open. Locking upon yours.

  I am here, it tells you; look across the lake, where my city rises, and watch us beckon. You have done me great service, bringing me back into this world.

  Now: be not afraid, lie still, lie quiet. Your long wait is over.

  Beyond the hovering ’copter, those two suns sink down, white-blue turning red, filling Hali’s caldera with false lava. And when you slump over onto your back, looking up again by sheer default, you see stars: Soft black stars, almost indistinguishable, in a black, black sky.

  The King lays one scaly hand on your brow, lightly. Almost affectionately.

  I am coming, he promises, to take you home.

  EVANGELINE WALTON

  The Other One

  EVANGELINE WALTON (1907–96) was the pseudonym used by Evangeline Wilna Ensley. Born to a Quaker family in Indianapolis, Indiana, she suffered from chronic respiratory illness as a child. Treated with silver nitrate tincture, her fair skin absorbed the pigment and turned blue-grey, which continued to darken as she aged.

  She grew up reading the works of L. Frank Baum, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood and James Stephens, and most of her fiction was written between the 1920s and the early 1950s.

  Inspired by the Welsh Mabinogi, her first novel, The Virgin and the Swine was published in 1936, but it was not until it was reissued as The Island of the Mighty in 1970, as part of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, that the subsequent three books in the series – The Children of Lyr, The Song of Rhiannon and Prince of Annwn – saw print. All four novels were collected in an omnibus volume, The Mabinogian Tetralogy, in 2002.

  Meanwhile, Witch House was published in 1945 as the initial title in the “Library of Arkham House Novels of Fantasy and Terror”, and her other novels include The Cross and the Sword and The Sword is Forged.

  During her lifetime, she was honoured with three Mythopoeic Fantasy Awards and two Locus Awards. She also received the World Fantasy Convention Award in 1985 and the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 1989.

  At the time of her death, Walton left behind a number of unpublished novels, poems and a verse play. The author’s family has been working with Douglas A. Anderson in going through her papers, where they also discovered a handful of unpublished short stories. “The Other One” is one of these, along with her tale that appeared in the previous volume of The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, and both are included in the posthumous collection Above Ker-Is and Other Stories.

  In a letter to her agent dated August 7, 1950, the author seems to be referring to the story that follows: “If you think this story has any possibilities as a ‘slick’, but that it needs cutting or altering, I hope that you’ll advise me . . . I think the central situation is appealing, but this type of subject matter is so foreign to me that I can’t rely on my own judgement.”

  Centipede Press has produced an expanded edition of Witch House containing bonus material, while Tachyon Publications recently issued Walton’s unpublished Gothic thriller She Walks in Darkness (written in the 1960s) with a cover by Thomas Canty.

  I SHOULD HAVE LOCKED the door. You can’t drag a solid body through a locked door. Fire would have finished the thing; without the body it couldn’t have come back; not out of just ashes. But perhaps it is not there after all – the shape that comes whenever night comes. Maybe Anne was right, and the strain has been too much for me. Anne!

  But it wasn’t always all in my brain. Not last year, when I first met Anne MacNair. I’d sprained my wrist and couldn’t finish a story that a magazine editor needed by a certain date. Somebody in his office told me where I could get a good typist cheap, and that typist was Anne.

  I remember asking, “If she’s good, why is she cheap?” and Miss Munson – or Miss Baker, whichever it was, I can’t remember – looking a little queer.

  “Well, I don’t know exactly. She’s had some kind of trouble – illness in the family, I think, something quite tragic, though it’s hard to find out much about her – she’s a nice, normal-looking kid, but she keeps herself to herself as if she had the plague. Her people live way down south – a father and stepmother; and I suppose she has to send money home. Anyway, she’s anxious for all the work she can get. And her work is good, Frank; I’ve seen it.”

  Frank is my name; Frank Carter.

  “She won’t come to your rooms though,” the woman added. “That’s a thing she’s always very particular about – so particular it’s funny. She won’t work except in her own apartment.”

  Anne had a shabby little place off 42nd St. She’d had it for years, I learned later, although she was still a young girl – very young to have been living alone so long.

  At least I thought she was living alone. There was no name but hers listed at that apartment number according to the little directory by the front door. And when I walked into the sitting-room that was the only real room she had (the bed was an in-a-door affair), the door into the tiny kitchenette was open. And I saw no one in there.

  Not that I was looking for anybody else. Or would have been after I saw Anne.

  She wasn’t a regulation pin-up girl. She was too quiet for that. Her prettiness was so quiet that you didn’t realise, until you’d looked at her awhile, that it was perfect to the point of beauty. The first thing you noticed about her was that she looked clean and trim and dainty. And I’ll still swear that she was clean, inside and out – I’ll swear that to the end and beyond.

  I offered her the standard rates, and asked if I could stay and dictate to her that afternoon, or if I’d better come back in the morning. But she said, “Stay. I’ve got some other work to do, but I can do it tonight.”

  I noticed, as she said it, that she glanced uneasily toward the other side of the room. As if there might be somebody there, somebody she’d rather not have there. That was what first made me glance toward the kitchenette. But it was so small that I’d have sworn nobody could have been in there. Not unless it was an almost paper-thin person hiding between the refrigerator and the open door.

  Anne said again, with a relieved note in her voice, “This is a good time for you to stay.” And I stayed.

  For three hours we worked steadily. I dictated, and she wrote, never even looking up from her typewriter. And then all of a sudden her fingers began to move more slowly on the keys; not really slowly, but without their original crisp speed.

  I had been walking up and down the room – I don’t find it easy to dictate sitting – and suddenly I stopped. Stopped walking and stopped talking. Beside a chair that had been empty when I came in, and wasn’t empty now.

  Anne was sitting in it too, working, her fingers moving busily over the keys of a typewriter that wasn’t there.

  I took one startled glance across the room, saw that she was still in her old place at the typewriter table. Another showed me that there wasn’t any mirror on the wall, though a mirror would have reflected the typewriter as well as the girl.

  Then I took a jump backward – a pretty fast jump – away from that chair, and looked again.

  She was still there, the second Anne. The same hair and face, the same figure and dress, the same busily moving fingers. I even saw, looking down, that the strings of her left shoe were coming untied, and I looked across the room and saw that the original Anne’s left shoe was coming untied in just the same way, and just the same place.

  Then she looked up and saw me, and the thing that I was staring at. The thing that shouldn’t have been there. And for a second her face crumpled up like that of a child about to cry.

  Then she said steadily, though with pain in her voice, “Do not mind her, Mr Carter. It is my sister Mary – my twin sister. She will n
ot speak to you, nor pay any attention to what you say. She lives in a world of her own. She always has – ever since my mother was killed in an automobile accident when we were little.”

  So that was it, I thought. The illness in her family wasn’t down south, it was up here, with her. And she had trouble getting work because of the crazy sister. Couldn’t go out to an office, of course – couldn’t leave her alone. And people who came in were startled, as I had been.

  I stammered, “I see. I’m sorry,” and went on dictating. But I found it hard to concentrate on my story again; unpleasant, somehow, to think of how quietly Mary must have stood there, those three hours, pressed into that narrow space between the kitchenette door and the refrigerator; into those few inches that I hadn’t thought would hold any human being.

  She’d watched us from there, her sister and me. Watched us, and then crept in at last so softly that I hadn’t heard her. So softly that the door hadn’t even creaked as she swung it outward to release herself from behind it.

  It should have creaked. It must be a very good door.

  We worked another half-hour; and all that time Mary’s fingers moved just as Anne’s moved, only with no keyboard beneath them. Typing on air. Imitating her sister was the one thing she had brains enough to do, I supposed. Probably she’d even noticed that Anne’s shoestrings were coming undone, and had untied her own to match. It wouldn’t be pleasant to be watched like that, always, every minute of every waking hour.

  I gave up, after that half-hour. I told Anne, “I’m tired, and you must be. Suppose we go out to dinner?”

  I felt sorry for the kid. I wanted to show her that her sister hadn’t scared me off, and besides, I liked her. Even then I knew that I liked her a lot.

  She looked scared. She said, “No. Thank you very much, Mr Carter, but I can’t. I can’t leave my sister.”

  “Bring her along,” I said. “And stop calling me Mr Carter. My name’s Frank.”